The Secret to Happiness Lies in Having Passion for What You Do
Your quality of life doesn’t depend only on happiness. It also depends on what you do in order to be happy. If you don’t develop goals to give meaning to your own existence, if you don’t use your mind to its full capacity, then the good feelings will only fill a small fraction of the potential we possess.
After dedicating decades to studying the states in which people reached their maximum potential, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies indicate that people are happier when the reach a state of high concentration. A state which this author called “flow”.
This state can be reached when we experience positive emotions such as happiness, strength or a positive attitude. All states known as “psychic negentropy”. By not wasting attention on ruminating and feeling sorry for ourselves, the psychic energy can flow freely towards any thought or task in which we decide to invest it.
On the contrary, negative emotions, such as sadness, fear, anxiety or boredom produce “psychic entropy”. That is to say, a state in which we can’t efficiently use our attention to face external tasks, because we need it to restore an inner subjective order.
In order to better understand a state of “flow”, it might be convenient to first analyze the complete opposite state. That would be a state in which there is no order in the consciousness, one in which thoughts appear and disappear by whim. We are unable to control them. It is a very unpleasant state that tends to be linked to other problems, such as insecurity, depression or anxiety. And if it repeats itself often, it can make people very unhappy.