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.