I've been looking back at old blog posts, and found this one about the things I do everyday to stay happy and positive. Since becoming a software developer, I've written a new list - not so much of everyday actions, but of concepts that lead to happiness. It looks like this:

• Connection
• Gratitude
• Purpose
• Growth
• Physical Health
• Flow

The newest addition is flow.

I used to be a competitive ski racer, and that was how I found flow. I remember kicking out of the starting gate and suddenly dropping into hyper focus. Ok, here goes, the voice in my head would say. If there were people standing on the side cheering me on I never heard them. All I heard was my own advice: remember there’s that flush coming up around this bend. Don’t forget about the huge rut over this knoll.  

Programmers love talking about flow, and now I know why. When I want time to fly by without my noticing, all I have to do is plug in my headphones and open up my text editor. Not that coding is the same as skiing of course, but it can lead to a similar mental state - effortless concentration, focusing completely on the present.

Just in case there's an overabundance of blog posts on flow, I'm not going to go into details about how to find flow. What I want to think about is flow and mental health. Does flow improve mental health? In the long-term or just short-term? How can we harness flow to improve happiness?

In the book Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal mention an organization using surfing - a reliable flow trigger - to treat PTSD. The approach seems similar to using exercise for depression or anxiety, but somehow the intense concentration required to surf makes it apparently more effective than exercise alone.

According to research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow states trigger the release of a bunch of neurochemicals, including norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, and serotonin, all of which make us feel good and perform our best. In addition to neurochemicals, flow causes "transient hypofrontality", the temporary shutdown of parts of our frontal cortex. This is what causes the sense of "timelessness" in flow. We stop thinking about the past or future, reallocating that brain power to take in more information about the present.

In my experience, flow dissolves anxious or repetitive thoughts, the ones that go round and round in my head and won't go away. When I'm completely focused on a single task, I don’t have the space to worry, or think about things that stress me out. It's a kind of calm that can be hard to find in everyday life. I stop thinking about all the other things I have to do, things people said, what people think of me, what I think of myself, etc. My brain feels quiet, kind of like in mediation, but with the added satisfaction of doing something productive.

"By periodically losing our minds, we stand a better chance of finding ourselves."
- Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

What about long-term benefits though? 

Most of the studies I came across just look at correlational data, so generally this is an area that needs more research. But there's some evidence to suggest that time spent in flow correlates with higher self esteem and increased work satisfaction. Some researchers have looked at the long-term effects of altered states similar to flow, such as meditation and peak experiences. Bob Kegan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, conducted a study on adults as they aged, defining the different developmental stages they passed through. The final stage he describes is "self-transforming," where people have increased empathy, and the ability to hold conflicting perspectives at the same time.

A large number of "self-transforming" adults engaged in meditative or flow-inducing activities, such as meditation or martial arts. It's not exactly "happiness" or "mental health," however we decided to define those, but it's definitely interesting. I still have yet to read some of his books and find out more.

Side note: I went surfing for the first time, and it was amazing!!! I'm hooked.
 
- Claire

There's a reason I read mostly nonfiction these days, although I didn't realize it until I started reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.  In the book, most of  humanity spends the majority of their time inside a virtual world called the Oasis.  It's like a giant multiplayer online game, but it's also where people go to school, go to work, meet their friends, attend church, play sports, watch movies, etc.  The world outside has been neglected for years, but few people care because they can just escape to the Oasis.

Something similar can happen when I start reading fantasy or science fiction.  I get lost in another world and neglect the real one.  First example that comes to mind: I once watched the first 3 seasons of Game of Thrones in under two weeks.  The only friends I saw during that time were Arya and Bran and Danaerys.

I was slightly worried I'd get sucked in like this again, but I kept reading Ready Player One to the end, because it wasn't just an escape.  It was also really thought provoking.  Here are some of the things I was thinking about.  WARNING: contains bad coding puns :-)
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1. Games are how we learn - One weekend during my programming bootcamp, I made the same Ruby on Rails project over and over again, studying for my assessment on Tuesday.  At first I thought it would be tedious, but it was actually kind of fun.  It was like a game: you have two hours to pass all the specs, get all the red messages in the console to turn to green.  Ready, go!  Games don't have to be a waste of time, they can be really valuable as an intrinsically rewarding way to learn new skills.

3.  Be  whoever you want to be - In a virtual world, people can be whoever they want because they have complete anonymity, hidden behind a fictional version of themselves.  Unfortunately not everyone has the freedom to be whoever they want in the real world.  For some, there may be actual risks involved, and it’s really sad that it’s just not physically safe for them to be themselves.  But for most people (me included), the risks are imagined.  Others can React however they want... but I use Ember now... just kidding!  Others can react however they want, say whatever they want, think whatever they want, but that shouldn’t stop me from becoming the person I want to be.  I have to stop caring about what people think!  The people who really matter will keep loving me anyway, and when I'm unapologetically myself, it's way easier to find others with similar interests and values (other paleo, biohacking nerds for example)!

4. The real world is amazing - Ready Player One reminded me of the farm I visited in Thailand, where I felt like I'd stepped into a scene from Legend of Zelda.  I was on the island of Koh Lanta, and my friend and I ventured up a very steep hill, following a sign for a lookout point.  A Thai woman who spoke very little English was the only person around, looking after her chickens.  She told us all about the treehouse she'd built, brought us pineapple to share, and taught us to shoot a sling shot!  She used it for scaring away monkeys, and we practiced shooting little rocks at a tin can target.  When it was time to leave, we all joked about picking up chickens and flying down the steep hill!  Amazing experiences do exist in real life, not just in video games, and I think this is the same lesson the characters learn at the end of the book, when they meet in person for the first time.

These days, I want to live my life in the real world.  I want to experience relationships with real people, not just characters on a page or a screen.  I want to be vulnerable and feel the exhilaration of uncertainty when I share my thought and feelings.  I want to feel real emotions, and create real emotions for others.  I want to challenge myself to grow and improve, not just watch others grow and improve.  Games have their place and can be fun and useful, but this world has so many amazing people and places and emotions and things and creatures, I don’t need to escape from it.  

People praise movies and books when they're raw and realistic, but nothing can be as realistic as real life.  So interestingly, reading a book about escapism motivated me go out and explore and have more adventures.

Sorry about the coding pun, couldn't help myself.

- Claire

I'm always looking for ways to be more efficient and effective with my time, and after moving to a new city where I didn't know anyone, I wondered: How can I make friends faster? How can I hack networking? How do I connect with people on a deeper level when I don't have any shared history with them?

Here's what I came up with:

• Introduce yourself first
• Ask the first question
• Give people undivided attention
• Use people's names
• Figure out something you have in common
• Figure out how you can help them
• Be unapologetically yourself
• Invite them to do stuff with you
• Be vulnerable, share things about yourself
• Ask good questions! brainstorm questions beforehand

This might just seem like common sense (and here's a book with more common sense), but these things are all so easy to forgot about! I found it helpful to have a list, anyway. I also noted that not every conversation has to be deep and meaningful, small talk is good too.

FYI: This list was sitting in my unfinished drafts folder for such a long time that I decided to just publish it as-is. What do you think of this format? Is my brainstorming helpful? Let me know in the comments!

- Claire