Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
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Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow
Cal Newport • Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life—that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
When an activity allows us to steer an x=y diagonal, we find ourselves happily in this ‘flow’ state, avoiding the tedium that arises when our skills outweigh the challenges we face, as well as the anxiety that follows when our obstacles become too great for us. Once again, then, we note the twin pitfalls of pain and boredom, the enemies of our happ
... See moreDerren Brown • Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine
when people entered flow they found it to be extremely enjoyable and fulfilling, and they performed the associated activity for its own sake rather than for any extrinsic reward.
Ph.D. Richard Schwartz • No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.