Following the trails of positive psychology


On Advik 2023 I took the stage of a rather unusual talk about positive psychology. Psychology has been my hobby since I was 15 years old and I still keep coming back to answer a simple question - how to live optimally. Because we’re far from it. It could be that our psyche has evolved to live in different times, different societies and different challenges. The world has changed drastically in the last 200 years, but our brain is the result of millions of years of evolution and therefore adapts slowly. Or it could be that we’ve forgotten the spiritual paths of the past. Most likely it’s both and even something more. 

When Nietsche announced the death of God, he was afraid of what it might cause. Religion has guided humanity for thousands of years and in many ways we’ve outgrown religion. In the age of disinfection, soap and refrigerators, we no longer need sacred books to tell us how to prepare our foods. In the age of man made laws and democracy, we no longer need priests to settle disputes between us. But have we truly harvested everything, or did we miss something as we made the step towards post-religious society? 

Psychology was in its infancy when Nietsche said that “God is dead”. And its pioneers weren’t exactly positive thinkers. Freud, Jung specialized in disorders and study of people we would classify as mentally ill today. We’re not going to find the answer on how to live optimally there.

Live a meaningful live
(Following the trail of Abraham Maslow)

Abraham Maslow did the very opposite, he studied healthy and successful people as a basis of his theories. Maslow's pyramid of needs is more taught today in marketing schools than psychology universities. In fact, it was never a pyramid. Maslow spoke of hierarchy of needs and in his original notes, it was displayed more as stairs. The pyramid came from a marketing book, after his death. 

Hierarchy has 5 levels, divided into 3 sections - physiological, psychological and self-actualization. Basic needs, such as food, drink, shelter, warmth and so on. Basic needs cover the need for today, Safety needs for tomorrow. Our society doesn’t struggle on this level. Followed by Social needs - need for friendship, family, fellowship. Different people found different ways to satisfy this need, some prefer a few close friends, some a family, some crowds and larger gatherings. While having people around us is not a struggle in our society, finding meaningful relationships often is. 

Esteem needs are when people need to be valued. Most people seek respect and appreciation from other people. However, that is not the way to solve this level and advance to the final level. Self-esteem, Self-respect, confidence in one's self abilities is the proper way to reach the final floor. Or simply stop caring about what other people think - you can’t please everyone after all. 

The final floor - self-actualization. Life until this point has been motivated by fulfilling needs, but now the needs are fulfilled and a new chapter awaits - growth. Accepting oneself, embracing the unknown, enjoying the journey, having purpose in life and looking at the big picture are just a few characteristics of self-actualized people, as described by A. Maslow. 

Maslow's hierarchy has been subject to criticism over the years. The concept of self-actualization has been called into question.
Recent research shows that there is probably a hierarchy of needs, but is there an universal one? And is this one the right one? Maslow himself probably wouldn’t be surprised by this, as he never claimed that his hierarchy is universal, just that successful people usually follow this hierarchy. 

Our understanding of psychology is still far from perfect, all systems, hierarchies of concepts we create are imperfect. Maslow’s understanding is also imperfect. Still he was the first one who tried to answer the question on how to live a happy and fulfilling life, based on science. 

My takeaway

Maslow said that this hierarchy is what successful people follow and for me, this was the inspiration.

At first, if there is a problem at lower tiers, fix that before anything else. Physiological needs come first, then if there is a hole in the safety net, patch it. But maybe too much safety is a problem as well, but more on that later.

Find the social interactions that leave you satisfied. For me, I’m a 1-on-1 person, so the interactions I prefer are those. Deep talks, hiking together or doing other sports, but mostly 1-on-1. Took me some time attending a different party every evening before I figured that out. Now I just attend parties to get in touch with people, but the enjoyable part is when we meet just the two of us.

Whenever I find myself motivated by esteem - desire of status, of respect, of being ‘someone’. I tell myself to stop and I try to find other motivations or abandon the effort. If you find yourself stuck on this level, try to solve it properly. Master a skill, accomplish something difficult or build something. Rather than seeking shortcuts to status.

On the final level, Maslow initially found something he called ‘peak experiences’. Moments, where we touch the pinnacle of human existence, experience joy, fulfillment and connection. Where we lose our self-awareness and when our perception becomes spot-on. He rather found that everyone is capable of these experiences. Later, he found something called self-transcendence at the very top and went to explore this phenomenon, leaving ‘peak experiences’ unexplored territory. Until someone else arrived at the same spot and gave it a new name…


Flow
(Following the trail of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Our story begins with young Mihaly, being born in 1934 as a son of a Hungarian diplomat in Italy. During the Second World War, he was in an Italian prison, separated from friends and family. It was here he made a discovery. “I discovered chess was a miraculous way of entering into a different world where all those things didn’t matter. For hours I’d just focus within a reality that had clear rules and goals” is how he remembered it later. In essence, Csikszentmihalyi uncovered the concept of 'flow', a state of immersion and heightened focus that seems to transcend the mundane struggles of life. He just didn’t know what it was.

After the war, he sought the answer to what it was in religion or philosophy. Later he attended Jung's speech on the psychology of UFO sightings, which sparked his interest in the field. He moved to the USA with a mission to study psychology and understand human happiness. 

He started by studying artists and noticed a couple of things. When the painting was doing well, artists would draw for hours, ignoring fatigue or hunger. And when they were finished, they started another painting. No “he finished the painting and lived happily ever after” stories. It almost appeared as if the process of painting was the goal. 

Later, Csikszentmihalyi introduced the groundbreaking “Experience Sampling Method” (ESM). This method, innovative for its time, involved asking (using a beeper) participants (teenagers in his case) at random times of day (usually, 10 times) what they are doing and how they feel. ESM was groundbreaking at the time and it revolutionized the way psychologists can understand human experience in real time. We feel better when we’re with other people, rather than alone. But more importantly, we feel better when we are actively engaged in doing something, rather than being passive. 

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”

As the pieces of his research came together, the concept of the flow state crystallized. Flow is a state of mind, where we feel our best and perform our best. Our ego dissolves and we enter a state of ecstasy. Our perceptions are heightened. Our sense of time is warped - a few seconds can unfold into hours, or a few hours can pass by in just a moment. We feel a deep sense of joy, fulfillment and connection. I don’t know about you, but I see Maslow's ‘peak experiences’ very clearly. Mihaly then asked the right questions. How can we get to the state of flow? How can we move larger parts of our lives into flow?

 

And he discovered ‘flow triggers’. Conditions that improve the chance of flow happening when they’re met. He initially discovered just 4 of them. Additional 4 were discovered by other researchers. You don’t need to meet them all. In fact, even a passive activity such as watching a movie can trigger flow state, when you’re really paying attention to the movie. Probably not when it’s on the second screen while you pretend to do something else. But the more triggers you hit, the better chance and the deeper the state. Try exchanging ‘watching a movie’ with ‘rock climbing’ and you will experience a much deeper flow state.

But Flow doesn’t just come in individual flavor, there is ‘group flow’ as well. Discovered by Keith Sawyer, creating a list of 10 group flow triggers. Once again, you don’t need to hit all of them, but the more the better. Group flow is powerful, because of how we evolved. For millennia it was critical for our survival to stay as part of the group. Exile meant death. And our brain still perceives social challenges as existential. And by the way, this creates a perfect blueprint for teamwork. 

While flow can bring ‘moments of our life’, it’s not just about those moments. Experiencing deep flow is also linked to happiness and higher satisfaction with life. Also 2 studies showed something interesting. A study comparing elite musicians and top athletes found that challenge/skill ratio is a significant predictor for life satisfactions. Another study focusing on mountain climbers found the relationship between flow and enjoyment is insignificant for novices. The better you are, the happier you will become with flow.

It should also be noted that flow has its dark side. Today it is very easy to get high by various means. And people are chasing these states as if those states were the goal, becoming bliss junkies. Always coming back for more, without a purpose. Take video games for instance. Video games are a flow gateway and gaming in moderate amount can have a positive effect on well being. But overdoing it can lead into gaming addiction with heavily negative consequences. Just as Csikszentmihalyi found solace in chess during his time in prison, it's essential to find activities that naturally induce flow without becoming overly reliant or addicted to them.

My takeaway

Flow is something that should be part of life. There is a sweet spot in everything, having no flow in life is definitely a bad thing. On the other hand, chasing flow for the sake of flow is also a bad thing (and also negatively affects life satisfaction). But I believe our society is heavily on the side where more flow is needed. There is a link between confidence, anxiety and flow, where confidence leads to more flow and anxiety is effectively a flow blocker. But the link also works the other way around - flow leads to more confidence and less anxiety. Also to less depression. 

Our brain also works in a way that it reinforces states of mind it experiences. Spending time being anxious also means more anxiety in the future. Spending time in flow increases the chance we hit flow state next time. Not experiencing any flow states will lead to gradually losing the ability to experience flow. And this is observed in kids who experience a lot of flow when playing outside, while as we get older, the ability to experience flow vanes over time. And in my opinion, this is one of the factors that leads to the boom of depression and anxiety in today's society. And experiencing more Flow can help reverse the trend. 

But here comes the catch - even Csikszentmihalyi believed that flow has evolved as a survival tool. It’s a state that kicks in in situations where life (or significant consequences) is at stake. You're not going to experience flow from your ‘safe space’. Practicing sports like rock climbing or various forms of flying can be a sure way to reach flow. But the possibility of dying also comes as part of the package. 

In my social circles, there is a huge difference in happiness between people who engage in sports such as paragliding, climbing or diving and those who don’t. Yet when I offer someone to go rollerblading with me, the answer I often hear is “do you know how dangerous it is?”

So, ask yourself, “Is there enough flow in my life?”. And if the answer is no, then fix it. Experiencing flow via activities can induce flow, such as spending time in nature or adventure sports will enable you to experience more flow in other situations, such as at work. 

More info

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Everything is perfectly fine
(Following the trail of Jeffery A Martin)

But no matter how high the flow trip is takes you, you’ll always come back to earth, entering the recovery phase of the flow cycle. While the after-effects of flow, such as satisfaction usually last a while, and even months for intense trips, they will vanish in time. And one day, you will be back for more. 

But what if there are persistently altered states of mind? States, where you don’t come back from the trip, but instead stay there. When Buddhists talk about reaching enlightenment or Christians about reaching the ‘peace that passeth understanding’, are those states really attainable? And what did Maslow mean by people reaching ‘self-transcendence’?

Our third story follows Jeffery A. Martin, an entrepreneur with a successful career in tech, bothered by one thing. There are people who have much less than him that are happier than him. Dropping tech careers and entering the psychology field with one mission - to understand why those people are happier. And reach the state as well. He began by interviewing those people focusing on what their experience of life is and shortly after he began noticing similarities. 

The states we’re talking about are called Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience (PNSE), which is the academic term. The name was chosen as a neutral term to help people open up. Because when he asked people “Can we talk about how you experience enlightenment?”, people often replied “Oh, you wouldn’t understand”. The state is classified as persistent after more than one year of continuous experience. The more accessible term is Fundamental Wellbeing. People who reach it are called ‘Finders’.

How to best describe PNSE? If you look deep inside yourself and ask yourself a question “Is everything perfectly okay?”, what will you find? Will you find calmness knowing that things are exactly as they’re supposed to be? Or will you find anxiety, knowing that something is wrong? Maybe you know what is wrong, maybe you don’t. Maybe you think that once you fix that one thing in your life, everything will be alright. Maybe you need to buy a Tesla, get a better job, get a relationship, or get out of the relationship, move to a different place. But usually, when you reach those goals, you’ll realize that wasn’t it and keep searching.

But if you’ve found calmness inside yourself, then you're experience PNSE. Jeffery noticed when interviewing hundreds of people that the experience fell into certain buckets, he named them Locations. 

The most basic form is called Location 1, where you still function as a normal human with a full range of emotions. You just know that everything is fine. You’re calm, less anxious. Sometimes you still experience negative emotions, but those pass away quickly. 

Location 2 is where you enter a state of ‘non-duality’, where you realize you’re an inseparable part of the cosmos. Emotions typically shrink to only the positive ones and you become a bit weird. If you have some of those "new agey friends", who are always in harmony with everything, yet little out of the world, it might very well be that place.

The next Location (3) is the pinnacle of human experience and sought after by many religions. You once again perceive things dually and have the sense of merging into cosmos or with god. There is just one emotion left - a combination of love, joy, compassion, happiness. 

Location 4 is where you lose all emotions and realize how much you were bound by them. Now  that they’re gone, you can enjoy freedom to its fullest. It feels a bit alien and my theory is that Gene Roddenberry encountered some of those people and created Vulkans based on them. 

The data I’ve seen suggests that for any given location, about 60% of people are in that location, while the rest are further along the continuum. It means that 60% of the finders are in L1, 60% of the remaining 40% (24%) are in L2, 10% are in L3 and so on. Jeffery claims that only 0.5% of humans experience PNSE. In my social circles, the number is closer to 5%. 

Here is the catch. In flow you feel best and perform your best. In PNSE you constantly feel best, but aside from that, it has many downsides. Loss of motivation is one of them, being a bit weird is another. You no longer feel that you can relate to the average humans, it’s not uncommon to take refuge in solitude. While in Location3 you can feel being filled with love and compassion, it doesn’t mean you exhibit that behavior, in fact, you can become very toxic and not even realize it (remember, everything is perfectly fine).

My takeaway

I wouldn’t be surprised if by this moment you’re wondering if there is even a scientific base to what you just read. Because it sounds more like pseudo-religion than science. Jeffery discovered this as part of his studies at CIIS and Harvard. The first paper where he talks about PNSE is his Dissertation work. His later article explaining PNSE clusters has been published in a scientific journal and passed peer review. And there are several other scientific articles about PNSE. This should give it some credibility. 

For me personally, the ultimate proof was direct experience. I’ve spent some time in PNSE, people around me did as well and met some other Finders. There are distinct EEG patterns in the brains of people who experience PNSE. Jeffery and his team measured those in the labs of their universities in the US. We measured them in our neuroscience lab at iNFINITE. For me, that’s enough validation.

Now the question, to PNSE or not to PNSE? My answer is that I try mostly on the PNSE side of being and try to achieve a location that seems best suited for the task at hand. I try to keep my motivations at cognitive level, where I each morning remember why I want to get up and get to work. 

If I were to question my effective use of PNSE, then the answer would be that I’m not able to effectively use it. Or at least, not yet.  Knowing what’s possible and being able to achieve it are two distinct things and I’m still working on it. 

And while we had the bigger half of a century to look into Maslow works, or decades to study Flow, the research on persistently altered states of mind is just getting started. And for many questions, we don’t know.

If you’re already in PNSE

Read the book The Finders by Jeffery A. Martin. It will answer many questions regarding what might’ve been experiencing lately. If you seek help with integration of PNSE into your life, Explorers Mini Course is a good way to start. 

If you seek to transition into PNSE

There seems to be 2 key elements. First is to be happy. Positive psychology exercises such as gratitude, forgiveness, loving-kindness meditation will help get there. Then the second element is doing a practice for at least one hour straight, daily. The catch is, different people react differently to different kinds of practices, there is not one universal practice that fits everyone. The key advice is to rotate practices. Try various forms of meditation (breath observation, body scans, transcendental, mantra), headless way experiments, various forms of inquiries etc. Don’t stick with one practice, but rotate until you find the one that clicks with you. 

Jeffery created 2 courses to help people transition, the Finders Course (FC, 4 month protocol) and 45 Days To Awakening (45D, 6 weeks). FC is now retired even that they do reruns every now and then. I’ve personally gone through 45D in the very first ‘experimental’ cohort.  The basic course is 1 hour a day practice, morning/evening exercises, weekly exercises and call. The biggest value is however the precise meditation instructions, which tells you exactly what is important and what is not, based on research.  I’m generally not much of a fan of self-development courses, as they are in almost all cases burned money and a form of entertainment. But both FC and 45D started out as experiments and data were gathered during its run. And results of those programs were put into a study and published once again in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, validating the course.

In Conclusion: The Journey Within

Here is the moment when I should give a strong conclusion, say something about how those concepts aren’t just academic musings, but genuine paths to self development, paths to realize one's full potential and pushing boundaries. 

Here is the problem, I don’t believe that ;)

Today's age is plagued by edutainment, where you read an interesting article or book, watch a video, listen to a podcast or attend a course, experience something and then the next day, you’re exactly your old self. Leadership courses taught by people who never led even a group of children on a summer camp. CEO coaches that never ran a company. And we’re surprised it’s not working.

So maybe, if there is one key takeaway from this entire article, it should be this. If you want your mind to perform in a specific way, you need to train it. Want to reach PNSE, chances of getting there if you can’t put in an hour of meditation daily for a few weeks are slim. Want more flow in your life? Train by experiencing flow. Spend a night under the stars, attend an ecstatic dance, start climbing. Step outside your comfort zone and more importantly, out of your safe zone. Take a 2 week vacation and do Camino de Santiago. And watch yourself be transformed in the process. It’s the only way.

And by the way, If you're curious about who am I, you can check my hopepage. You can follow me on 𝕏. I run iNFINITE Production, a development studio focused on technologies of tomorrow. I try to run the company in a way to keep my employees happy above all, while also delivering value to our clients. I run Advik, an anime convention. But the main point is leading a team of 150 volunteers and trying to create an environment to reach Group Flow state. And learning far more lessons about leadership and flow than any course could ever give me.