Flow State

As a student with a decent amount of school work, I’m often desperate to achieve some sort of “flow state” in order to complete tasks in a timely fashion. Personally speaking, I find flow states to be few and far between these days. I do know the feeling described by Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi, and I wish I could tap into that state of mind whenever I liked. Unfortunately, if I’m trying to do some kind of assigned work especially, I consider myself lucky if I can be flowing for more than a few minutes at a time. I’m sure the required conditions for a flow state are different from person-to-person, but for myself, it’s largely dependent on the type of task I’m working on, and whether or not there’s a deadline. Discussing with Andy and Jacob, I realized that I’m more likely to have those moments of dedicating all my brain power when I’m focusing on something creative, or if I’m physically engaged in something like a sport. In those cases, I can lose track of myself for an hour or two at a time, and it’s a wonderful feeling to be locked-in like that. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen if I’m writing, or working on a math or physics problem, say. But usually in those cases, I’m flowing if I have an idea of how to proceed, and it may just last a few minutes before I either finish, or get stuck, or get distracted and need to remind myself to focus up. For a student, those moments of flow are precious and addicting. As teachers, I think we want to unlock that state for students as frequently as possible. From my own experience, it’s also more difficult to achieve flow when you’re not interested in what you’re doing - I don’t think you can force it like that. To me, that’s a clear point for trying to understand students’ interests. If we can get them engaged on a level which speaks to their “soul” or what-have-you, we can maybe facilitate entry into a flow state. Like I said, that feeling is addicting, and maybe if we can harness the flow state of our students, we can improve their engagement with their education. So I do think it occurs more frequently when our actions are aligned with our interests. And we want to encourage students to pursue their own interests, but at the same time, I also think we are often interested in more than we realize. For instance, I can claim that I don't like to cook, but that's in full denial of times when I've become completely absorbed in the process of preparing a meal. So anyway, I'm super skeptical of anyone and everyone who claims they do not like math. Sure, they may have had some bad experiences in a math class, but maybe the conditions for them to unlock that interest or that flow state are simply more stringent than they are for me. I'm optimistic that it's possible for anyone, we just need to be sensitive to the fact that the conditions for flow are different from student-to-student, and then try our best to work within those bounds.