Have you ever been lying in bed late at night and you can’t get to sleep, and all of a sudden your mind drifts back to something embarrassing you may have said six months ago, and next thing you know, you’re dwelling on it for an hour or more? Or you’re sitting around in lockdown, you find yourself getting rather bored, and all of a sudden your mind gets stuck on some negative thought or event that just keeps replaying for no apparent reason?
There’s actually a word for it. It’s called “rumination”. It comes from when cows chew grass and swallow it into their stomachs (or “rumens”) and they can’t digest it. So they vomit it back up again, chew and swallow what they’ve just vomited up, and continue this process again and again until whatever’s in their rumens is finally soft enough to digest. This is what the brain’s doing – vomiting up unhelpful thoughts over and over trying to get a different result, until finally it’s exhausted. We all do it from time to time, but if we do it often enough, it can spiral into a habit that’s really unhealthy for our state of mind. In fact, persistent ruminating is one of the key markers of depression, and people will turn to almost any coping mechanism to deal with it regardless of the cost.
Research shows that one of the best ways to get around this habit is to do something that is actively engaging the mind. The key here is to find something that is both enjoyable and challenging – getting us close to what Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi describes as “flow state” (Csikzentmihalyi, 1999). This is where we experience a sense of timelessness, and our thoughts, senses and worries vanish as we find ourselves in an active dance with life. This “flow state” cannot be described as a “positive” emotion as such. In fact, it is marked by a complete absence of any emotion at all. Our entire sense of self, our ego, our human tendency to obsess over petty details and day-to-day concerns, these all vanish as our active involvement in the task at hand connects us with the spirit of existence itself.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Imagine you’re playing soccer. It’s the 90th minute. The scores are tied, 1-1. You’ve got a clean run down the right-hand side of the field. If you get past the defenders and bury the ball in the back of the net, the game is over - you’re carried off the field like the hero. In that moment, are you thinking about something coming up in a week? Are you thinking about something that happened six months ago? Are you thinking about anything at all? No. Your mind is right there, in the moment. Nothing else exists except for the game. And as an individual, even you cease to exist. You are in “flow state”, or close to it. This is a state of mind that athletes, artists, writers, creative types, performers and others often describe as the reason why they do what they do. It is a deeply spiritual experience, a space of “effortless effort”, and it is one of the best things we can do for our mental fitness.
When lockdown hit in 2020, I lost my job in the conference industry. Knowing full well what boredom and isolation have done to my mental health in the past, I knew if I didn’t act fast, I’d find myself alone with an active mind that loves to torment itself with ridiculous scenarios of its own creation or regurgitated memories of nothing in particular. So I bought a roll of canvas from the art supplies store around the corner. I got on YouTube, and started learning how to paint. Some of these were OK, some of them were downright mulligans, and some of them I was happy enough with that I shared them online. None of this involved any career aspirations or even any kind of “side hustle” – it was nothing more than a way to keep myself sane and my mind engaged at a time when I knew I needed it. I remember getting so caught up in this work that I often put the brushes down at 10:30pm at night, cross-eyed from focusing for so long, wondering where the time had gone. I credit this simple habit to helping me get through that first lockdown in pretty good shape.
So do we need to practice for years on end to reach pure "flow state"? Potentially, but you don’t need to be a professional athlete or world-class musician to at least get close to it. However, a few conditions need to be met. You will need to find something that is both enjoyable enough to interest you and challenging enough to keep your mind engaged. If something is enjoyable, like binge-watching TV, but not challenging, the mind will sooner or later fall into a passive state, and the chance of reaching anything like “flow” is low (research estimates flow is reached about 7% the time when watching TV – and even that is only from purposefully planning in advance what to watch [Csikzentmihalyi, 2004]). If something is challenging but not at all enjoyable, your mind is likely to be focused on how unpleasant the whole thing is (though plenty of “flow” activities require a period of painful growth before they are enjoyable).
Lastly, remember that it is actually more difficult to plan our leisure time than our work week. Many of us tend to switch off at the end of the week and passively wait for our physical, mental and emotional refuelling to simply happen, but this is where rumination and disengagement from the world is most likely to happen. Next thing you know, it's Sunday night and you've been stuck down a YouTube rabbit-hole for half the weekend. The key is to plan your free time as intentionally as your work week, set up your challenging & enjoyable task in advance, and get involved.
So three tips - find something enjoyable, something that is just challenging enough to keep the mind alert, and make a plan. If you do this regularly, you will notice the benefits spilling out into your overall mental health and into other areas of your life.
References
Csikzentmihalyi, M. (1999). Finding Flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. Harper Collins Publishers.
Csikzentmihalyi, M. (2004). “Flow, the secret to happiness”. TED Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness#t-745763
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