Everyone brushes their teeth. Or at least, I hope everyone brushes your teeth (p.s. If you are one of those weirdos who doesn’t, then i really hope we never meet in person). And we do it twice a day, every single day, for about 3 minutes each time. That’s 6 minutes a day, 42 minutes a week, 180 minutes (3 hours) a month, and 2190 minutes (36.5 hours) a year. That’s a whole lot of time doing something as mundane, although very important, as brushing your teeth.
What if there was a way to make tasks like these actually enjoyable, instead of just boring and routine? Thankfully there is, and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses it in his seminal book Flow. Wikipedia defines flow as
“the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
Doesn’t that sound awesome? Well, it probably does to you, but you are probably thinking to yourself right now, “How can tooth-brushing be a flow state activity.” The truth is that anything can be a flow-state activity. Obvious ones include rock-climbing, video games, chess, cooking, painting, and meditation. In my life, even certain ordinary tasks like showering, walking, and yes, brushing my teeth, are flow-state activities.
There are various requirements for an activity to allow you to enter a “Flow”, but the most important one is that it needs to provide challenges. The reason that ordinary tasks aren’t flow-state is that they are too easy. So we have to create our own challenges for these otherwise easy tasks. For example, with walking, I set certain goals. If I need to walk ten blocks, I break it down into smaller chunks, like 1 or 2 blocks at a time. And then I focus on these “mini-challenges”. Every time I walk a block, I do a little celebration in my head. That allows me to break down a lengthy and boring task like walking 10 blocks into smaller, more achievable, and rewarding mini-tasks. Instead of getting to my destination tired after having walked 10 blocks, I feel energized because I just accomplished 10 mini-goals and I entered into a flow state.
You can do the same thing with brushing your teeth. Treat each section of your mouth as a mini-challenge that needs to be completed. Molars, incisors, canines, gums, tongue. Celebrate when you finish brushing each region. Enter into a flow state. And you will turn those 3 minutes of morning boredom into 3 minutes of flow.
So go ahead. Pick one ordinary task and turn it into a flow-state activity. Then once you master that, pick another task. Pretty soon, your entire life will be spent in “Flow”.