Happy Place:

A memory, situation, or activity that makes you feel happy.

The mental state achieved when one wants to avoid the unpleasant or uncomfortable. Everyone’s happy place is different, and usually consists of the things that make them joyous.

Today, while following one of my favorite YouTuber’s exercise video, a certain phrase caught my attention. During a squat hold, he spoke about finding that happy place and holding that position for as long as one could .

After playing around with different squat positions, I found that perfect squat position. I knew that the muscles were burning. It was demanding but at the same time it did not over stretch me. At that point, my muscles were neither underworked nor overstretched. That was my happy place.

A good way to hold a stretch for long is to divert your mind into something else (a.k.a something interesting). Counting backward, being mindful of the breath etc works well during different times. Today, since that phrase, happy place, had caught my attention, I started thinking about an article that I read long back. The article spoke about the concept of FLOW or The FLOW State. (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience )

In positive psychology, a flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is 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. The term was coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975.

I am leaving a link to that article here.  It is a rather long one and in order to understand it better,  watch a Ted Talk here  by Csikszentmihalyi . 

The national bestseller book FLOW by Mihaly gives an in-depth analysis of this concept of being in the zone.

Regardless of what a person did, the work takes over a person and he reaches a state of flow depending on the the challenge level and the skill level. When we do what we like to do and we are neither under skilled nor over skilled to do that, that is when the flow happens.

This is the chart which shows the individual’s skill level vs the difficulty level of the job in hand. It also shows what a person feels during the various combinations of skill and challenge.

Finding that happy place, no matter what we are doing, takes us into a State Of Flow. That perfect combination of skill level and challenge is required for a child attending school and a person working in office. It also explains the issue of a one-size-fits-all curriculum in schools and a one-size-fits-all job description at work. 

The lack of this leaves a child in school and a person at work either bored or stressed out.

In their book, The Healing Power of the Breath, Richard P. Brown and Patricia L. Gerbarg talk about a pranayama (breathing) technique that has been shown to improve stress resilience is Coherent Breathing, which is essentially full yogic breathing with a focus on finding the number of breaths per minute (usually between 3.5 and 6) to optimize the effect on stress resilience. They  argue that when this “sweet spot” is found, the electrical rhythms of the heart, lungs, and brain become synchronized. They report that this breath rate can “induce up to a tenfold improvement in heart-rate variability,” a measure of stress resilience. Researchers have found that this sweet spot can open the capillaries to optimize blood flow, bringing more oxygen to the body.

In conclusion, It is important to find that happy place during work, while in school, during a stretch and during mindful breathing.

The fact that holding a squat led me to think of such an interesting topic made me realize that I had indeed hit that perfect happy place of  squats. 

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