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Each year sees hundreds of titles published with advice on how to stay trim, how to grow rich, or how to develop self-confidence. While these self-help books may help a reader in the short term, they are likely to be unsatisfying, for they do little to enhance the quality of experience. But what really does make people glad to be alive? What are the inner experiences that make life worthwhile?
For more than two decades Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been studying states of "optimal experience"-those times when people report feelings of concentration and deep enjoyment. These investigations have revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow—a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity. Everyone experiences flow from time to time and will recognize its characteristics: People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Both the sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear, and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience reveals how this pleasurable state can, in fact, be controlled, and not just left to chance, by setting ourselves challenges-tasks that are neither too difficult nor too simple for our abilities. With such goals, we learn to order the information that enters consciousness and thereby improve the quality of our lives.
Flow is expected to become one of the most productive areas of psychological research during the next decade. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is the ideal introduction to this remarkable subject and a book that can lead its readers to discover the true richness of everyday life.
For more than two decades Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been studying states of "optimal experience"-those times when people report feelings of concentration and deep enjoyment. These investigations have revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow—a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity. Everyone experiences flow from time to time and will recognize its characteristics: People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Both the sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear, and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience reveals how this pleasurable state can, in fact, be controlled, and not just left to chance, by setting ourselves challenges-tasks that are neither too difficult nor too simple for our abilities. With such goals, we learn to order the information that enters consciousness and thereby improve the quality of our lives.
Flow is expected to become one of the most productive areas of psychological research during the next decade. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is the ideal introduction to this remarkable subject and a book that can lead its readers to discover the true richness of everyday life.