How to Enjoy Boring Tasks and Reduce Anxiety
WHY this is important: We all find ourselves either bored or anxious throughout certain parts of the day. You might be bored checking and answering those emails you get everyday, or you might be really stressed about the deadline for you latest project at work. We all experience these emotions at some point or another, knowing that they cannot be good for us. To live a better, happier, and more productive life, we should strive be get rid of anxiety, stress, and boredom as much as possible.
WHERE I learned this: Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This book is all about being in a state of “flow” where effort flows effortlessly, we lose ourselves completely in our work, and we feel GREAT! It is not the classic “happy” state where someone is smiling and such. Often, it involves hard work that isn’t great in the moment, but feels incredible looking back. We have all felt this at some point or another, but few of us know why.
HOW to achieve this: Achieving flow has many complex parts to it that I won’t go into here. If you’re interested after reading this, order the book on Amazon, it’s incredible! At the core of flow is the idea of a challenge. For something to engross all your effort and fully engage your mind, it must be challenging in some way. For instance, writing this post is a bit of a challenge for me, but it is forcing me to focus and be present. If you are not challenged, you are likely to get distracted and your mind will wander. This happens to me all the time whenever I watch TV/Netflix. It’s not even remotely challenging, so I find myself checking my phone or even tidying up around the room. The key to this optimal experience is a worthwhile challenge.
If you took anytime to view the chart this article is linked to, you’ll notice a second component, skill. If the author of the book were writing a post on this topic the same way I am, he would not be challenged at all, because his skill far exceeds what is required of him for the task. In the same vein, if someone who hadn’t even heard of flow tried to write this article, the challenge would be too great and he would be unable to do it. Therefore, there is a sweet spot where both the challenge at hand and the skill required are in alignment. It is at this intersection that flow occurs, and we should strive to have all of our task be in this range (see the graph).
So let’s say you are challenged too much for you skill level. This usually results in stress or anxiety; the question is now, what do you do? The easy answer would be to lessen the challenge to something you can handle, but is still difficult. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work this way. Let’s use the example of a person driving a car with moderate skill, like most of us. A lot of the time, we find ourselves in flow while driving because the road curves back and forth, and we have to focus and adjust. We are skilled enough for it, but we still have to try or we’ll get into an accident. Let’s say that we are driving and all of a sudden it starts raining, it’s dark out, and we’re on an unfamiliar road. We’d likely be anxious, but we can’t change the challenge. In situations like this, we are often helpless in the moment, but can be better off in the future. When the challenge exceeds the skill you have, you must work on your skills, i.e. learn and grow. The driver in this example could talk with a more experienced driver about the scenario at a later point and be better prepared next time he finds himself in a similar situation.
Even more often than the above situation, we find ourselves on the other side of the graph, where our skill-set far outweighs the challenge of our task. Using the driving example, imagine driving on a straight road with nobody on it and not a cloud in the bright sunny sky. I would fall asleep! Obviously, one does not want to reduce their skills to meet the challenge, that would have devastating long term effects. The thing to do here is to increase the challenge. I’ve put on songs with hard to sing lyrics (anything Kendrick Lamar) to force myself to stay awake because it challenges me. We often times try to make a game out of menial task to make them less boring. That’s exactly what to do to in these scenarios. If I have to clean the house, I try to figure out the most efficient way of doing so which consumes my energy and forces me to stay present. It puts me in a state of total mindfulness and focus. That is flow.
To summarize all that we discussed here: If your skill meets the challenge at hand, you’re golden; if you aren’t skilled enough for your challenge, acquire more skills; if you are too skilled, make more of a challenge out of the task. This is a very simple concept, yet so many people do not understand how it works, and some that do, fail to implement it. My challenge to you is to learn that one skill that will bring you closer to your challenge and to make a game out of the boring tasks you dread, but nonetheless must do.
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