3 Highest Human Experiences
The science and psychology of peak, flow, and peak
Since its inception, although it’s hard to pinpoint when that was, psychology has mostly dealt with pathology, that is, with mental illnesses and disorders.
However, towards the end of the 20th century, psychology went through a “quiet revolution,” as Carl Rogers, one of its foremost "revolutionaries,” called it. We know it today as humanistic psychology.
There were two main aims of this revolution. The first was the emphasis on human growth and potential rather than just on all the ways our minds (and souls) can be "unhealthy." The second was a more holistic psychology, mainly meaning that one’s subjective experience was taken as a valid thing to consider in the study of the human being.
In this essay, I want to talk about 3 of the most positive human experiences. And you can already recognize by the fact that they are positive, and they are experiences, that they wouldn’t be recognized if it wasn’t for this quiet revolution. We will take a look at peak experience, peak performance, and flow.
Why do I want to talk about them? Well, they are the highest states that a human can achieve. They make life more meaningful, fulfilling, fun, and enjoyable. I guess, then, we should learn more about them, their similarities and differences, to increase our chances of experiencing them.
Let’s start with the least known and talked about of the three.
Peak experience
According to Abraham Maslow, the goat of humanistic psychology, all humans have a drive, a tendency, towards actualizing their potential. This he called self-actualization, a term I’m sure you heard before.
“This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” - Abraham Maslow (A Theory of Human Motivation)
While studying self-actualizing individuals, Maslow “discovered” peak experiences.
Peak experiences, he wrote, are “moments of highest happiness and fulfillment.” They teach us about all the "aspects of the full functioning of human beings when they are most fully realizing themselves, most mature and evolved, most healthy, when, in a word, they are most fully human.”
Maslow recognized that these experiences can be so intense and rich moments of ecstasy that they are often considered mystical.
Even though, as Maslow says, “practically all people can report moments of rapture if they dug around long enough in their memories,” we don’t want to confine ourselves to these seemingly extreme occurrences and start viewing the peak experience as something unrelatable.
That’s why it’s enough to look at the peak experience as a moment of total absorption, getting lost in the present moment, giving one’s full attention to the matter at hand, and attaining a great sense of fulfillment from it.
Although peak experiences can potentially occur even in the most mundane moments, there are certain activities where they are most likely to occur. Maslow noted that besides his work, the research done by Marghanita Laski on ecstasy (the experience, not the drug) provides the best insight into peak experiences.
Both Maslow and Laski identified art (especially music), time in nature, love, sex, religion, creative work, and childbirth as some of the most common “triggers” of peak experience.
Next, let’s look at flow, which is probably the most popular of the three experiences.
Flow
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as an intrinsically rewarding, or autotelic, experience. It's a state we reach when there is a balance between skill and challenge and, just like in peak experience, one’s attention is fully invested in the matter at hand.
Csikszentmihalyi identified children’s play, sports, dancing, creative work, rock climbing*, collective ritual, and Eastern meditative practices as some of the activities that most often induce flow.
Flow is especially significant to study because of intrinsic motivation and reward. As an autotelic experience, flow is rewarding in itself; people seek flow for the sake of flow. That’s why flow activities are those activities with “patterns of action which maximize immediate, intrinsic rewards to the participant.” To put it simply, flow itself provides motivation and reward for flow.
*There is no reason for us to believe that there is something special about rock climbing that makes it more flow-inducing than surfing or mountain biking, for example. It seems like a choice made arbitrarily or out of practical reasons that Csikszentmihalyi interviewed rock climbers and not some other extreme athletes during his research.
Lastly, a term that there’s a lot of misconception about.
Peak performance
The misconception comes from an honest mistake, I would say.
A lot of coaches who are helping people perform on a higher level either physically or mentally use the term “peak performance.” They use it to describe a state that, once accessed, can be maintained for prolonged periods of time as well as switched on and off at will.
However, what psychology defines as peak performance is a bit different.
As psychologist Gayle Privette says, peak performance is “the prototype of superior use of human potential; it is more efficient, creative, productive, or in some way better than habitual behavior.”
So far it fits into our usual idea of peak performance.
But, equally important, it’s “an episode of superior functioning” rather than a long-term state or a type of activity. It’s a rare occurrence or sometimes a once-in-a-lifetime event. A good explanation of this is the fact that, besides athletic and intellectual events, peak performance occurs most often in death crises.
Peak performance is important to study because it helps us understand human potential as well as recognize qualities that are common to all experiences where above-average levels of human power are being accessed.
Here are some examples of how each one of these 3 states is distinct from the other two before we dive into their main characteristics reported in research.
A joyful event is exclusively a peak experience when it does not specifically involve (superior) behavior. Example: experiencing a moving live music performance.
An event is exclusively peak performance when superior behavior is not accompanied by joy or enjoyment. Example: saving a person from drowning.
An activity is exclusively flow only at the lower levels of joy and performance. Example: putting together a puzzle.
Unique Characteristics and Differences
Most noticeably, peak experience has a kind of mystic quality that is rarely or at least not as clearly reported in peak performance or flow. This explains why Maslow considered research on moments of ecstasy as something closest to his research on peak experiences.
Loss of self and becoming one with the object or activity, even the feeling of becoming one with the world, are all associated with peak experience and flow. In peak performance, however, the person encounters the world, object, or activity with a strong sense of self.
In peak performance and flow, the person participates in a transaction. There is a clear activity or action and an object or a person at the other end of it. In contrast, peak experience tends to be perceptual, receptive, and even passive, not needing to involve behavior at all.
It is the structure of the flow activity that largely determines the motivation, the goals and acts of completion, and the action and guidance. On the other hand, the structure of the activity doesn’t play a significant role in peak experience and peak performance.
Both peak experience and peak performance include a great magnitude, or high level, of joy and/or performance. Flow, on the other hand, is not defined by the intensity of either joy or performance but may range from moderate to high performance and/or joy.
Maslow described peak experience as nonmotivated or metamotivated. Privette found strong motivation and intention, at least concerning effort, important to peak performance. Csikszentmihalyi recognized that one of the main characteristics of flow is the presence of intrinsic motivation, or enjoyment inherent in the activity.
Both peak experience and flow were described as playful; however, respondents in peak-performance research denied playfulness during their greatest moments.
Overlap
By far the biggest similarity and overlap between these 3 experiences is the absorption, full attention, or clear focus. Considering some of their differences, we can conclude from this that the ability to invest one’s attention in the present moment is equally important for joy and enjoyment as it is for high functioning.
Whether it’s the ecstasy of peak experience, the power of peak performance, or the fun of flow, it cannot be reached in a state of distraction. We don’t need scientific research to figure out that these higher states cannot be reached while doomscrolling or trying to multitask.
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Another characteristic present in all three, although most notably in peak performance, is the awareness of human power and potential.
Lastly, in each of them, the person experiences integration and personal identity, that is, feeling more whole and complete as an individual after the experience. This may come through a sense of meaning, a sense of responsibility and power, or clarity through the structure of the activity.
An interesting question that arises out of the study of these 3 states
Are “the loss of self” and “strong sense of self” really different or opposite? Or are they two sides of the same coin?
After all, Csikszentmihalyi said that, although loss of self is one of the main characteristics of flow, a person comes out of flow with a stronger sense of self. Maslow hinted at the same thing regarding peak experience.
Could it then be that the strong sense of self that we hear about in peak performance is just a matter of the way those situations are reported, not a matter of the real difference between it and the loss of self that's described in the peak experience and flow?
I'm sure you can come up with more personally relevant questions, but this one remains for the new generations of psychologists, and maybe philosophers.
Conclusion
Very little research is being done on these 3 higher states nowadays. But the little new information we have on them shows that they are being experienced way less today than at the time they were being discovered and written about the most. And that shouldn’t surprise us.
By looking at the unique characteristics of these experiences as well as the activities that most often produce them, we learn an important thing. One’s life doesn’t become great or enjoyable because they are struck with a sudden moment of peak experience, peak performance, or flow. Rather, it is the people who are already leading high-quality lives filled with engaging and worthwhile activities that reach these states most often.
The average life of a modern human being living in the digital age isn’t fertile ground for either peak experience, flow, or peak performance.
A sedentary life full of distractions, where most of one's free time is spent in passive consumption of cheap dopamine hits—not exactly the way to reach higher levels of human experience.
That’s why, if we want to increase our chances of reaching them, for the sake of joy and pleasure as well as purpose and meaning, we must take the design of our lives into our own hands.
As Csikszentmihalyi said,
“One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment.”
Despite the widespread cynicism and catastrophizing nowadays, opportunities to lead a fulfilling, interesting, and fun life have never been greater. That is, for humans fortunate enough to live in countries not affected by war. However, opportunities are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of those opportunities. And the ultimate skill for that, Csikszentmihalyi believed, is having control over your attention. If Maslow lived enough to see all the digital entertainment available to us today, I have no doubt he would’ve agreed.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. In my free self-exploration course, Clarity Quest, Lesson 4 has journaling exercises that connect peak experience and flow with one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most underrated ideas on discovering your higher self. You should check it out.
P.P.S. If digital distractions are preventing you from pursuing your goals with full capacity, if you want to go from a doom-scroller to a regular flow-state enjoyer in approximately 30 days,…
I created Attention Mastery for you.