The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

by Michael Easter

So he began studying the state, which he eventually named “flow state.” Over Csikszentmihalyi’s career—where he ran the psychology department at the University of Chicago and was president of the American Psychology Association—he interviewed thousands of high-level performers. They ranged from chess players, rock climbers, and painters to surgeons, writers, and Formula 1 drivers. Lapsing into flow requires two conditions: The task must stretch a person’s limits and it must have a clear goal. The flow state, Csikszentmihalyi and the other researchers now believe, is a key driver of happiness and growth. It is the opposite of apathy. Csikszentmihalyi wrote that flow has the “potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strengths and complexity of the self.”