'Flow' Experiences: The Secret to Ultimate Happiness?

You are skiing down a mountain trail in Aspen, Colo. -- one of the expert diamond slopes, with the awe-inspiring snow-capped Rockies in your view. Though you have skied down this slope before, you have never been able to "dominate" it -- until now. You begin to hit your stride, striking every mogul perfectly, effortlessly. Your actions seem frozen in time and every little sound becomes more intense -- the crisp slap of your skis against the powder, the scrunch of your knees, and your rhythmic breathing. You are flowing down the slope, and later you might even describe yourself as having become "one with the mountain." All those years of training and struggling, taking ski lessons and tumbling into the woods, are now finally justified. You have had, quite literally, a peak experience.

If it is not skiing, you may have had similar experiences in other activities -- some other challenging exercise, working on a difficult project, or even in simpler exercises like reading or an intense conversation with a friend. These are moments in which your mind becomes so entirely absorbed in the activity that you "forget yourself" and begin to act effortlessly, with a heightened sense of awareness of the here and now (athletes often describe this as "being in the zone"). This type of experience has become the focus of much research in recent years by positive psychologists. Indeed, the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has even given it a name for an objective condition: "Flow."

More...