What makes a good ‘flow’ activity?

I thought I knew how soldering worked. I thought what happened was that you applied heat to the edges of two pieces of metal until they melted and stuck together. I’d watched my dad use a soldering iron dozens of times over the years – once to get a stubborn tick off the back of the family dog. It’s testament to how much that dog trusted Dad that the operation was carried out with no injury to anyone except the sizzled tick – yet somehow I must have missed a crucial part of the process.

In a high-ceiling workshop at the London Jewellery School, instructor Kimberley Wingrove showed us how soldering is really done as we made a ring from a strip of flattened silver. The two ends of a centimetre-wide strip were carefully prepared so they were absolutely parallel before the ring was shaped and those ends were squeezed tightly together to make the smallest gap possible. Kimberley snipped solder – fusible metal alloy – from another strip, selecting a square piece as small as a pin head. She painted the two ends of the ring with flux, a chemical cleaning agent.

The tiny piece of solder was set on the soldering block. The space in the ring was set right on top of it. Kimberley ran a burner flame around and around the silver. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened but then... the melted solder suddenly flew up the seam like a zipper, fixing the silver ends (which hadn’t melted at all) together in a tidy bond. It was like magic. I wanted to clap.

Soldering was one of many new skills I learned in what would be a day full of technical challenges. It was a day that seemed to pass in a moment, without there ever being a moment in that day when I wanted to check my phone. On a beginner’s silversmithing class, I had unexpectedly experienced the joy of “flow”.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian American psychologist and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is credited with being the first to recognise the concept. He defined it thus in an interview with Wired magazine: “Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

We’ve all of us experienced it at one time or another, looking up at the clock to realise that hours have passed in what felt like minutes, during which we haven’t thought about our day-to-day worries at all. Since Csikszentmihalyi’s first described flow in 1975, there have been many investigations into what it really is and why it feels so good. Research suggests that flow induces a state called “transient hypo-frontality”, in which the pre-frontal cortex becomes less actively engaged. The pre-frontal cortex is responsible for our higher cognitive processes, which include self-consciousness. While the pre-frontal cortex is less active, self-talk is quietened, which is a particularly good thing if your inner voice is that of a critic in the vein of Simon Cowell humiliating the most hopeless hopefuls in the first show of a new series of Britain’s Got Talent.

So what makes a good “flow” activity? Firstly, it must be intrinsically motivating. Then there’s the ratio of challenge to skill. If we pick an activity that’s too challenging, we run the risk of feeling overwhelmed and giving up. On the flip side, an activity that isn’t challenging enough, which we can do easily and without too much thought, might leave us bored and looking for other distractions (like checking the phone again). Two more important conditions for flow are having an unambiguous goal and immediate feedback. It sounds complicated but in fact the list of activities that could meet all these requirements is endless.

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Musicians often experience flow when they’re playing. Practising yoga is a classic route to finding the flow state. Creative activities such as painting and pottery fit the bill, as does DIY (though presumably not assembling a piece of flat-pack furniture with half the screws missing). Many online games are specifically designed with the purpose of inducing flow in mind, in the way they subtly increase a game’s difficulty in lock step with a player’s increasing skills. Flow activities don’t have to be expensive or involve signing up to a training course. You might experience flow in something as simple as reading a book or going for a walk. Apparently, it’s even possible to find flow at work, so long as your workplace allows for a degree of creativity, mistakes aren’t unduly punished and any goals you achieve are acknowledged.

That beginners’ silver class struck the perfect balance for me. We knew our goal – to make a piece of jewellery. It embodied the right combination of skill to mastery. Kimberley’s directions were delivered with a clarity and simplicity that was encouraging. She made everything look easy. However, when the work itself turned out to require more finesse, or more muscle in my case, than we’d expected, Kimberley’s careful corrections – that valuable immediate feedback – stopped us from becoming disheartened and giving up. Here was something we could do but it would take effort and concentration. In that concentration, we found our flow.

I got home from the course to find a newsletter from London Jewellery School alumna Caitie, of Caitie Met Soda, talking about the positive effects of craft on mental health. Caitie, who has written elsewhere about living with depression and anxiety, wrote: “Here’s the deal. It’s not that some of us are born creative while others aren’t – it’s a practised skill. Being creative takes patience and a willingness to make (lots) of mistakes on your journey. And, the important part is the process, not the product – a focus on a perfect finished product is actually what stops us from being creative!”

I certainly didn’t make a perfect finished product during my day in Hatton Garden. I’d walked into the class hoping to make something worthy of Tiffany but despite the hour I’d spent sanding away at the edges, my finished ring looked like a plumber’s cinch clamp ring, with the addition of a few hammer marks. Ultimately, it was clear to me that silversmithing was not going to be the next branch in my portfolio career – naively, I’d had no idea it was going to be so noisy or grimy or require such physical strength. From now on I’ll stick to the quieter handicrafts.

However, a day spent experiencing flow did have a lasting effect. It was like a short holiday for the more worry-prone parts of my brain and for days afterwards, I felt uncharacteristically chirpy in the face of the national news. As Caitie’s London Jewellery School newsletter pointed out, sometimes the process is the real purpose. The journey definitely matters more than the destination when it comes to flow.