- Emotion regulation: Engaging deeply in an enjoyable activity boosts your mood and generates positive emotions, which in turn strengthens your ability to manage stress and navigate difficult emotions. It helps maintain emotional balance, which is beneficial when making investment and spending decisions. Being calm means you’re less likely to react impulsively with your money, leading to fewer costly mistakes. This emotional steadiness leads to thoughtful financial choices.
- Fulfillment and happiness: Flow can bring enjoyment to what you’re doing, making the activity rewarding. Csikszentmihalyi’s research indicates that flow can contribute to increased happiness and overall life contentment. Budgeting to have more of these moments can lead to lasting life satisfaction.
How money can make you happy
You’ve likely heard that money is a tool. While that’s true, using money as a tool for happiness can be challenging. We attach so many emotions and meanings to money that it can be hard to separate them. However, that shouldn’t deter us from using money to mindfully invest in engaging, joyful activities and experiences that create moments of flow.
How to use flow for a better relationship with money
A musician I know named Greg says he’s always been grounded by music. He was born deaf, and a successful surgery at the age of two unlocked sound for him. He has embraced music ever since. By his early 20s, Greg had learned to sing, write music and play the guitar. He performed at local gigs and on international stages. Yet, as he became more and more successful, accomplishing the stardom he always thought would make him happy, he felt drained by his music label’s relentless push for commercial hits, which diminished his drive for creating artful and meaningful music.
Greg went to Hawaii for a year-long reprieve and rediscovered flow in music. He looked back at his “best” performances, where he felt deep flow states, and recognized that it didn’t happen at sold-out shows. Instead of pursuing commercial success, he focused on making music at private workshops, writing songs for people, and performing at wellness and yoga festivals.
Now, more than 20 years later, Greg’s life is filled with flow moments that involve his music. In Hawaii, he built a life with meaning and purpose. It’s no longer about chasing success, money and big hits.
His new life comes with challenges, of course, especially when it comes to finances. And when I asked Greg if he would change anything, he responded with a big smile: “Would I like more money? Sure, but I wouldn’t change a thing. My [happiness] bank account is through the roof. I have a great life.”
How to invest in self-care and flow states
The takeaways from Greg’s example and Csikszentmihalyi’s research are to integrate more flow states into our lives (and ultimately our finances) by doing the following steps:
- Write out the activities you find flow in. What are you doing when you feel in the zone? What captures your full attention? List the activities and think about how to prioritize them in your life.
- Budget for flow moments. Dedicate money to these activities you truly love. Think of it as investing in your well-being. Cut out activities you’re doing just because you think you should be doing them.
- Be smart with your self-care choices. Balance flow with your need for financial security—they’re not mutually exclusive. Don’t risk essential expenses for flow states. However, you can still evaluate your expenses (housing, transportation, food, etc.) to discover ways to decrease those costs.
- Don’t do it alone. Sharing your flow experiences with others can deepen them. Can you join or create a group aligned with your interests?
- Reflect and adjust. Just like you do with your annual budget or investing portfolio, regularly check in on your flows. Reassess how your spending affects your ability to achieve flow. Be flexible and reasonable, and adjust as needed.
Why should you care about flow? If you care about your money, you will
When reflecting on our lives, we hope that when our time on this Earth is over, we can say, “I did it. I lived a good life.” Of course, a “good life” doesn’t mean it was easy—life is always full of challenges, obstacles and setbacks. But scientific research shows that the more we invest in our well-being, the more resilience we have during challenging times. Flow states offer us emotional regulation and life satisfaction.
By intentionally spending time and money on areas in our life that bring flow and happiness, perhaps we can experience not just how money makes the world go around, but also how we can use it to sing and dance a little more.
Shaun Maslyk, CFP
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