Category Archives: Uncategorized

I originally published this blog post on June 5, 2013,  Black, White and Gray, a blog hosted by Patheos.  Click here to read the full post.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

“Do you take your leisure seriously? If not, you aren’t going to get flow which I described last week. Contrary to popular belief, flow is not the easy-peasy feeling you get when plopping down on the couch to watch an old movie or the NBA Finals. Flow also is not the exclusive property of musical or spiritual virtuosos who seem to just forget the world around them as they wrap themselves in beauty or prayer.  Flow happens when your work or leisure expand your consciousness, producing and optimal psychological state fundamental to happiness.

Why do we need to be serious about flow? Positive psychologist Martin Seligman convinced me that if you don’t get flow most days, you probably will never be happy. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, states that if you know how to flow, you can expect to be happy practically no matter what, including during times of  serious adversity…”

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I originally published this blog post on May 29, 2013,  Black, White and Gray, a blog hosted by Patheos.  Click here to read the full post.

“Did you know that you can actually increase your ability to enjoy the things in life that produce the greatest satisfaction? When I read Martin Seligman’s PERMA concept of human flourishing (Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement) I simply presumed that Type-A, achievement oriented people like me are too busy doing our work to get into flow (another word for engagement). “Flow must be what creative types, like artists or actors, experience,” I naively thought.

To learn more about flow, I recently perused one of the books from the reading list I developed for my positive sociology class, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Czikszentmihaly.  To my delight, I learned from Czikszentmihaly that the reason I can dedicate so many hours of solitary  reading and writing is because learning new things is the primary way I experience flow.

What exactly is flow? According to  Czikszentmihaly, flow is “joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life” (Flow, p. xi). How do we achieve flow? By fighting against psychic entropy (or chaos in our thoughts) by striving for order in our consciouness. When we have order in consciousness, “the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly” (Flow, p. 39). ..”

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I originally published this blog post on May 1, 2013,  Black, White and Gray, a blog hosted by Patheos.  Click here to read the full post.

Barry Schwartz

“Have you ever felt overwhelmed at the number of choices to buy a salad dressing at the grocery store? Have you ever failed to choose a health care or retirement option just because, well, there were so many options that you couldn’t pick one? Have you ever searched and searched for the perfect pair of shoes, the best dress for a special event, or a new car, and then made a choice but still felt like maybe you could have found something even better?

If you answered “yes’ to any of these questions, then you are suffering from what Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz calls “The Paradox of Choice.” As he recounts in this TED lecture, Schwartz suffered so much agony when buying a pair of jeans that he decided to write a whole book explaining how Americans mistakenly think that more choices means more freedom and that more freedom means more well-being…”

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I originally published this blog post on March 20, 2013,  Black, White and Gray, a blog hosted by Patheos.  Click here to read the full post.

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

“It is with a bit of trepidation that I begin discussing with my students in positive sociology this week Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Is a work written in the 1830s relevant nearly 200 years later? When I assign readings from 1985 my students say, “Gee, this is old and out of context,” so how will they respond to a book from 1835? Will they dismiss Tocqueville’s insights or writing style as irrelevant to their everyday concerns and the concerns of our nation? As the book’s title suggests, Tocqueville ventured to the U.S. from France to find out: what makes American democracy work?

The 600-page volume he produced is quite likely still the best assessment of American culture that has ever been written. In this masterpiece that has now become a foundational piece for cultural literacy, Tocqueville writes as a foreigner (he was a Frenchman) and to foreigners (his book was originally published in French for a French audience) about what cultural and social forms distinctly American, and how those distinct American social and cultural traits uphold the great American experiment in democracy…”

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