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ESM was invented by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, an American psychologist and author of Finding flow: the psychology of engagement with everyday life. He believes people are at their best when doing something that completely absorbs them. He calls this “Flow.”
Flow experiences can frequently be reasons to live. They’re usually things you are good at and/or things you love. They can be working with violets or cutting fingernails. In April, I wrote here on R2L about a woman who began to recover from her stroke when she realized she could still cook with her husband’s help. Cooking was the one positive thing she needed to start living again, after two years of vegetating.
What’s the message? Major depression and chronic schizophrenia are two of the deepest holes life can dig. But having a reason to live, a way to flow, lifted these women back to level ground. If it worked for them, it seems any of us could do it.
One other thing: reasons to live do us no good if we don’t give them energy. When you find your flow, I hope you spend as much time as you can there.
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It amazing that while sitting outside our building I encounter many people with issues who wish to discuss these issues carefully. For some reason the cosmos wants me to understand these issues as my own, and listen carefully to my responses.
Thank you for sharing these stories, David! I work in mental health as well, although on the government program/policy side of things and one of the best things to happen to mental health in the province of Ontario has been the use of a new standardized tool to help both clinician and client work toward the CLIENT’S expressed goals. Before, we used to have such a paternalistic way of viewing clients with mental illness and advocating for their “recovery” – only as clinicians and practitioners perceived it. Now, we have a tool that allows the clients themselves to tell us what elements in their life they are interested in improving: relationships, housing, vocational skills, activities of daily living, and the clinician works as a team-member with the client rather than trying to “enforce compliance” from him/her. It’s such a simple thing but a crucial shift in understanding what really matters to people who struggle with mental illness.
Thanks again for sharing these.
Thanks, David for your stories and the class you taught in spring. It was inspiring. On top of doing 200 push-ups, I’m now getting my writing published and training for a marathon.
Thanks much for these, David! It’s important to share stories of people recovering from mental illness by finding ways to live more satisfying lives. This gives hope and a creative perspective to many who might otherwise buy into the pharmaceutical/medical inadequate band-aid approach to ‘treatment’.
I want to express my appreciation to the writer just for bailing me out of this type of setting. After looking through the world wide web and getting views that were not beneficial, I assumed my entire life was well over. Existing without the presence of solutions to the difficulties you have solved all through your entire write-up is a crucial case, and ones that might have negatively damaged my entire career if I hadn’t come across your blog