Mental health can sometimes feel like a full-time occupation: the pitfalls and risks seem ubiquitous and the achievement of some perfect state of mental health exhausting and nebulous. If you’re feeling this way: Let go of the idea that mental health is a state of perfect happiness to achieve, and instead engage in the imperfect, messy work of being human. That’s where mental health resides. A good place to start: Pay attention to the present moment.

You’ve probably heard about the benefits of being in the present moment: Be here now. Meditation is one of the great ways to achieve this. But you might not be a person who meditates. Things like mindfulness aren’t for everyone. Another way of being in the present is called flow, or being in the zone. In a state of flow, you are completely immersed in an activity, feeling energized, focused, and fully involved. This feeling of flow brings a lot of enjoyment. It’s a reward in and of itself. People lose track of time in the state of flow. Time flies when you’re in flow.

Flow Is All About Balance
One of the originators of the concept of flow is Mihalyi Csíkszentmihályi, who developed it as a theory of learning. Flow is all about balance, it occurs when one’s skill level is a good match for the difficulty of an activity. When that balance is out of whack, other states occur, like relaxation, anxiety, and boredom. When you’re in a flow state, you know you’re capable of doing what you need to do, even if it’s difficult. Time and sense of self disappear, and you become part of something bigger. It’s losing yourself in the best sense of the phrase. In that perfect balance between skill and challenge, people are totally immersed in the process, concentrated in their focus, and therefore learn better.

In contrast, a learner might feel the pleasant feeling of relaxation when their skill level far exceeds the difficulty of the task, but they won’t learn as well. When learners feel anxiety because their skill level is far too low to meet the challenges of a task, they also don’t learn as well. Flow is about that sweet spot and, like mindfulness, immerses you in the rich and thick present moment.

Take time to find flow. It can be found just about anywhere—playing the piano, writing a killer PowerPoint presentation, knitting that impossibly long scarf—but many achieve flow through exercise. During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, I discovered this myself in an unexpected place, virtual reality. Imagine listening to your favorite music, set in beautiful 360° VR landscapes, while battalions of black and white glowing balls fly toward you. Your task? Bang them out of the way with your matching black and white lightsabers through an immersive fight-dance fitness choreography of strikes, lunges, and squats. It seems made for people like me, the non-exercising set, the people who look in horror at certain home-exercise technologies.

A Feeling of Satisfied Equanimity
For the first time, actually the first time, in my life, I looked forward to exercising. I created a habit of exercise. That’s because, yes, the physical exercise was rewarding. And my pants fit better. But what really kept me coming back for more was the sense of flow, of immersion in a present in which there’s nothing but a beautiful landscape with balls shooting towards me, and I’m dance-whacking my way to a feeling of satisfied equanimity.

There’s no doubt that exercise is one of the great universal treatments for everything, from high blood pressure to depression. It also happens to be a boon for anxiety and finding flow. One of the largest epidemiological studies ever attempted included 400,000 Swedish men and women. They found that those who had a more physically active lifestyle had an almost 60 percent lower risk of developing anxiety disorders over a period of 21 years.

This kind of finding, showing the profound impact of exercise on emotional health, reminds me of something Alan Kazdin, Ph.D., professor at Yale, and founding member of the preeminent Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), said at ABCT’s 50^th Anniversary Meeting in 2006: “If we want to help people, really want to help people with their mental health, we’d first get people to exercise on a regular basis. Then, we’d see what problems were left over and develop boutique treatments to target those problems.” There was laughter from the crowd, mostly uncomfortable because he wasn’t joking, but it made me sit up straighter.

Here was the past President of ABCT, a crucial figure in the field, and he just told us that our gold-standard cognitive behavioral treatments shouldn’t be the first line of defense in the fight against mental health problems. It’s the same lesson I learned in VR, instead of trying to fix yourself like you’re broken, make more space for the habits that amplify your healthiest parts. And perhaps where you can find flow.

Honing in on Delight
The poet and essayist Ross Gay began such a habit in 2018. Beginning on his birthday, he wrote a daily essay about something delightful—something he keenly enjoyed, that provided satisfaction, pleasure, surprise, or that ah-ha moment. There were some rules to the exercise, such as writing each-and-every day and for an entire year, and to write the delights down quickly and by hand. The resulting work, The Book of Delights, is a compendium of not only what delighted Mr. Gay over this year, but what occupied his mind—the kindness of strangers, racism, his mother, music, mushrooms, trees, and his garden.

In funny, philosophical musings, he considered the full spectrum of his life—his friend, whose profligate use of air quotes amazed and amused him, the silent nod of recognition between Black people, the feeling of Botan Rice Candy wrappers melting in your mouth, and the ‘onomatopoeicness’ of janky. Along the way, he discovered that as he practiced tuning into delight, honing his delight radar, as he called it, he found more delight with each passing day, but didn’t find less anxiety, pain, or sorrow. It was by observing, by immersing himself in the whole mess of it that delight truly flowed into view.