Recently  I’ve been feeling very low, and very lost. It feels like everytime I’m nearly a new decade of life, I suddenly go into a state of confusion and find myself asking what the point is to it all. I mean the ‘whys’ just don’t seem to stop. I found myself feeling very low, unmotivated, and uninspired by life in general. One Saturday afternoon as I sat staring through my TV, I realised something – I’ve always asked “why?” I’ve been asking why my whole entire life. I’ve always been searching for answers that perhaps do not even exist.

When I was a child it was “why do I have to go to school? what is the goal of life? and why do I have to do what I’m told?”

As I’ve grown my whys have become;

“Why do I have to pay bills on things like water?” – a basic necessity for a human to live and breathe. And; “why do I even exist?”

When you’re feeling down and feeling lost in the world, you can get yourself in such a state when you tirelessly think about the ‘whats’ and the ‘whys’. I mean, have you ever felt so lost in the world that you find yourself asking these questions about your place in the world, over and over again?

That’s the cycle I find myself in sometimes, and yes, it sucks. Whilst I’ve always envied those who can get up in the morning and ‘just get on with life with little second thought’, I myself seem to always find myself questioning if I’m living correctly, being a good dad, and being a good human being in general.

So the other day got me really thinking, more so than I ever have in my life before. Maybe it’s because I’m nearing 30 and still not quite understanding what I want out of life, or maybe it was because the time it happened was particularly stressful. I suddenly had this moment of clarity where I could see myself in my present form, existing, but not quite feeling where I was supposed to be.

Whilst this looked like depression to most of my family on the outside, I wasn’t exactly feeling like I was sad or depressed. Instead I was more confused, and more conscious of my existence than ever before. I had more and moe questions about life in general, and everything started to feel like one big slog with no purpose. My whole life I have aimed to do something great, but never really knew what that ‘thing’ would be, or what I wanted it to look like. My goal has been to give my life purpose, and not just feel as if I was ‘existing for the sake of it.’

So I was feeling low and lost and the feeling stayed with me for a number of weeks. I was hoping it was just a bad spell that I would shake out of it, and slowly but surely, the confusion about my existence started to dissolve. I started to feel warmer again, and like I was getting back on track.

What helped me when I was feeling low and lost in my life?

My family, and those around me.  Sounds cliche by now but talking about how I was feeling really helped me to start feeling better about my existence and my life. Whilst I was hesitant that others wouldn’t totally understand what I meant when I explained it to them (and maybe they still don’t) it helped me to off-load. In fact, I have felt this way for most of my life, totally confused about being alive and what it means.

So, this was like lifting a weight off my chest that had been there since my early teens. Talking to others allows you to externalise what you’ve been keeping inside of you. It allows the thoughts you’ve been thinking about a chance to be said out loud. This in-turn allows for constructive responses from those you care about.

So often when you’re feeling low, it becomes a habit to keep it inside of you, hoping that it will eventually go away. However, rarely, if ever, does it go away by itself. When negative thoughts are kept pent up, they compound on eachother, and multiply in strength. Talking them out, is the first step to taking that pressure off yourself.

If you’re like me, you sometimes get in a rut of feeling like life is boring and a rut that simply repeats itself every single day. I think that was half of my problem when I was feeling low. I didn’t know what to do with myself, or what would make me feel happy again. I felt as if I was just a robot, living for the sake of it whilst trying to keep on top of all of my responsibilities.

Then, I read something that reminded me where I was going wrong in my life. I was browsing the web, like I normally do, searching for what to do when you feel low and lost. I came across an interesting article that sounded like it was talking to me, and I related to every word that was written. It was written by a guy (can’t remember what site it was on!) who was giving advice out to people who feel low and lost in their 20’s. He referenced several psychologists, and one of them particularly stood out.

 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was just a young 10 yr old boy when he found himself and his family in an Italian POW camp during world war two. He witness the cruelty of the soldiers around him, and the pain of the victims of the war. Even at that age, he found himself wondering what the point of life was, when there was nothing but pain surrounding his existence.

However, a young Mihaly remembered being almost oblivious when the bombs would continue to shake the ground, day in, and day out. He found himself lost playing chess. He would be so engrossed in chess that everything around him seemed like it would dissolve away and become irrelevant in that moment. When the war ended, Mihaly found that he had a great deal of interest in psychology, and what ‘living a happy life’ meant to him. The young Hungarian moved to the USA and began studying more about what it meant to be happy, and more importantly, how to live a fully rich life.

It wasn’t too soon that he coined the mental state ‘flow’, greatly inspired by his own experience during the War, all those years before, when he was a small child.

So what exactly is ‘flow’?

Mihaly describes 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.”  

Therefore, you’re in a kind of flow where you find the task at hand naturally easy and it makes total sense to you. Mihaly interviewed a number of sports professionals and asked them what they felt when they were experiencing peak performance. He found that most of those interviewed came back as describing the most enjoyable part of their performance was when it seemed to flow out of them, with very little effort on their part. It just came naturally, and in that emersion they were separated from their everyday reality.

Flow can be described for the following creative processes;

• It’s when the artists paint brush spreads across the paper with little thought
• When the figure skater dances each piece perfectly and it all comes together
• When the singer hits the high note and feels as if they could just keep going and going
• It’s when the tennis player keeps racking up points and feels unstoppable
• It’s like me right now writing this blog pos, feeling as if I’m contributing something useful to you.

Flow is when we’re doing something that we really want, to do, enjoy, and get fully immersed in. The sensation of flow can also feel as if time is disrupted, as if hours feel like minutes and we lose a little sense of reality.

You’ve heard people say a million times: “I was enjoying myself so much I lost track of time!”

It’s because they were so immersed in that basketball game, having so much fun being with their friends, or feeling like they were gliding as they rode their bike for hours on end.

Have you ever played a football match where your team was scoring, you were winning, and the match was nothing but enjoyable? Before you know it, it’s half time, and then soon after that, the game is over. You were having so much enjoyment from the game that you forgot about that money you owed, the person you think you upset, and the work you need to do.

When we’re in this state of ‘flow’ we leave little to no room for any other thoughts that may be bothering us. Only the task at hand is on our minds.

 

What To Do When You’re Feeling Low

 

Start getting into a flow. When you’re feeling low, you’re likely either fed up and bored, or you are anxious about something that you think you will or are struggling with. I was both, in fact I still and always will feel like these things sometimes. However, I’m trying to get myself into a channel of flow more often. I’m trying to create situations where things just seems to click for me.

 

Getting into a place of flow is doing something that you love to do which is directly located  between feeling bored, and feeling anxious and panicked. This is the activity that is pleasurable, comes easily to you, and you enjoy and feel comfortable doing. Usually these are our hobbies and passions.

Part of my feeling low was my absence of doing the tasks I love the most and get a great feeling of accomplishment from. When I do these things I love, I feel like I am doing something meaningful and productive. For me, these things are drawing and writing. They are the things that naturally motivate me, that I don’t have to force myself to do. For example, I have to force myself to do chores around our home a lot, but when it comes to my hobbies, I find it easy, and don’t have to think about doing it. When I draw or write, I lose track of time, feel a sense of ‘being in the zone’, and do not feel either bored or anxious about the task at hand.

When my pencil hits the paper, my hand moves by itself, as if it knows exactly what to do, where to sketch the lines and when to stop. There is little thought that goes into it, but also no thought about anything else at the same time.

I’ve talked a lot about making time for doing what you love, and the flow theory has only reinforced my thinking that doing what you naturally enjoy with ease is more important than I had previously thought. When an artist cannot paint, he becomes depressed, when a musician cannot sing, she becomes depressed. All meaning for life seems cloudy, because the raw pleasure that these tasks gives them is absent.

Being in a state of flow is not always realistic though. Of course, you have to do things which don’t always allow you to get into this perfect line of flow. Maybe you have to go to the in-laws place for dinner, maybe it’s work that stresses you out, or maybe it’s just the busyness of day to day activities. However, finding happiness by doing what you naturally love is something that we have to actively pursue. We can’t just sit down at the end of the day and expect to be happy just because the day is over. If there is no activity that causes this euphoric state of flow, there is a chance that happiness will not be found. At least that was the case for me.

As Mihaly puts it;

“Happiness takes a committed effort to be manifested.”

The good news is though, if you’re truly passionate about the thing that makes you happy, you obviously shouldn’t have to force yourself to do it.

Mihaly says that to find happiness in our lives, we have to actual take action instead of sitting down and letting it come to us. That means not spending our free time watching TV, aimlessly browsing Facebook, and getting involved in other peoples drama. We have to spend the time we are not active doing the things that will actively give us a sense of meaning and enjoyment. It’s easy just to get in after work and throw yourself on the couch, but what if we went out for that walk? shot that video? or wrote that blog post? Would we feel as if we had some kind of control over our lives that we so strive for? I think yes. And I also think that by doing the things that keeps us up at night excited, we can start experiencing that euphoric feeling we get from ‘being in a flow’.

If you’re not sure what makes you happy, start trying new things. Pick up a guitar, run around your town, read a book, or start writing. Most people go their whole lives without knowing what their passion is, as if it’s something rigid that must be set in stone. In reality, our passions can come and go, and forever be fluid as we discover new things. That’s what I’m finding about life in general. Life is always changing and moving, so there no wonder we feel like we don’t know what it’s meaning is. The good news is, putting yourself into a position of flow doing the things you love, can give you that feeling of meaning being present for you.

It can be hard to know what to do when you’re feeling low, but I believe this is a key theory that we all need to adopt and try to reach for as much as possible. Being in that ‘flow zone’ where doing what you love feels easy, gives us a euphoric feeling. We stop worrying about everything else in our life for that moment, and just live in it instead.

In the end, isn’t that all that matters?