Flowstate concentrates full#

In that way, this level of concentration resembles meditation in which the the desired result is often a feeling of envigoration and relaxed alertness.

''There is a mental recruitment where everything aligns in an effortless concentration, sort of a mental overdrive.'' ''The fine focus during flow cuts out all irrelevant thoughts and sensations,'' Dr. When their concentration drops, so does their motivation and confidence.'' Many people are bored much of the time, and their attention is totally scattered. ''Your skills for it increase rapidly, but the challenge doesn't change, so you get bored. ''Most jobs have a ceiling built in - you can learn them in a few days,'' said Dr. And simply making the effort to pay attention, even if a struggle at first, can on occasion give way to flow. On the other hand, if things are overwhelming, sometimes simplifying a complex job into manageable pieces can bring that alignment of skill and challenge that evokes a flowing concentration. But after several years he was still experimenting with ways to shave a few seconds from his time, a challenge that kept him engrossed. One assembly-line worker in the Chicago research, for example, had a job in which he simply tightened a set of screws all day long. If a situation is boring, for example, somehow making it more challenging may lead to flow. There is no easy formula for getting into the flow state, but some circumstances make its occurrence more likely, according to the research. The volunteers ranged from assembly-line workers and clerks to engineers and managers. In one recent study, 82 volunteers carried beepers that would remind them, at random times throughout the day, to record what they were doing, how concentrated on it they were and how they felt. Csikszentmihalyi most recently has been studying the circumstances that draw people into the flow state.

With a group of colleagues at Chicago, and another group at the University of Milan Medical School, Dr.

These include a distortion in the sense of time, so that events seem either to go very quickly or very slowly an altered sense of one's bodily sensations or sensory perceptions, and a fine precision in gauging one's responses to a changing challenge.

Flowstate concentrates full#

One of the elements that was invariably present in these descriptions was full absorption in the activity at hand, an attention that was finely attuned to the shifting demands of the moment.Īlong with a full absorption, people in flow described a set of experiences that, taken together, suggest an altered state of consciousness. Basketball players, composers, dancers, chess masters, rock climbers, surgeons and others were asked to describe in detail times when they had outdone themselves. The Chicago research on flow, which has been under way for more than a decade, began with a study of people performing at their peak. The understanding that deep absorption can be transporting will not come as news to those who readily sink into rapture at a symphony or while reading poetry, but the new research adds precision in defining the circumstances that evoke such heightened awareness.