Flow

The optimal state is when... attention is invested in realistic goals and when skills match the opportunities for action. 

The control of consciousness determines the quality of life.

The events that constitute consciousness are information that we can manipulate and use.

Intentions (drive, desire, need) order consciousness.

The mark of a person who has control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to concentrate as long as it takes to achieve a goal.

"She recharges her mind by standing still for fifteen minutes with eyes closed on the shore."

Focus attention intentionally.

Attention is psychic energy.

The order is disrupted by information which conflicts with goals (pain, fear, rage, anxiety).

The outside event appears in consciousness purely as information without positive or negative spin. The self interprets the raw information in the context of its own interests.

When the information that keeps coming into consciousness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. When one pauses to think about oneself the message is that you are doing allright and that creates positive feedback which strengthens the self.

Flow is when attention can be freely invested to achieve a persons goals because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat to the persons self.

The battle for the self, the struggle to establish control over attention.

We can improve the quality of life by two methods: 1 ) try to make external conditions meet our goals. 2) Change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.

The quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or what we own. It depends more on what we feel about us and our experience.

Pleasure helps to maintain order but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.

Enjoyment is to go beyond what we have been programmed to do and achieve something.

Everybody takes pleasure in eating but enjoyment is something the gourmet enjoys. Enjoyment happens because of unusual investment of attention.

A person can feel pleasure without effort, for example by using drugs but it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game or a conversation without attention being concentrated on the activity.

It is for this reason that pleasure is fleeting and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasureable experiences. 

Children are natural "learning machines" and their concentration while learning shows what enjoyment is all about. This natural connection between growth and learning tends to disappear with time, perhaps because of the external imposition of schooling. The excitement of mastering new skills gradually peters out. It becomes too easy to settle within the narrow boundaries of the self. If one ends up feeling that psychic energy is wasted without getting extrinsic awards, one may end up no longer enjoying life and pleasure becomes the only source of positive experience. 

On the other hand many go to great lengths to create enjoyment in whatever they do.

Without enjoyment life can be endured and can even be pleasant. But then it depends on luck and the external environment. To gain personal control over the quality of experience one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into whatever happens day in and day out.

The first surprise we encountered in our study was how similarly very different activities were described when they were going especially well. The feeling of the long-distance swimmer is the same as the chess-players. Another surprise was that enjoyment seems to be felt the same all the world over.

The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. 

1. The experience occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.

2. we  are able to concentrate on what we are doing

3 and 4. Concentration is possible because the task has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.

5. One acts with deep but effortless involvement which removes the worries of everyday life.

6. Enjoyable experiences allow people to experience control over their actions.

7. Concern for the self disappears but the sense of self appears stronger after the experience.

8. The sense of duration of time is altered.

The overwhelming proportion of optimal experience within sequence of activities that are goal-directed and bounded by rules.

It is not just physical activity.

Reading is an activity because it requires concentration and has a goal and to do it one must know the rules of written language. 

Another activity is being with other people. Socializing calls for skills. 

Any activity contains bundles of opportunities for action or challenges that require appropriate skills to realize. For those who do not have the right skills the activity is not challenging; it is meaningless. Setting up a chess board gets the juices of the chessplayer flowing but leaves those who do not play cold. 

Competition is enjoyable as a way to increase our skills; when it becomes an end in itself it ceases to be fun.

Challenges are necessary to create enjoyment even in situations where would we not expect it to be the case. For example, the passive enjoyment of looking at a painting is dependent on the challenges the work of art contains. 

Even routine details can be transformed into personally meaningful games that provide optimal experience.  Mowing the lawn or waiting in a dentists office can become enjoyable provided on restructures the activity by providing goals and rules and other elements of enjoyment. 

Everybody develops routines to fill in the boring gaps of the day or to ward off anxiety.

 Some doodle, others bite nails or smoke, smooth their hair or hum a tune. These rituals are to impose order in consciousness through patterned action. But how enjoyable an activity is depends on its complexity.

Enjoyment comes at a very specific point: Whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities. Playing tennis is not enjoyable if the opponents are mismatched. The less skilled player will feel anxious and the better player will feel bored. This applies to all activites: A piece of music which is too simple compared to one's listening skills will be boring and a piece of music that is too complex will be frustrating.

Enjoyment appears at the border of boredom and anxiety when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act. 

When all a person's relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of the situation, that person's attention is completely absorbed by the activity. All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli.

People stop being aware of themselves as separate from the activity. 

The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. Flow does not appear without the application of skilled performance. Any lapse in concentration will erase it.

One reason that flow is possible is that the goals are unusually clear and feedback immediate.

 A tennis player always knows what she has to do: Return the ball into the opponents court. And each time she hits the ball she knows wheter she has done well or not. Same applies to the chess player whose every move tells him whether he is closer to the goal.

Of course, if one chooses a trivial goal, success in it does not provide enjoyment. If my goal is to remain alive while sitting on my sofa achieving that would not make me especially happy.

Certain activites require a very long time to accomplish yet the components of goals and feedback are very important to them. Gardening for example. Seeing plants grow can provide immense feedback.

The goals are not always as clear or the activity as simple as in thesee examples but goals and feedback are needed all the same. In some creative activites the person must develop a very strong personal sense of what she intends to do. The artist might not have a visual image in mind but when the painting has progressed she should know whether this was what she intended to do. A painter must have an internalized criteria for good and bad so that after each brushstroke she can say: "This works; this doesn't".

Sometimes the goals and rules are invented or negotiated on the spot like in an improvisation.

The difference between the surgeon and the psychiatrist is that the former considers blood and excision the only feedback worth attending to whereas the latter considers signals reflecting a patients state of mind to be significant information. 

The feedback is only valuable as it contains a symbolic message: That I have succeeded in my goal. Such knowledge creates order in consciousness and strenghtens the structure of the self.

Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable provided it is logically related to a goal in which on has invested psychich energy. Each of us is temperamentally sensitive to a certain range of information that we learn to value more than others. 

Some are born with more sensitivity to sound than others and are more likely to be attracted to be playing with sounds and the feedback they are looking for are melodies, rhythm etc.. 

Others are unusually sensitive to other people and will learn to pay attention to the signals they send out. The feedback they are looking for is the expression of emotion. 

Some have fragile selves that need constant reassurance and for them they only information that counts is winning in a competitive situation. Others have invested so much in being liked that the only feedback they take into account is approval and admiration. 

In normal everyday existence we are prey to thoughts and worries intruding into consciousness. Most jobs and home life in general lack the pressing demands of the flow experience, concentration is rarely so intense that anxieties can be automatically shut out. This is one reason why flow increases the quality of the experience. 

People never have complete control but they glimpse the possiblity in the flow state.

What is most striking when talking to specialists in risk (race car drivers, divers, climbers) is the enjoyment derives not from the danger itself but from their ability to minimize it. Rather than a pathological thrill which comes from courting disaster the positive feeling they enjoy is being able to control potentially dangerous forces.

Activities that provide flow experiences are so constructed as to allow the practitioner to develop sufficient skill to reduce the margin of error to close to zero.

What people enjoy is not being in control but exercising control in different situations. It is not possible to experience the feeling of control without giving up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake and one is able to influence the outcome can a person really know whether she is in control. 

Almost any enjoyable activity can become addictive. That is the downside of flow.

Preoccupation with the self consumes psychic energy because in real life we often feel threatened. Someone laughs and we think about whether we look funny and spend psychic energy on restoring order to consciousness. This disappears in flow but loss of self-consciousness is not loss of self.  The self is very active but the concept of self disappears under the threshold of awareness. It seems very enjoyable to be able to forget temporarily who we are.

There is nothing mystic about this. When a person invests all her psychic energy into an interaction -whether with people or work or whatever -she in effect becomes part of a system greater than what the individual self had been before. The system takes it form from the rules of the activity and its energy from the person's attention.  But it is a real system.

The true believer is not really interacting with the belief system, he usually lets his psychic energy be absored by it.From submission nothing new can come.The order in consciousness will be imposed rather than achieved.

It seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a stronger self-concept. In flow a person is challenged to do her best and must constantly improve her skills. At the time she does not have time to reflecton what this means in terms of the self. But afterwards, the self that the person reflects upon is not the same self that existed before the flow-experience. It is now enriched by new skills and fresh achievements.

The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself.  Even if initially undertaken for other reasons the activity consumes us and becomes intrinsically rewarding. 

Most things we do are combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic reward seeking. Surgeons spend a long time in school to be able to help people and make money; if they begin to enjoy their work it becomes to a large extent a reward in itself.

The flow experience is not "good" in an absolute sense. It is good because it increases the complexity of the self.

Total Self-confidence

By changing our thinking we can change our lives.

Imagination always wins against willpower.

The student actually educates himself with the assistance of the teacher.

Once a person believes something is true he will act as if it was.

The degree to which you awaken will be in direct proportion to how much truth you can accept about yourself.

Try out new principles.

We avoid, resist and reject ideas which threaten our beliefs

Is my belief rational? Could I be mistaken?

A self-confident personality is not possible until you have built a solid foundation of self-reliance.

The moment you begin to compare yourself with anyone you are subjecting yourself to slavery.

Do not depend on others. No one can let you down if you haven't been leaning on them.

The conformist is filled with need for approval.

The person who compares himself to others is filled with fear.

All forms of competition are hostile to creativity.

The reward is in the doing, not the end result.

The competitive person always needs someone else to validate what he is doing.

The self-reliant person strives for excellence in his own life.

The destructive power of praise lies in it making you identify yourself with your actions. You did well so you must be good; conversely if you do badly you must be bad.

People can be controlled with praise.

You must stop placing others above you.

Recognition is much better than praise. It's just a statement of fact.

Nothing can stop you from achieving self-confidence.

Positive self-esteem is not an ego trip. It is self-acceptance.

Self-defeating concepts beliefs and values we have accepted from our parents.

There is no such thing as a bad child; only actions are bad.

Awareness determines your concept of reality.

You always do your best (as prescribed by your awareness).

You must allow others to live according to their awareness even if it is faulty.

You can only be compassionate and understanding of others to the degree that you

are understanding of yourself.

Stop all value-judging because it is harmful to your wellbeing.

There is no good bad right wrong fair unfair.

As soon as you start loving others as they are they will start loving you.

Everyone is always motivated even if it is just to sit in a chair.

There is positive and negative motivation.

You will always do what you would rather do than not.

To make a positive change you must evaluate the potential benefits. Then you must convince yourself that the benefits will outweigh the price.

Everyone is self-motivated.

The alcoholic has decided that the addiction is worth the price and will continue to do so until his awareness changes, usually as a result of something tragic.

Do not use good bad right wrong etc. Use "wise" and "unwise".

That is not a value judgment of a person.

You have the right and option to choose to do anything you want to do.

You can only do the thing your awareness allows you. You must allow yourself to make mistakes because that is how awareness is expanded.

You will never be free until your learn to accept full responsibility for your life. You have to accept full responsibility for your actions, words etc. and there is a price to pay for each.

Beofre you do anyting ask yourself: Is it a wise act or an unwise act? Will it contribute to my basic needs? Will it harm me or someone else? What is the total price I must pay? Am I willing to pay this price?

We must get rid of negative habits.

Diets fail because the dieter begins to feel deprived.

Before you can change any habit you must recognize and accept that you have one.

Positive habit conditioning program:

What negative habit do you want to replace?

What positive habit will you use to replace it?

What actions will you take to do it?

What is the easiest and most logical way to do this?

Visualize yourself as having already succeeded.

Select and use positive affirmation ("I am my creator. Everyting I can be is a part of me."

Remove anything in your life that is not working for you

See what is working right and program that.

Add new desireable and wise habits.

Accept that you have a bad habit but do not judge your value

Weigh benefits/cost

You must be convinced that the change will bring about the gratification of a certain need.

Every stranger you meet is crying out: "Please love me."

Love begins with loving yourself

You can't give love. You can only be loving. Learn to love your mind, thoughts, body, life, trees, cars, 

For every positive want we have a negative want which we don't want to admit.

Give your dominant attention to what you want.

There is an Universal Mind.

Whatever desire you have carries with it the means.

Whatever you visualize you can have. See yourself having achieved and then consider your wish accomplished. Then it becomes a self-fulling prophesy

Picture the end result and know you have it. Feel it.

You will get what you want when you feel you already have it.

You don't have to be clever or witty; just have an interest in other people.

Hold only positive conversations.Let people know you enjoy life. Everyone wants to associate with those have a happy outlook.

Let the other person know she is impressing you.

Make the first move. Assume that she is friendly and act as if you expect to be both welcomed and liked.  Take for granted that she will like you and listen.

Start by asking questions.

Smile, smile, smile.

Quit for life pt. 1

It is best to stop smoking on monday or tuesday and have accomplished it before the weekend.

Smoking has become an automatic and compulsive habit.

It is automatically controlled by the biocomputer.

Be optimistic, enthusiastic and confident about your chances.

Try to enjoy the process. NO willpower necessary.

Automatic Chain: Reach for packet - take a fag - put it in your mouth - find lighter - light the fag -Inhale - exhale --put cigarette in ashtray -Inhale again - repeat until finished and stub it out.

You must be aware of the first step which is the way for the chain to start. QFL method is to put a band on the packet which you must open before you take the cig.

Stop the chain at the beginning.

Make a chart. NO 1. Be Aware!

You think certain thoughts about smoking being good when you start the process.

You need to reprogram that chain.

This cigareette is giving me no satisfaction

This is an unpleasant experience

This cigarette is making me feel rotten

I am losing the desire to smoke

Smoke every cigarette deliberately and with concentration

When using willpower you create a "split" in your personality. You go to war with yourself.

You create tension and a smoke will relieve that tension.

Therefore you should deprogram when the desire is weak.

You have associated smoking with many things.

Always try to determine what triggered your decision to smoke.

Deprogramming triggers: Strong verbal commands and imagery rehearsal.

"Wanting a cigarettte now is just an automatic response to X. Just because of X I don't have to have a cigarette. The next time I do X I refuse to smoke automatically. I won't be made to smoke just because of X."

Stop -Think -Deprogram.

Imagination and relaxation. 

I can use this as well with food/sweets. Everytime I have a sweet I think of how negative the effects of it are. I can deal with the triggers as well. And if I don't eat at night I have a prepared script.

See yourself as a non-smoker in your imagination.  Imagine yourself doing something which usually triggers smoking without smoking.

Relieve your stress by meditation. 

Counteracting rationalizations. Each day it is becoming easy and my mind is becoming calm so there are no goo reasons to smoke yesterdays craving is gone.

Be aware.

Distract yourself. 

Meditate.

Tension and smoking are very connected.

Meditation helps a great deal.

The argument game:

There are no good reasons to smoke

I accept objective reality: That smoking leads to a horrible and painful disease which can ravage my body and my mind.

Just one cigarette starts the chain again.

If there is discomfort you can stand it. Think how much more discomfort it is having a disease.

Even if you gain a little bit of weight it is worth it.

See the cigarette as dead bodies, poison, cancerous, fire you are breathing, the body vomits the smoke, 

Help yourself to happiness

People tend to escalate their wants, desires, preferences and wishes into absolute should's, ought's, must's, necessesities, have to's.

People have trouble with objective reality. They try to ignore it or deny and that causes irrational thinking as well.

You control your feelings

What would a camera show really happened?

You see something - you evaluate it as good or bad - the brain creates the feeling

A- perception B-evaluating thought C-feeling

It's not the facts and events that upset man but the view he takes of them.

You alone create sadness or gladness

When you habitually think the same thoughts about the same things it converts the feelings into personality traits

Having the same feeling over and over again in response to the same thoughts is a rapid way to form strong beliefs. 

New learning is in four stages: First your neocortex gives you intellectual insight into the action to be learned and a mental map of it. Second your neocortex directs you in the correct practice. Thirdly while your practicing the neocortex causes your limbic system to give you the right emotional feeling. Fourth with emotional insight and practice your turn it into a personality trait.

A. Actual practice

B. Emotive imagery

Emotional re-education: 

Cognitive dissonance: Doing right but feeling wrong.

Then you need emotive imagery to make you feel right when you are doing right.

Rational self-analysis

A. Fact and events

B. Self-talk

C. Emotional consequence of B.

Da. Camera check of A. What really happened?

Db. Rational debate of B. "Is that statement based on facts? Will this help me achieve my goals?"

E. Emotional goal for future A's.

Use "I think" instead of "I feel".

Rational emotive imagery is practicing the thing you want to learn.

Relax.

Picture the A situation. See a movie without you in it. See yourself thinking or saying only the rational sentences.

There are two basic desires. Desire to get something and desire to avoid something.

A.    If I see a pretty girl I want to approach her but i stop myself doing it. Sometimes I notice a girl looking at me. I start talking loudly to my friends.

B.     “Should I go and see if she’s interested in talking to me?”, “No, it will be discomforting” (anxiety rises) and she could reject me or even worse, accept me and then I would be stuck with her. My friends would laugh at me. I don’t know what to say anyway and she would find me boring. I would be a loser if she rejected me.

C.     Intense discomfort which lessens when I decide not to do it.

 

Camera check for A. Correct.

Dispute B. It can be discomforting to go and talk to a girl but the rewards can be great. You also have the goal of being able to talk to girls so this is a step in the right direction. Even if she doesn’t want to talk to me. If she rejects me I don’t have to reject myself. I can just shrug and say OK. My friends would rather respect me than laugh at me. You just say hello and see how it goes from there. You can allow yourself to be silent. You’re not boring you know that. If you succeed you can always get rid of her. That’s the way it is. Make a new plan stan. How would I be a loser? There was no win/lose in this. I desired a conversation and maybe something more. She didn’t. End of story. No losers. If a girl came up to me and I was going to meet a friend or something and brushed her off would I think: “God, what a loser, she is?”. No, I would maybe think I didn’t like the look of her but a loser? No way. Girls aren't dangerous like cats aren't dangerous. I always try to "meet" cats. 

D.    Emotional goal: to be able to talk to strange girls without discomfort. To be able to initate contact without discomfort.

 

1. I decide to smoke many, many times a day.. –Camera check: Right
2. I feel discomfort. I will therefore smoke. I’m waiting, I’m bored, I’m walking I decide to smoke. Smoking lessens my discomfort.
3. Intense discomfort whcih lessens while I do it.

B-dispute: My discomfort does not lessen while I smoke. It increases. It keeps the addiction going. My habit.

 

Persuasive arguments

Absolutism - This must be so or everything is terrible

Always and never thinking - "I will always be alone".

Attitude selection - the last of the human freedoms, the power to choose your attitude

Avoidance - fear of rejection may stop you from asking someone out. Expose yourself to your fears, tolerate the discomfort, encourage risk-taking

The power of NO!

Best friend argument -Would you condemn your best friend for this?

Blow-up technique -blowing result out of all proportions -the worst worst case.

Court discomfort

Cognition with ignition -practice your new attitude

Discomfort - the paradox of discomfort -avoid it to increase it -endure it to decrease it

esteem -we all have equal intrinsic value as human beings

False dichotomy - Either/or thinking

High frustration tolerance - I can stand it

learning: Planning - experiencing - reflecting -concluding

Motivation - direction, effort and persistence. Motivation comes when you take action.

Needs - there are no needs, only wants

Who puts you down? - You do it if you accept the putdown.

Rating - Performance is a measure of behavior not a person

Rejection - Others do not reject us. We reject ourselves. When someone is not interested in you, it can be for a wide variety of reasons. It could just be not on her schedule at the moment. But what do you say to yourself? "I must be nothing because she rejected me." However, you could with equal justication say: "She is not interested right now. That's all right. There are others who might be interested."

Reward - stroke yourself

Risktaking - It has two sides. You can see the downside but it could also fulfill your desires.