Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
OVERVIEW
“Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi seeks to answer the question: “When do people feel most happy?” But this is not a superficial happiness how-to book. This is a book about optimal experience, what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow – “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter… the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” Flow is genuine satisfaction with your present experience.
“Flow” answers the question “how can I enjoy my life more?” Importantly, it tells us how not to waste our time – how to live a life that doesn’t feel passive or boring. How, instead, we can find true fulfillment and enjoyment in what we’re doing, and how this can give our lives meaning.
We’ll first examine why flow is important and what the characters of flow are, and then we’ll review how to bring more of it into our lives. Finally, we’ll tether optimal experience to purpose and fulfillment: how to use flow to create meaning.
Why flow?
Whatever exists in our consciousness is the totality of who we are. But our consciousness can only process so much information at any one time, so what we allow in becomes of critical importance. The contents of consciousness determine the quality of life. The gatekeepers to the quality of our lived experience are then, necessarily, intention and attention – what we intend to do, and the focus we apply in doing it. It’s intuitive to us that we direct our attention, but this also cuts the other way. Attention determines what enters consciousness, and it is the contents of consciousness that determine who we are. In this way, you are created by what you pay attention to. Csikszentmihalyi argues that flow experiences are the most desirable episodes of directed attention. That’s why flow matters. Flow is the state we achieve when our attention is optimally directed, and so creates the optimal experience of reality – the most enjoyable way to live your life.
The characters of flow experience
Many of us fall into the trap of believing that enjoyment means relaxation. We can’t wait to relax on the weekend, or on vacation. This would suggest that passive pleasure is the ideal experience. But psychology vehemently disagrees. The difference between pleasure and enjoyment is that enjoyment is characterized by the sense of novelty and accomplishment. According to his research, Csikszentmihalyi argues that our most enjoyable moments occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. This is the recipe to flow, investing our attention in a challenging goal, to the limits of our concentration and skill.
Here are four key features of a flow activity:
1. The task is achievable (often rule-bound), and the degree of challenge is balanced with our skillfulness (physical and/or mental)
2. The task is one that we can invest ourselves in, to the limits of our concentration
3. The task has clear goals
4. The task provides immediate feedback
And here are four key features of the flow experience:
1. The awareness of everyday worries/frustrations fades away
2. We exert control, but the process also has a feeling of effortlessness
3. Concern for the self disappears
4. The sense of time is altered; we lose ourselves in the task
To sum, a flow activity is characterized by its difficulty, its requiring concentration, control, and the application of skill to accomplish; one that has clear goals and feedback. The flow state is characterized by our utter absorption in a task such that our sense of time, self, and everyday bothers fades from awareness. Csikszentmihalyi says these types of experiences are autotelic, meaning they are intrinsically rewarding. The experience is enjoyable in the moment and rewarding afterwards due to the sense of accomplishment. You may think a relaxing evening is your most desired experience, but it’s rather working toward self-discipline and mastery that is most fulfilling. Further, flow activities provide a sense of discovery and creativity, opportunities for self-growth.
Where to find flow
The Body
We can all learn to use our bodies and senses to find flow. Every pursuit of flow involves setting a goal (and as many sub-goals as necessary), measuring progress, maintaining concentration, honing skills, and constantly raising the stakes. Running, swimming, walking, sports, etc. leverage physicality to find flow, but we can also become more skillful at listening, seeing, hearing, and tasting. If you enjoy classical music, select a Tchaikovsky piece recorded by two different orchestras and try to note the differences. How many birdsongs can you memorize? How many flavours can you detect in your tea? How good can you get at distinguishing your favourite painters by their brushstrokes? Can you beat your previous swim record, set a new personal best? The body is a diverse instrument of flow.
The Mind
Flow activities of the mind are symbolic in nature; the goals we set centre not around physical attributes, but abstraction – mental manipulation of concepts, memorization, or even just learning to think better. Solving mental puzzles, playing games like backgammon or chess, writing, or even honing our conversational skills can be sources of flow. Those with innate interest in history, science, or philosophy may be drawn to amateur scholarship. Perhaps you want to learn more about the philosophy of beauty, or draw your own insights from reading several books on an interesting topic; maybe you want to learn more about identifying wild mushrooms or other local flora/fauna in your community. Scholarship or mental mastery is not about the quality of the performance, but rather about the quality of the experience.
Work
Given that most of our waking hours are spent working, learning to find flow at work is probably the single greatest stride you can take toward improving the quality of your life. Lucky for you, work is more conducive to enjoyment, to flow, than our leisure time, because work has the built-in structure of challenging goals, feedback, rules, and the application of skillfulness. If flow is the conscious effort to master challenges, to concentrate on a difficult task and get better at something, then it’s clear how work is our most accessible ally. At work, people are more likely to report feeling strong, creative, motivated, and active than they are in their leisure time (where, especially if you are participating in the passive consumption of mass media, you’re more likely to report feeling passive and dull). The paradox is that people also overwhelmingly report that they would rather have free time than be working. Csikszentmihalyi suspects this is because of the deeply rooted cultural stereotype that work is an infringement on our freedom, an imposition and a constraint. Therefore, we ignore the quality of our experience at work, and will almost always say we’d rather have free time (even though we are objectively less satisfied with time spent in leisure). The key to finding flow at work is to shift your perspective such that goals feel personal and freely chosen, and to focus on honing intrinsically rewarding skills. Jobs that present above-average challenges and require the development of above-average skills are most suited to flow (but it’s our perspective that matters most. Any activity can be a flow activity).
Adversity
Even adversity and hardship present opportunities for flow, the challenge of better cultivating courage, perseverance, or resilience. The key, as it has always been, is to become skillful in the goals that are available to you. Csikszentmihalyi says: “of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”
Flow and meaning
How does meaning come into the picture? Csikszentmihalyi offers that we create meaning by goal setting (for our flow activities) within a unified context. We select goals that coalesce around a theme that feels significant – a worthwhile use of time and energy. According to Csikszentmihalyi, people who describe their lives as meaningful have worked toward achieving goals that feel important, and they have possessed resolve toward meeting those goals. The twin powers of purpose and perseverance within the context of some personal value system recover an inner harmony, a congruence between our values and our attention/action. Living with purpose, resolve, and harmony gives life meaning by giving it directionality. We look back knowing that our energy was not wasted, that it was invested in something worthwhile, and that the pieces of our lives fit together in some coherent way. There is a sense of participation, accomplishment, and significance. The aim is a lifetime of pursuit toward a seamless flow experience that rallies around some ultimate project(s), a life theme that feels of great importance.
There is no one out there who can tell you what kind of goals are worth spending your life on. It’s up to you to find worthy projects for your own life, to select goals and carry out goal-directed actions that lend it shape and meaning. We are given two pieces of advice in this regard. The first is to choose projects that are authentic. You are intrinsically motivated to pursue a goal because it’s aligned with your desires, ideals, and beliefs, not because it’s what everyone else is doing or what you feel you ought to do. Your projects should reflect a genuine expression of your own values. The last piece of advice is to set challenges “that involve the improvement of material conditions while at the same time pursuing spiritual ends.” We’ll be exploring secular spirituality more over the next year, but suffice to say that projects transcending self-interest are what we’re after here; whether we focus on helping others, contributing to our communities, or protecting the environment, any unselfish and altruistic endeavour is more likely to satisfy meaning than selfish pursuits. In so doing, the skills we develop are not just for self-growth, they improve the lives of others too.
In sum, “flow” is a state in which we are utterly absorbed in an activity that has clear goals, feedback, and that requires skillfulness. There must be a sense that the goals are freely chosen – they may even be self-constructed. Investing our energy to the limits of our concentration and skill is inherently rewarding, but selecting goals that are linked to our values, and pursuing them with conviction, creates meaning and a sense of purposefulness to our living – especially so for goals that are directed toward improving the lives of others.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Choose a goal that feels worthwhile, invest yourself in that goal to the limits of your concentration
Flow is achieved through a conscious attempt to master challenges, and where you are so engaged and focused that you lose yourself. Using the 4 characters of flow activities mentioned above (and the 4 features of the flow experience as assessment tools), start creating flow for yourself. If to come to the end of your life and decide whether it was meaningful or not is to ask: “did I accomplish what I set out to do?”, “did I work towards significant goals?”, or “did I waste my time?”, then it’s clear to me why cultivating flow is an important task. Unifying your daily activities around some ultimate life theme or project will certainly lend meaningfulness, but pursuing flow itself is to ensure that we are working as hard as we can toward achieving the goals we believe to be worthwhile (and, if flow is optimal experience, it’s to have a really good time doing it).
I also think it’s interesting to highlight the feature of self-transcendence that can occur during flow – where you lose complete sense of yourself in an activity. You may remember that self-transcendence is one of the ways we can successfully attenuate death anxiety. I don’t know if the feelings of self-less-ness achieved during flow are of the same breed, such that they would make us less afraid to die, but it’s worth the suspicion.
Turn your free time into flow time
One of the most interesting take-aways from this book was that people find more objective enjoyment at work than they do at leisure, because it’s easier to find flow at work than in our completely unstructured free time. Listening to music, reading, having friends over, etc. typically do not produce the rewarding feelings of creativity, challenge, or concentration. Hobbies that demand skill are much more enjoyable. However, music, reading, and spending time with friends can be turned into skillful activities, provided we have the will and self-discipline. But there’s one set of activities that Csikszentmihalyi is adamant can’t be turned into flow, and that’s the passive consumption of mass media. Mass media (like TV programs, sporting events, radio) is not designed to make you feel happy, creative, or strong, it’s designed to make other people money.
This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality… They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before.
If living a meaningful life requires participation (and so far, every book on meaning assures me it does), then it’s critical we stop wasting our free time on mindless entertainment.
Csikszentmihalyi would very strongly object to my Netflix binges.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No. There are a few references to religious activity or supernatural ritual/contemplation being suitable flow activities.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? How to improve the quality of experience and engender meaning through flow.
Who should read this book? Anyone who has envied the ability of others to be so utterly absorbed in their work or passions that they lose track of time.