Personal Best: learn to go with the flow

Many of us know what it is like to feel stuck. We feel trapped in our daily lives, everything is an effort, we feel like we are going nowhere, time drags and we wish we were doing anything but what it is we are actually doing. This, those in the know will tell us, is the polar opposite of being in a state of "flow".

Needless to say, anyone who is in a state of flow is having a different time of it. They are enthralled with their chosen activity, everything happens for them with ease, time flies by, and they live in a paradise-like world of their own. We may just dismiss these kinds of people out of hand as freaks of nature or as members of the privileged few, but experts say the state is available to all of us. We just need to know some of the rules in order to get there - and then, ideally, stay there.

"[Flow] is a state in which people are so involved in the activity, where the attention is invested in realistic goals and the skills match the requirement of the task," says Cindy Chan, clinical psychologist at CCPS in Central. She says there are some basic things we need to do to be in this state, which essentially include being challenged, rewarded, focused, in control and being present in the moment.

"It must be a challenging activity that requires skills," she says. "There is a merging between action and awareness, so the person is so involved that they stop becoming aware of themselves. There must be clear goals and immediate feedback. [There is a] loss of self-consciousness so I am not aware of myself any more. And time passes, so I don't have a sense of time any more."

Chan cites a classic example of a "flow" experience as being one where a surgeon can spend up to 10 hours in surgery, fully immersed in his job and able to operate at full capacity without knowing any time has passed. "This is a flow experience," she says. Chan stresses that the activity must be intrinsically rewarding in itself, which is the reason why the surgeon can spend so long doing this one thing.

And that is the secret ingredient held by the person most likely to remain in a state of flow, Chan adds: the autotelic. "There is a kind of person with an autotelic personality, which includes curiosity, persistence, low self-centredness and performing activities for intrinsic reasons and this personality is more likely to have flow experiences," Chan explains.