Flow Psychology
This is for finding flow, so you can grow; here's how to get in that state, that special place, where we create.
What is Flow?
Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes Flow as a state of complete immersion in an activity.
In a flow state you will feel complete concentration on your task while simultaneously holding in mind your goals and the rewards you will receive for reaching them, your task will provide clear and immediate feedback, you will lose your sense of usual time, working with ease and almost effortlessly as you balance challenges carefully with your skills. Not enough challenge means you’ll be bored. Not enough skills to meet a challenge means you will face anxiety.
The middle ground is where we find flow.
Links to Learn More:
https://thefundamentalflow.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi
https://positivepsychology.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/
https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/faculty-profile/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-phd
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/flow-theory
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/flow
https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-flow/
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfimprovement/comments/r78p2c/im_a_psychologist_specialized_in_flow_states_the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
https://www.quora.com/How-accurate-is-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyis-theory-of-Flow
Ready to take a deeper dive into Flow Theory? Read the following excerpts from the book Flow:
INTRODUCTION TO FLOW THEORY
It seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness live a happier life.
It is obviously important to understand how consciousness works:
It is the biological results of processes that exist because of the incredibly complex architecture of our nervous system which is built-up according to instructions contained in the protein molecules of our chromosomes. Consciousness is not entirely controlled by its biological programming; in many respects it is self-directed. Consciousness has developed the ability to override its genetic instructions and to set its own independent course of action.
The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. Sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas all establish priorities among all the diverse information that flows through our senses. Without consciousness we would have to react in a reflexive instinctive way.
With consciousness we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us and respond accordingly. We can also invent information that did not exist before. We can daydream, make up lies, write poems, and even build scientific theories.
A person can make himself happy or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening, just by changing the contents of consciousness. Hopeless situations can be transformed into challenges to be overcome. You must persevere despite obstacles and setbacks.
To develop this trait, one must find ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts.
A specialist cannot afford the time or the mental energy to do anything other than fine-tuning his skill at manipulating inner experiences. Consciousness is phenomenological in that it deals directly with the events or phenomena as we experience and interpret them rather than focusing on the anatomical structures, neuro-chemical processes, or unconscious purposes that make these events possible.
CONSCIOUSNESS & IT'S LIMITATIONS
What does it mean to be conscious?
It simply means that certain specific conscious events (sensations, feelings, thoughts, intentions) are occurring, and that we are able to direct their course.
When we are dreaming, some of the same events are present, yet we are not conscious because we cannot control them. In dreams we are locked into a single scenario we cannot change at will. Events that constitute consciousness -the things we see, feel, think, and desire- are information that we can manipulate and use; we might think of consciousness as intentionally ordered information.
For us outside events do not exist unless we are aware of them. Consciousness corresponds to subjectively experienced reality. Everything we feel, smell, hear, or remember is potentially a candidate for entering consciousness, but the experiences that actually do become a part of consciousness are much fewer than those left out. While consciousness is a mirror that reflects what our senses tell us about what happens, it reflects those changes selectively, actively shaping events, imposing on them a reality of its own.
The reflection consciousness provides is what we call our life: The sum of all we have heard, seen, felt, hoped, and suffered from birth to death. Although we believe that there are things outside of consciousness, we have direct evidence only of those that find a place in it.
Intentions are the force that keeps information in consciousness ordered.
Intentions arise in consciousness whenever a person is a aware of desiring something or wanting to accomplish something. Intentions are also bits of information, shaped either by biological needs or by internalized social goals. Intentions act as magnetic fields moving attention toward some objects and away from others, keeping our mind focused on some stimuli in preference to others. Intention doesn't say why a person wants to do a certain thing but simply states that he does.
Intentions to make an ideological statement might override genetic instructions resulting in voluntary death or self-mutilation. The intentions we either inherit or acquire are organized in hierarchies of goals, which specify the order of precedence among them.
Individuals who depart from the norms -heroes, Saints, sages, artists, and poets, as well as mad men and criminals- look for different things in life than most others do. The existence of people like these shows that consciousness can be ordered in terms of different goals and intentions. Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality.
There are limits of consciousness.
Indefinite consciousness in short, is Godlike. In the space of a lifetime we could go through 3 million, or even through an infinite number of, lives. The nervous system has definite limits on how much information that it can process it any given time. There are just so many events that can appear in consciousness before they begin to crowd each other out. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot because these activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.
At this point in our scientific knowledge it seems we can manage at most seven bits of information -Different sounds, visual stimuli, or nuances of emotion and thought- at any one time. The shortest time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second. Using these figures, one concludes that it is possible to process at most 126 bits of information every second, or about 7560 every minute, or almost a half million every hour. Over a lifetime of 70 years, 16 hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. Out of this total everything in our life must come: every thought, memory, feeling, or action.
To understand what another person is saying we must process 40 bits of information every second. To understand with three people are saying simultaneously is theoretically possible, only by managing to keep out of consciousness every other thought or sensation. We could not, be aware of expressions, or about why they are saying what they are saying, or even what they're wearing.
The nervous system has become adaptive at chunking bits of information so that processing capacity is constantly expanded. Simple functions grow to be automated, leaving the mind free to deal with more data. We also learned how to compress and streamline information through symbolic means: language, math, abstract concepts, and stylized narratives. Parables try to encode the hard won experience of many individuals over unknown eons of time. Consciousness, the optimists argue, is infinitely expandable, and there is no need to take into account its limitations.
The ability to compress stimuli does not help as much as one might expect. The requirements of life still dictates that we spend about 8% of waking time eating and almost the same amount of time taking care of personal needs such as washing, dressing, shaving, going to the bathroom, and more. These two activities alone take up 15% of consciousness, and while engaging them we cannot do much else that requires serious attention or concentration. Even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In their precious leisure time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible. Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching television. Reading, talking, and gazing out the window all involve processing very little new information, and require little concentration. An individual can experience only so much.
Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life.
ATTENTION AS PSYCHIC ENERGY
Information enters consciousness because we intend to focus attention on it or as a result of attentional habits based on biological or social instructions.
An image enters the focus of consciousness and we become aware of it. In the mind the visual information gets related to information about other memories to determine into which category the present instance fits. As soon as the event is matched to an already known classes of events, it is identified. Now it must be evaluated: is this something to worry about? And we must decide on an appropriate course of action. All these complex mental operations must be completed in a few seconds, sometimes in a second. It seems to be a lightening fast reaction, but it does take place in real-time. It does not happen automatically: there is a distinct process called attention.
Attention selects the relevant bits of information from the potential millions of bits available. It takes attention to retrieve the appropriate references for memory, to evaluate the event, and then to choose the right thing to do.
Attention cannot step beyond the limits described.
It cannot notice or hold in focus more information than can be processed simultaneously. Retrieving information from memory, comparing information, evaluating, deciding - all make demands on the mind's limited processing capacity.
Some people learn to use this resource efficiently, while others waste it.
The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distraction, to concentrate for as long is takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. The person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.
Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy, or by diffusing in random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Names we use to described personality traits, refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention. Attention can be invested in many ways that can make life rich or miserable.
Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events, such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions, happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated.
We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. It is an energy under our control, to do with as we please. Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.
ENTER THE SELF & PSYCHIC DISORDER
Where is the I, the entity that decides what to do with the psychic energy generated by the nervous system?
Where does the master of the soul reside? As we consider these question for even a short while, we realize that the I, the self, is also one of the contents of consciousness. My own self exists solely in my own consciousness. In that of others who know me there will be versions of it, most of them probably unrecognizable likenesses of the original myself as I see me.
The self contains everything else that has passed through consciousness: all the memories, actions, desires, pleasures, and pains are included in it.
The self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up over the years. At any given time we are usually aware of only a small part of the self, as when we become conscious of how we look, or of what impressions we are making, or what we would like to do if we could. The self is in many ways the most important part of consciousness because it symbolically represents all of consciousness's other contents, as well as the pattern of their interrelations.
If attention, or psychic energy is directed by the self, and if the self is the sum of all the content of consciousness and the structure of its goals, and if the contents of consciousness and the goals are the results of different ways of investing attention, then we have a system that is going round and round, with no clear causes or effects. At one point we are saying that the self directs attention, at another, that attention determines the self.
Both statements are true: consciousness is not a strictly linear system, but one in which circular causality obtains. Attention shapes the self, and the self in turn shapes attention.
Most of us start with no idea of what to do with life, with a relatively uninformed self, and no identity of our own. We start with no clearly differentiated goals, wanting things only because of genetic programs or social environmental influences. We thought only vaguely of the good life imagined to be destined to arrive in the coming future.
Then an exploration, an adventure, an excursion of some kind shocks our senses, and leaves us in disbelief of our own eyes, ears, or feelings.
A mysterious, beautifully dangerous environment can be so intriguing and enchanting that it calls for closer examination and greater familiarity. An accidental event can impose itself on consciousness. It is not planned, and it is not the results of the self or its goals having directed attention toward it.
Once we become aware of what goes on in the magical environment, we like it, and the experience resonates with previously enjoyed experiences, with feelings about the nature of life and beauty, and with priorities about what is important established over the years.
We feel the experience is good, something worth seeking out again. We build the accidental event into a structure of goals. From then on, goals direct attention to focus more and more closely on the intriguing surroundings, thereby closing the circle of causality.
First attention helps to shape the self, when exposed to an accidental event, and through the intentional search for knowledge, the self then begins to shape attention. Almost every attentional structure is shaped in a similar way.
Experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy - the structure of attention.
This, in turn, is related to goals and intentions. These processes are connected to each other by the self, the dynamic mental representation we have of the entire system of our goals.
These are the pieces that must be maneuvered if we wish to improve things.
We need to consider what follows whenever attention brings a new bit of information into awareness. Then we will be ready to get a thorough sense of how experience can be controlled and changed for the better.
One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder - information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out.
We give this condition many names: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. These varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.
When the internal order of the self is disrupted, the basic patter is always the same: some information that conflicts with an individual's goals appears in consciousness. Depending on how central that goal is to the self and on how severe the there to it is, some amount of attention will have to be mobilized to eliminate the danger, leaving less attention free to deal with other matters.
Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals, we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.
Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten or support our goals? Is it neutral? A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals and free up psychic energy.
ORDER IN CONSCIOUSNESS: FLOW
The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience.
When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. There is no need to worry, no reason to question one's adequacy. But whenever one does stop to think about oneself, the evidence is encouraging: you are doing all right. The feedback strengthens the self, and more attention is freed to deal with the outer and inner environment.
Performing the same task over and over, most people would grow tired of working. But when you approach the task as a challenge, with personal records to be broken, training yourself to better your times, working on a private routine for how to use your tools and make your moves, it is enough to know that you can do it because when you are working at top performance, the experience is so enthralling that it is almost painful to slow down. Never even let others know you are ahead, let your success pass unnoticed by others. You can reach the limits beyond which you can improve your performance no further, and then seek a more complex job, activity, or task, and confront it with the same enthusiasm.
While immersed in your job, every piece of information fits: even when temporarily frustrated, you know what causes the frustration, and believe that obstacle can be overcome.
Optimal experiences are situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against.
The Flow Experience is the opposite of psychic entropy; negentropy. Those who attain it develop a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy has been successfully invested in goals they themselves have chosen to pursue.
When a person is able to organize consciousness so as to experience flow more often, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve, because even the usually boring routines become purposeful and enjoyable. In flow we are in control of our psychic energy, and everything we do adds order to consciousness.
It's exhilarating to come closer to self discipline. You look back in awe at the self, at what you've done, and it will blow your mind.
The battle is not really against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle FOR the self; it is a struggle for establishing control over attention. The struggle does not necessarily have to be physical. Anyone who has experienced flow knows that the deep enjoyment it provides requires an equal degree of disciplined concentration.
COMPLEXITY & GROWTH
Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex.
The self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies movement toward uniqueness, separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self.
A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.
Overcoming a challenge leaves a person feeling more capable and skilled; they become more unique, less predictable, and possessed of rarer skills.
Complexity also involves a second dimension - the integrations of autonomous parts. Complex things are made of many components, each performing a different function. Complex things also demonstrate a high sensitivity because each component is in touch with the others. Without integration, a differentiated system would be a confusing mess.
Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all the senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony.
A self only differentiated and not integrated may attain great accomplishments, but risks being mired in self centered egotism.
A person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be connected and secure, but risks a lack of autonomous individuality.
Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.
The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow.
Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motive, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. Once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. Flow is important because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to others.
There is no easy shortcut to flow. It is possible, if one understands how it works, to transform life to create more harmony in it and to liberate the psychic energy that otherwise would be wasted in boredom or worry.
ENJOYMENT & THE QUALITY OF LIFE
There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. We can try to make external conditions match our goals, or we can change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.
Neither of these strategies is effective when used alone. Changing external conditions might seem to work at first but if a person is not in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties.
Controlling external conditions does not necessarily improve existence. Even though we recognize that material success may not bring happiness, we engage in an endless struggle to reach external goals, expecting that they will improve life. Wealth, status, and power have become symbols of happiness. We assume that if only we could acquire some of those same symbols, we would be much happier.
If we do actually succeed, we believe for a time that life as a whole has improved. They can be genuine blessings, but only if they help to make us feel better. Symbols can be deceptive; they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent.
The reality is that that quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is how we feel about ourselves and what happens to us. To improve life, one must improve the quality of experience.
Given these observations, instead of worrying about how to make a million dollars or how to win friends and influence people, it seems more beneficial to find out how everyday life can be made more harmonious and more satisfying, and thus achieve by a direct route what cannot be reached through the pursuit of symbolic goals.
PLEASURE & ENJOYMENT
When considering the kind of experience that makes life better, most people first think that happiness consists in experiencing pleasure: good food, good sex, all the comforts that money can buy. We imagine the satisfaction of traveling to exotic places or being surrounded by interesting company and expensive gadgets. If we cannot afford those goals that slick commercials and colorful ads keep reminding us to pursue, then we are happy to settle for a quiet evening in front of the television set with a glass of booze close by.
Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in the consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The taste of food when we are hungry is pleasant because it reduces a physiological imbalance. Resting in the evening while passively absorbing information from the media, with alcohol or drugs to dull the mind overexcited by the demands of work, is pleasantly relaxing.
Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself does not bring happiness. Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostatic experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur. But they do not produce psychological growth. They do not add complexity to the self. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.
Other experiences that overlap with pleasurable ones that deserve another name: enjoyment. Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior execrations or satisfied some need or desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, and perhaps before unimagined.
Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty and accomplishment. None of these experiences may be particularly pleasurable at the time they are taking place, but afterward we think back on them and think, that was really fun and wish they would happen again. After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect we have become more complex as a result of it.
We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investment of attention. A person can feel pleasure without any effort, if the appropriate neurons are stimulated, or as a result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to ENJOY unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.
It is for this reason that pleasure is so evanescent, and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasurable experiences.
Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging.
The rapt concentration on a child's face as she learns each new skills is a good indication of what enjoyment is about. Each instance of enjoyable learning adds to the complexity of the developing self. This natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time. Perhaps because learning becomes an external imposition when schooling start, it becomes all to easy to settle down within the narrow boundaries of the self developed in adolescence. But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good change of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enjoying life, and pleasure become the only source of positive experience.
If you're starving, take the money, but if you're not, why make a deal that's no fun?
Without enjoyment, life can be endured, but only precariously depending on luck and the cooperation of the external environment. To gain personal control over the quality of experience, one needs to learn how build enjoyment into what happens day in and day out.
The Elements of Enjoyment
In sum, optimal experience, and the psychological conditions that make it possible, seem to be the same the world over. The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components.
1. The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks when there is a chance of completing them.
2. We must be able concentrate on the task at hand.
3. The concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.
4. One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removed from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
5. Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.
6. Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the send of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
7. The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass in minutes, and minutes can stretch to seem like hours.
8. The combination of theses elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it again by repeating the activity.
With this knowledge, it is possible to achieve control of consciousness and turn even the most humdrum moments of life into events that help the self grow.
CHALLENGING ACTIVITIES THAT REQUIRE SKILL
Sometimes a person can experience extreme joy, a feeling of ecstasy for no apparent good reason: a bar of haunting music may trigger it, or a wonderful view, or even less, just a spontaneous sense of well being.
By far the overwhelming proportion of optimal experiences occur within sequences of activities that are goal directed and bounded by rules - activities that require the investment of psychic energy, and that could not be done without the appropriate skills.
An activity need not be active in the physical sense, and the skill necessary to engage in it need not be a physical skill. One of the most frequently mentioned enjoyable activities the world over is reading. Reading is an activity because it requires the concentration of attention and has a goal, and to do it one must know the rules of written language. The skills involved in reading include not only literacy but the ability to translate words into images, to empathize with fictional characters, and so on.
In this broadest sense, any capacity to manipulate symbolic information is a skill, such as the skill of the mathematician to shape quantitative relationships or the musician in shaping musical notes.
Another universally enjoyable activity is being with other people.
Any activity contains a bundle of opportunities for action, or challenges, that require appropriate skills to realize. For those who don't have the right skills, the activity is not challenging it is simply meaningless.
One simple way to find challenges is to enter a competitive situation. Competition is a quick way of developing complexity. Our antagonist is our helper. Challenges of competition can be stimulating and enjoyable, but when beating the opponent takes precedence in the mind over performing as well as possible, enjoyment tends to disappear.
Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one's skills; when it becomes and end to itself, it ceases to be fun.
Challenges are not confined to physical activities and competition.
Activities that provide enjoyment are often those that have been designed for this very purpose. Games, sports, and artistic and literary forms were developed over time for the express purpose of enriching life with enjoyable experiences. It would be a mistake to assume that only art and leisure can provide optimal experiences. In a healthy culture, productive work and the necessary routines of everyday life are also satisfying. Even routine details can be transformed into personally meaningful games that provide optimal experience.
One can take control of a boring situation and and turn it into a mildly enjoyable one. Create your own private activity that provides just enough challenge to prevent absolute boredom while still remaining so automated that it leaves enough attention free that anything novel or interesting can stuck enter awareness.
Everybody develops routines to fill in the boring gaps of the day, or to bring experience back to baseline when anxiety threatens. Some engage in esoteric private rituals for the same purpose of imposing order on consciousness through the performance of patterned actions.
These are the micro flow activities that help us negotiate the doldrums of the day. How enjoyable an activity is depends ultimately on its complexity.
Small automatic games woven into everyday life do help to reduce boredom, but they add little the positive quality of experience. For that, one needs to face more demanding challenges, and use higher level skills.
In activities, enjoyment comes at a specific point: whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities.
An activity is not enjoyable when these are mismatched. The less skilled player will feel anxious, and the better player will feel bored.
A challenge too simple for one's skills will be boring, while a challenge too complex will be frustrating.
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.
With the fine balancing of challenge and skills, games and activities will yield the maximum amount of enjoyment.
THE MERGING OF ACTION & AWARENESS
When all a person's relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, attention is completely absorbed by the activity. There is no excess psychic energy left over to process any information but what the activity offers. All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli.
One of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience is that people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing. Concentration is very complete. Your mind isn't wandering. You aren't thinking of anything else. You are totally involved in what you are doing. You energy is flowing very smoothly. You feel relaxed, comfortable, and energetic. You are so involved that you aren't thinking of yourself as separate from what you are doing. You lose touch with the rest of the world and become totally absorbed in what you're doing. The concentration is like breathing, you never think of it.
We call this optimal experience flow. The short and simple word describes well the sense of seemingly effortless movement. The mystique is that you reach the peak, glad it's over but really wishing it would go on forever. The only justification for doing what you do, is just what you do. You don't conquer anything except things in yourself.
The purpose of flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing. There is no possible reason for the action except the action itself that serves as a self communication.
Although the flow experience often appears to be effortless, it is far from being so. It often requires strenuous physical exertion, or highly disciplined mental activity. It does not happen without the application of skilled performance. Any lapse in concentration will erase it. While it lasts, consciousness works smoothly, action follows action seamlessly. In normal life, we keep interrupting what we do with doubts and questions. Why am I doing this? Should I perhaps be doing something else? Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. In flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.
CLEAR GOALS & FEEDBACK
It is possible to achieve complete involvement in a flow experience because goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate. You always know what you have to do, and each time you act you know whether you have done well or not.
Goals are obvious, and with each move you can calculate whether you have come closer to your objective. Keep a very simple goal in mind, and every second, hour by hour, you will receive information that you are or are not meeting that basic goal.
If you choose a trivial goal, success in it does not provide enjoyment.
Certain activities require a very long time to accomplish, yet the components of the goals and feedback are still extremely important to them.
The goals of an activity are not always so clear as a sport or game, and the feedback can be far more ambiguous than a simple, I'm not dead or dying. A composer may know that he wishes to write, but other than that the goals are pretty vague. And how does he know if the notes captured are the right or wrong ones? The same is true for most open ended, artistic, and creative activities. These are exceptions that prove the rule: unless a person learns to set goals and to recognize and gauge feedback in such activities, they too will fail to provide lasting enjoyment.
In some creative activities, where goals are not clearly set in advance, a person must develop a strong personal sense of what they intend to do. The artist might not have a visual image of what the finished painting should look like, but when the picture has progressed to a certain point, they should know whether this is what they wanted to create or not. They must have internalized criteria for good or bad so after each performance and addition they can say this does or does not work. Without such internal guidelines, it is impossible to experience flow.
Sometimes the goals and rules governing an activity are invented, or negotiated on the spot. The goal of such sessions emerges by trial and error, and is rarely made explicit; often it remains below the participants level of awareness. Yet it is clear that these activities develop their own rules and that those who take part have a clear idea of what constitutes a successful move, and of who is doing well.
What constitutes feedback varies considerably in different activities. Some people are indifferent to things that others cannot get enough of. Bits of information are used to monitor progress. The kind of feedback we work toward is in and of itself often unimportant. What makes the information valuable is the symbolic message it contains: that you have succeeded in your goal. Such knowledge creates order in consciousness, and strengthens the structure of the self.
Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable, provided it is logically related to a goal in which one has invested psychic energy. Each of us is temperamentally sensitive to a certain range of information that we learn to value more than most other people do, and it is likely that we will consider feedback involving that information to be more relevant than others might.
CONCENTRATION ON THE TASK AT HAND
One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life. This feature of flow is an important by product of the fact that enjoyable activities require a complete focusing of attention on the task at hand - thus leaving no room in the mind for irrelevant information.
In normal everyday existence, we are the prey of thoughts and worries intruding unwanted in consciousness. Most jobs, and home life in general, lack the pressing demands of flow experience. Concentration is rarely so intense that preoccupations and anxieties can be automatically ruled out. Consequently the ordinary state of mind involves unexpected and frequent episodes of entropy interfering with the smooth run of psychic energy. This is one reason why flow improves the quality of experience: the clearly structured demands of the activity impose order, and exclude the interference of disorder in consciousness.
It is not only the temporal focus that counts. What is even more significant is that only a very select range of information can be allowed into awareness. Therefore all the troubling thoughts that ordinarily keep passing through the mind are temporarily kept in abeyance. You're not aware of other problematic life situations. You have more confidence in yourself than any other time. Your mind has to be absolutely clear. Problems have to be erased from consciousness as if they didn't exist.
The concentration of the flow experience together with clear goals and immediate feedback provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy.
THE PARADOX OF CONTROL
Enjoyment often occurs in games, sports, and other leisure activities that are distinct from ordinary life, where any number of bad things can happen.
The flow experience is typically described as involving a sense of control or, more precisely, as lacking the sense of worry about losing control that is typical in many situations of normal life. These respondents are actually describing is the possibility, rather than the actuality, of control. At least in principle, in the world of flow, perfection is attainable.
This sense of control is also reported in enjoyable activities that involve serious risks, activities that to an outsider would seem to be much more potentially dangerous than the affairs of normal life. Enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, but from their ability to minimize it. So rather than a pathological thrill that comes from courting disaster, the positive emotion they enjoy is the perfectly healthy feeling of being able to control potentially dangerous forces.
The important thing to realize here is that activities that produce flow experiences are so constructed as to allow the practitioner to develop sufficient skills to reduce the margin of error to as close to zero as possible.
Recognize two sets of dangers: objective and subjective ones. The first kind are the unpredictable physical events that might confront a person. One can prepare oneself against these threats, but they can never be completely foreseen. Subjective dangers are those that arise from the lack of skill including the inability to estimate correctly the difficulty in relation to one's ability.
The whole point is to avoid objective dangers as much as possible, and to eliminate subjective dangers entirely by rigorous discipline and sound preparation.
What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control. One type of activity seems to constitute an exception. Games of chance are enjoyable, yet by definition they are based on random outcomes presumably not affected by personal skills.
The objective conditions, however, happen to be deceptive, for it is actually the case that gamblers who enjoy games of hazard are subjectively convinced that their skills do play a major role in the outcome. In fact, they tend to stress the issue of control even more than practitioners of activities where skills obviously allow greater control. Poker players are convinced it is their ability, and not chance, that makes them win; if they lose they are much more inclined to credit bad luck, but even in defeat they are willing to look for a personal lapse to explain the outcome. Roulette players develop elaborate systems to predict the turn of the wheel. In general, players of games of chance often believe that they have the gift of seeing into the future, at least within the restricted set of goals and rules that defines their game. And this most ancient feeling of control whose precursors include the rituals of divination so prevalent in every culture is one of the greatest attractions the experience of gambling offers. This sense of being in a world where entropy is suspended explains in part why flow-producing activities can become so addictive. The exhilaration gamblers feel in figuring out random chance is even more notorious.
Almost any enjoyable activity can become addictive, in the sense that instead of being a conscious choice, it becomes a necessity that interferes with other activities.
When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness. Thus enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.
THE LOSS OF SELF CONSCIOUSNESS
When an activity is thoroughly engrossing, there is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli. One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self.
It's a Zen feeling, like meditation or concentration. One thing you're after is the one-pointedness of mind. You can get your ego mixed up in all sorts of ways and it isn't necessarily enlightening. But when things become automatic, it's like an egoless thing, in a way. Somehow the right thing is done without you ever thinking about it or doing anything at all. It just happens. And yet you're more concentrated.
The loss of the sense of a self separate from the world around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment.
Hundreds of times every day we are reminded of the vulnerability of our self. And every time this happens psychic energy is lost trying to restore order to consciousness. But in flow there is no room for self-scrutiny. Because enjoyable activities have clear goals, stable rules, and challenges well matched to skills, there is little opportunity for the self to be threatened.
When people first learn about the flow experience they sometimes assume that lack of self-consciousness has something to do with a passive obliteration of the self, a going with the flow Southern California-style. But in fact the optimal experience involves a very active role for the self.
So loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self. What slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of self, the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are. And being able to forget temporarily who we are seems to be very enjoyable. When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are. Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forward. This feeling is not just a fancy of the imagination, but is based on a concrete experience of close interaction with some Other, an interaction that produces a rare sense of unity with these usually foreign entities.
One could treat these testimonials as poetic metaphors and leave them at that. But it is important to realize that they refer to experiences that are just as real as being hungry, or as concrete as bumping into a wall. There is nothing mysterious or mystical about them. When a person invests all her psychic energy into an interaction, they in effect becomes part of a system of action greater than what the individual self had been before. This system takes its form from the rules of the activity; its energy comes from the person's attention. But it is a real system subjectively as real as being part of a family, a corporation, or a team, and the self that is part of it expands its boundaries and becomes more complex than what it had been.
This growth of the self occurs only if the interaction is an enjoyable one, that is, if it offers nontrivial opportunities for action and requires a constant perfection of skills. It is also possible to lose oneself in systems of action that demand nothing but faith and allegiance. Fundamentalist religions, mass movements, and extremist political parties also offer opportunities for self-transcendence that millions are eager to accept. They also provide a welcome extension of the boundaries of the self, a feeling that one is involved in something great and powerful. The true believer also becomes part of the system in concrete terms, because his psychic energy will be focused and shaped by the goals and rules of his belief. But the true believer is not really interacting with the belief system; he usually lets his psychic energy be absorbed by it. From this submission nothing new can come; consciousness may attain a welcome order, but it will be an order imposed rather than achieved. At best the self of the true believer resembles a crystal: strong and beautifully symmetrical, but very slow to grow.
There is one very important and at first apparently paradoxical relationship between losing the sense of self in a flow experience and having it emerge stronger afterward. It almost seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept. Why this should be so is fairly clear. In flow a person is challenged to do their best, and must constantly improve their skills.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF TIME
One of the most common descriptions of optimal experience is that time no longer seems to pass the way it ordinarily does. The objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity. Often hours seem to pass by in minutes; in general, most people report that time seems to pass much faster. But occasionally the reverse occurs: Two things happen; one is that it seems to pass really fast in one sense, and after it's passed, it seems to have passed really fast.
The safest generalization to make about this phenomenon is to say that during the flow experience the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.
Practitioners of other activities where time is of the essence, for instance, runners and racers, in order to pace themselves precisely in a competition, have to be very sensitive to the passage of seconds and minutes. In such cases the ability to keep track of time becomes one of the skills necessary to do well in the activity, and thus it contributes to, rather than detracts from, the enjoyment of the experience. But most flow activities do not depend on clock time; like baseball, they have their own pace, their own sequences of events marking transitions from one state to another without regard to equal intervals of duration. It is not clear whether this dimension of flow is just an epiphenomenon by-product of the intense concentration required for the activity at hand or whether it is something that contributes in its own right to the positive quality of the experience. Although it seems likely that losing track of the clock is not one of the major elements of enjoyment, freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.
THE AUTOTELIC EXPERIENCE
The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding.
Autotelic derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.
What transpires in the two situations is ostensibly identical; what differs is that when the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences. Most things we do are neither purely autotelic nor purely exotelic (as we shall call activities done for external reasons only), but are a combination of the two. Surgeons usually enter into their long period of training because of exotelic expectations: to help people, to make money, to achieve prestige. If they are lucky, after a while they begin to enjoy their work, and then surgery becomes to a large extent also autotelic. Some things we are initially forced to do against our will turn out in the course of time to be intrinsically rewarding.
Many children never reach the point of recognizing the possibilities of the activity into which they are forced, and end up disliking it forever. How many children have come to hate classical music because their parents forced them to practice an instrument? Often children and adults need external incentives to take the first steps in an activity that requires a difficult restructuring of attention.
Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding. An autotelic experience is very different from the feelings we typically have in the course of life. So much of what we ordinarily do has no value in itself, and we do it only because we have to do it, or because we expect some future benefit from it. Many people feel that the time they spend at work is essentially wasted, they are alienated from it, and the psychic energy invested in the job does nothing to strengthen their self. For quite a few people free time is also wasted. Leisure provides a relaxing respite from work, but it generally consists of passively absorbing information, without using any skills or exploring new opportunities for action. As a result life passes in a sequence of boring and anxious experiences over which a person has little control. The autotelic experience, or flow, lifts the course of life to a different level.
Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control, and psychic energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of being lost in the service of external goals. When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain. But, as we have already seen in the section dealing with the sense of control, one must be aware of the potentially addictive power of flow. We should reconcile ourselves to the fact that nothing in the world is entirely positive; every power can be misused. Love may lead to cruelty, science can create destruction, technology unchecked produces pollution.
Optimal experience is a form of energy, and energy can be used either to help or to destroy. Fire warms or burns; atomic energy can generate electricity or it can obliterate the world. Energy is power, but power is only a means. The goals to which it is applied can make life either richer or more painful. The Marquis de Sade perfected the infliction of pain into a form of pleasure, and in fact, cruelty is a universal source of enjoyment for people who have not developed more sophisticated skills. Even in societies that are called civilized, because they try to make life enjoyable without interfering with anyone's well-being, people are attracted to violence.
Much of what we label juvenile delinquency car theft, vandalism, rowdy behavior in general is motivated by the same need to have flow experiences not available in ordinary life. As long as a significant segment of society has few opportunities to encounter meaningful challenges, and few chances to develop the skills necessary to benefit from them, we must expect that violence and crime will attract those who cannot find their way to more complex autotelic experiences.
The flow experience, like everything else, is not good in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self. But whether the consequence of any particular instance of flow is good in a larger sense needs to be discussed and evaluated in terms of more inclusive social criteria. The same is true, however, of all human activities, whether science, religion, or politics. A particular religious belief may benefit a person or a group, but repress many others.
It is an illusion to believe that any solution is beneficial for all people and all times; no human achievement can be taken as the final word. Jefferson's uncomfortable dictum - Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty - applies outside the fields of politics as well; it means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, lest habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities. It would be senseless, however, to ignore a source of energy because it can be misused.
To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to distinguish the useful and the harmful forms of flow, and then making the most of the former while placing limits on the latter. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
-End of excerpts from Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
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