People who’re easily absorbed in an activity can improve their mental and cardiovascular health.

Have you ever lost track of space and time when redecorating a room? How about playing an instrument so focused that a minute ago your worries evaporated? Then you've probably experienced “flow.”

Flow is a term utilized in psychology to explain a state of heightened concentration, during which you turn into completely absorbed in an activity. It exists somewhere between boredom and stress – normally experienced during activities that take some period of time. Challenging but still meet our skill level.. When we experience flow, we're highly efficient, feel on top of things and ignore time.

Flow is commonly a positive experience. So can or not it's good for our mental health? This is an issue that researchers, including myself, are currently grappling with.

Concepts like flow have been around for some time, for instance “Polarization of Attention”which is a state of heightened attention proposed by Italian educator Maria Montessori within the early twentieth century. But the fashionable, scientific version of flow was prepared By Hungarian-born American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi within the Seventies.

My work and that of others has shown that how often and in what order we experience flow varies widely between people, and is. Partly genetically influenced.

In other words, some individuals are more liable to drift than others, partly resulting from individual differences in genetic predispositions, but in addition resulting from aspects in our surroundings. These may include the circumstances of the actual activities we engage in, the distractions we experience, and our mental states.

Does flow cause mental health?

It has been suggested that there could also be drift Associated with many positive outcomesIncluding higher mental and cardiovascular health. These associations are generally interpreted as evidence of drift attributable to such conservation efforts.

First corporations are seeing business opportunities and offers resulting from these proposed benefits of flow. Flow promoting training. However, this will be a bit premature.

To date, a lot of the available research doesn't allow for conclusions in regards to the causal effects of flow on mental or physical health. This is because research is based totally on small sample sizes and self-reported data. And the tendency to experience flow and mental health problems are each partly hereditary.

Our particular tendencies, together with our surroundings and experiences, will influence how we undergo life, including whether we experience flow or mental health issues. But how our genes and environment work together remains to be largely unknown.

This signifies that the identical family aspects, including genetic predispositions or early childhood environment, can influence each how prone we're to drifting and our mental health. In this case, the reported associations wouldn't be directly causal, but slightly attributable to a 3rd factor that causes each, equivalent to genes or specific childhood experiences.

Enter neuroticism.

Another such third factor could also be an idea called “neuroticism.” Neuroticism is a personality trait that describes our tendency to be emotionally unbalanced and simply irritated. are more sensitive For stress and psychological problems in addition to cardiovascular and other physical ailments.

At the identical time, it makes intuitive sense that anxiety, stress, and emotional instability are aspects that may prevent you from moving into flow experiences. So it's very possible that our predispositions, including neuroticism, affect each our ability to experience flow and our mental health.

If we searched for a relationship between flow and mental health without considering neuroticism—as most research has done—we might observe an association. But it's really driven by neuroticism.

Together, this raises the query: Can flow really protect against certain health problems? This query was recently investigated by Emma Gaston, a student of mine on the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Laura Wesseldijk, a senior researcher in my group on the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, in my and Laura Wesseldijk's joint Supervised. Germany. Our paper was published. In Journal Translational Psychiatry.

We investigated for the primary time whether neuroticism influences the observed associations between flow and mental health – and whether family aspects equivalent to genetics or early family environment may play a job. Also for the primary time, the study tested the reverse; Whether mental health issues result in low flow. This was done using real-life assessments from 9,300 people in a Swedish patient registry.

We found that individuals who were more liable to flow had a lower risk of certain diagnoses, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, stress-related disorders and heart problems. This is consistent with expectations of a protective effect of flow on mental and cardiovascular health outcomes.

However, when neuroticism and family aspects were considered, flow experiences remained associated only with major depression and (potentially) anxiety, although the associations were somewhat reduced. This finding suggests that flow can have some protective effect on these two mental health outcomes, but the connection is more complex than thought.

On the opposite hand, the indisputable fact that most of those associations disappeared suggests that exposure to flow did in a roundabout way contribute to reduced risk for these conditions. Rather third aspects, equivalent to genes, could also be a greater explanation.

Does this mean we must always engage in flow training to cut back our risk of depression and anxiety? No, research is lacking to research whether and the way we are able to manipulate flow and what the implications will likely be.

That said, once we're in a state of flow, we're prone to spend less time ruminating about our lives or worrying in regards to the future—just because we're busy. And the experience of flow is rewarding in itself. So if something you're keen on makes you lose track of space and time, it's probably good for you – no less than within the moment.