Those of you who know me personally know that I don’t read; I listen to audiobooks. But I do read the books by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (pronounced, “Me-High Chick-SENT-me-high”). He is a positive psychologists who studies topics such as happiness, success, creativity, and high performance and has spent decades studying how to improve the quality of everyday life through optimal experience. He investigates what makes people happy and how people create a sense of purpose and meaning in life. He has studied a huge variety of people and the activities in which they find flow: artists, musicians, business professionals, assembly-line workers, and, of course, rock-climbers.

Our book for today, Flow, discusses (surprise!) the flow state — the state of being completely absorbed in the activity that you are doing.

Flow is the state we are in when we are on a redpoint burn, when we are so focused on what we are doing that nothing else exists. Flow is when you are “in the zone.”

There are 8 characteristics of flow as defined by Csikszentmihalyi:

1. Clarity of goals: You know exactly what you have to do, both on a large scale as well as moment to moment. So for instance, you want to send your project, and while climbing it you know each and every move you have to do in order to accomplish it. Pretty clear?

2. Immediate feedback: You know moment to moment whether what you are doing is getting you closer to your goal. You stick the holds or fall, succeed or fail—can’t get more immediate than that!

3. Challenge: Your project must be appropriately matched to your skill level. It can’t be too easy or too difficult or you won’t be able to experience flow. You will either be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, bored or anxious. Choose your projects based on a grade of difficulty that is challenging for you, one that stretches your skill level and ability, but is still realistic and achievable.

Most climbers naturally meet the first 3 criteria of flow (it’s why he studied climbers!). Once you meet these you can advance to the other aspects of flow:

4. Focus: Your full attention and concentration is on the task at hand.

The remaining characteristics result from this complete focus and attention on what you are doing:

5. Everyday problems disappear: When you are focused on climbing, you’re not thinking about work or life problems. You’re focused on the movement, breathing, and clipping. When was the last time you entered the crux on a redpoint burn and thought, “Damn! Hope I remembered to lock the front door.” No! It just doesn’t happen. There isn’t enough attention to focus on anything but climbing. Maybe once you’re back on the ground you can think about that stuff. But that usually doesn’t happen either. We’re more excited to talk about beta and conduct an after-action review with our belayer: What just happened up there? What went particularly well? How could we improve?

6. Increased sense of control: We are trying to master our project. Mastery creates a greater sense of control in our lives and gives us more confidence—in climbing and everyday life. I often tell people that I feel more in control on the wall than I do on the drive up to the crag. (But that’s probably because I don’t like to drive.) We are the masters of our domain.

7. Lose a sense of self-consciousness: When you really focused on sending, your ego, worry, doubt, and embarrassment — your sense of self — disappears.

8. Lose a sense of time: While we’re climbing, time distorts itself. It can move really fast or really slow. This phenomenon explains why a climber may feel like only a couple minutes have past while at the same time the belayer feels like it’s been an hour (and it’s actually been 25 minutes).

This is just an introduction to the idea of flow. I’m going to discuss more of Csikszentmihalyi’s work in the future, but if you can’t wait to learn more, try these titles:

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

You can also check out Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explaining his work on Flow in this TED Talk.