Essay on
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The world is naturally chaotic. We are unable to control it. What we can strive for though is inner harmony. And once again, as mentioned in multiple self-help books, when we are focused on the future and on what we want to achieve, we can never be content.
It is proven that people who master their consciousness do live a happier life. By mastering consciousness is meant the ability to control feelings and thoughts. Mihaly explains how to do that in his book called Flow.
When we are unable to focus on something, we call that psychic entropy:
“The internal order of the self is disrupted. The basic pattern 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 threat 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,” says Mihaly in his book.
The opposite of psychic entropy is the optimal experience. It is a state in which energy flows with no issues and we are able to focus on the activity we are doing at a certain moment. The process in which we can freely focus on our goals because we do not face any other threat that is stronger than the activity we are currently doing. And that is what we call flow.
For us to become able to control our consciousness we have to organize ourselves. Mihaly speaks about complexity. “When we grow we are becoming more complex. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward 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,” explains Mihaly.
The conditions of flow
First condition is activity. The primary function of flow activities is provision of enjoyable experiences, as mentioned in the book. Some examples are play, art, ritual, and sports. All of these activities are constructed in a way that gives everyone involved good conditions to enjoy them. All of these activities have another thing in common. They all provide the person a sense of discovery. That way the person enters new states of consciousness.
In the picture above is the balance between anxiety and boredom one has to do in order to achieve flow. One thing that is sure is we cannot be in flow on the same level of activity for very long. We get either bored or frustrated.
Flow and culture is another condition of flow. Cultures differ in terms of how much “pursuit of happiness” they make possible. That is highly based on the quality of life these cultures have. “Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the im-
pact of randomness on experience. They are adaptive responses, just as feathers
are for birds and fur is for mammals,” mentions Mihaly.
The autotelic personality is the third flow condition. Some people have a stronger ability to experience flow than others. When a person cannot control psychic energy, neither learning nor true enjoyment is possible, as Mihaly says. That can be observed in some illnesses like attention disorder or schizophrenia. Some people have problems with excessive self-consciousness. “A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive them, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment,” describes Mihaly.
Another one is a person who is self-centered. These people think of every information in terms of how it fits their desires. All of the above prevents flow because the psychic energy is too fluid and erratic. What also prevents from experiencing flow is a social pathology. They are called anomie and alienation. Anomie is a condition in society in which the norms of behavior become unclear. Alienation is a condition in which people are constrained by the social system to act in ways that go against their goals.
Some people may experience flow more easily. There is ample evidence to suggest that how parents interact with a child will have a lasting effect on the kind of person that child grows up to be. These relationships have five characteristics: clarity, centering, choice, commitment, challenge. “Families that provide an autotelic context conserve a great deal of psychic energy for their individual members, thus making it possible to increase enjoyment all around,” explains Mihaly.
The last flow condition is “The people of flow”. Some people seem to enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable. Some of these people survived by finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience. “When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces.” says Mihaly.
Flow helped me uncover a new layer on how to learn and practices happiness and fully enjoy what I do. It is a very rich book in terms of ideas, information and references to psychology, sociology and anthropology and offers a broad view on how we experience our life.
