What is “flow,” and why is it so hard to find?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” in the 1970s. He defines it as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

Csikszentmihalyi wrote that during flow, “concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted.”