I was fortunate to have a college roommate whose family owned a house right under the main gondola in Vail, Colorado, one of the premier mountain resorts in the United States. We spent our summers there, working in restaurants and laying bricks in order to make money for the upcoming school year, and enjoying the spectacular alpine beauty of the area.
A fellow our age who we got to know — let’s call him Chris C., so as not to give away too much — was from Chicago but spent his summers in Vail, too, where his father put on a workshop. I went to their condo a couple of times, and the environment within ran counter to the sun-and-fun vibe elsewhere in the valley. Curtains were drawn to block the sunlight and mountain views, and desks and tables were piled high with books and untidy stacks of papers. It was quiet. On the gorgeous afternoons when I visited, Chris’ father was at one of these desks, under the artificial light of a table lamp, absorbed in his academic work. Perhaps he was experiencing “flow”, the state of contentment that comes with being completely immersed in an activity? After all, the man at work was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term “flow” and who died a few weeks ago on October 20.
Attaining a state of flow is when we often feel the most satisfied; it’s the embodiment of flourishing. As Bulgaria and the rest of the world continues to languish under COVID and a shift to shorter, darker, colder days (Winter is coming!), it’s a good time to consider how we might better flourish.
The psychologist Adam Grant from the University of Pennsylvania described languishing as being the “neglected middle child” of well-being: On the one hand, it’s not depression, but it’s not flourishing. It sits in the middle, and we therefore might not even know that we’ve sunk into a state where our motivation and focus has dulled. How do we know if we are languishing? Dr. Lori Santos of Yale University suggests this simple diagnostic tool: ask yourself, “Do you wake up ready to start your day or would you rather go back to sleep? Do you have a sense of purpose or do you find how you spend much of your day to be meaningless?” Languishing students aren’t performing as well nor enjoying life as much as they should.
To break out of this state of stagnation, Dr. Grant encourages people to invest themselves in activities where they might attain a state of flow. He cites simple examples such as playing a challenging word game, or even getting sucked into a Netflix series where you are absorbed in the story and have forgotten for the time being that there are Instagram posts that need to be checked. The key is engaging in something that has our full attention. That can be a tall order during these strange times when many of us find it especially hard to sustain focus on one thing at a time.
Here are two very simple suggestions that Dr. Grant believes will help us to flourish and attain periods of flow:
- Give yourself extended periods of uninterrupted time. Flourishing and flow can only be reached when one’s attention is focused on the task at hand. Parents, this might mean “borrowing” your child’s phone or laptop for a while. If your child is writing a poem, let her have the laptop but you keep the phone. Better yet, take both and leave her with a quill and roll of parchment.
- Focus on a small goal. Engage in a small but somewhat challenging, purposeful activity that you can complete or at least achieve some progress. “We now know,” writes Dr. Grant, ”that the most important factor in daily joy and motivation is a sense of progress.” While we probably would be proud of ourselves for running 10 km, we also can feel a sense of accomplishment from running a kilometer. Or cleaning our rooms. These small, purposeful achievements can provide uplift and the motivation to continue with such productive activities.
Doable steps like giving ourselves uninterrupted time and engaging in small goals will take us from languishing toward flourishing. And when a bit of normalcy returns here and there, we can take advantage of those things that become available to us (perhaps a winter or spring CEESA activity, a concert at NDK) and which will put more distance between us and languishing. Until we are back to “normal”, it’s good to know that there are little things we can do to flourish.
More about flow, flourishing, and how to attain each can be found in these recent New York Times articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/well/move/exercise-mental-health-flourishing.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/science/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-dead.html
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