Flow, Mindfulness, and Buddhism…Oh My
Right, so I’m in my psychology class (half-awake, mind you, because this is one of my 8 a.m’s)… aaaaand we’re talking about Buddhism.
Now, this class discussion isn’t just some tangent that stemmed from an overzealous kid really excited about their religion. There are actually some deep, DEEP psychological concepts ingrained in Buddhism.
So, the topic for today’s class is mindfulness and how it can help people’s emotional health. My TA is talking about how a lot of meditation apps (I’m looking at you headspace) use this concept of focusing on mindfulness to ease the stress of their user base. Now… if you don’t know, my topic is on the flow state, a mental state that also has some evidence of helpin’ out some people’s mental health. I started thinking, “oh boy, this ‘mindfulness’ idea sounds a lot like the flow state, but, like, the opposite”.
Lemme explain….
So one day, a bunch of REALLY smart psychologists decided to see if surfers dudes’ idea of “going with the flow” had some scholarly backing. Turns out, yeah they did (geez…imagine getting psych advice from Johnny under the pier). This discovered mental state was named the “flow state” by the leading scholar in this field, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yes I copied and pasted the name). A lot of fancy terms were used by the researchers to explain just what the hell “flow” is. But basically, it’s when someone loses some concept of their reality when in a hyperattentive state (usually when performing a passion like music or sports).
Mindfulness, quite elegantly, is kind of like the opposite of flow. What I got from an hour and a half in my psychology lab was that mindfulness is when someone “de-tethers” themselves from the worries of their present life (HaHA! There’s the Buddhism!). People achieve mindfulness by not being hyper-attentive about any particular thing and instead focusing on their overarching reality and being “mindful” about the “big picture.”
I can’t be the only one that thinks that these two concepts are connected…
This really opens a whole new can of worms. What does this mean if these two concepts are linked? What does it mean if mindfulness and flow are really, in some ways, opposites? Is it a supplementary relationship, where if you are in the flow and also being mindful… will you feel better? Or does one inhibit the other? If this last one is true, then I’d be pretty pissed if I was paying a monthly subscription to some app for nothing just because I wanted to play a little guitar. Geez. Well, good luck research psychologists! Godspeed.
P.S. Turns out that headspace came out with a “flow state” program on their app which basically destroys my idea of becoming a millionaire. Oh well.
