Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Summary, Analysis and Criticism

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Perspective

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is Claremont Graduate University’s Professor of Psychology and Management. He is also the founder and co-director of the Quality of Life Research Center (QLRC). Csikszentmihalyi received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago. Since receiving his doctorate, he has served as the head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Subsequently, he worked as the head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lake Forest College. In 2004, Csikszentmihalyi delivered a TEDTalk titled “Flow, the Secret to Happiness.” This talk now has more than 3.5 million views.

The Conditions Required to Enter a Flow State

The most crucial element of entering a flow state is to have clarity in your goals. This requires you always have a purpose for what you are doing. Hence, to enter a flow state, you must think of step-by-step goals rather than the overarching goals. Mihaly uses the example of chess. Although the overarching goal is check-mate, you should focus on how to clear a particular space or take your opponent’s pieces.

Some activities are more prone to flow. We enjoy games because they naturally make us lose ourselves in the micro-objectives. However, things get messier in our everyday lives. It is hard for us to keep track of our day-to-day goals as we deal with the minutiae of life. The best way around this is to give yourself goals for every activity you do. This integrates the activity into the rest of your life and gives it meaning along the way.

The Importance of Feedback

Feedback is a crucial element of flow since it engages us through results. This allows us to learn and improve as we continue with our activities. Some tasks are not enjoyable because their feedback isn’t immediately apparent, so they don’t give us a sense of growth or learning. Mihaly provides the examples of washing the dishes or walking the dog.

One way of making these activities fun and engaging is to turn them into games. For instance, you can try to fold your clothes quicker by trying new techniques. You should no longer find them as uninteresting as they used to be.

The Four Ways Flow Helps Your Life

The transformational process of integrating flow into your life will help you in four ways:

1. Flow teaches you how to control your inner self. Control over attention, mood, and willpower.
2. You will be able to enter a flow state in everyday situations, even during challenging periods.
3. You will develop an increasingly complex self. After each minor challenge you overcome, you will want to move on to a more complex one. This development gives you more opportunity to learn.
4. Flow will restructure your life. Your days won’t be composed of merely self-repeating episodes of work, leisure, and other tasks.

The Major Components of Flow

Flow has eight major components, as identified by composers, rock climbers, painters, surgeons, programmers, and other people who experience it.

Each Action Must Have a Goal or Purpose

When singing a song, a musician knows precisely what notes he must play. A painter knows where his next brush must touch the painting. A writer knows what his next words must communicate to his readers.

Similarly, our day-to-day activities should have their own immediate goals. Otherwise, they appear meaningless to us. These goals help us track our progress in life and offer something tangible as feedback for our actions.

Measure Your Progress by Looking for Feedback

Feedback helps us measure the impact of our actions. A pool player who misses a shot knows he should change position or how he holds the cue. Following the feedback trail of an activity induces a person into a flow state. Each observation and reaction teaches people what works and what doesn’t.

Concentration without feedback is problematic since you don’t know if what you are doing is worthwhile or meaningful. So, your attention and craving for feedback gets hijacked by whatever else is near you. This process leads to boredom or mental distraction.

The Challenges of the Activity Must Not Overwhelm the Skill of the Person

A game of chess is only fun if both players are at a similar skill level. If the opponent is much better, then the game feels frustrating. If the adversary is too weak, the game becomes tiresome. The same principle applies to work and other activities. Alternatively, if the challenge matches your skills, it eventually becomes interesting and enjoyable.

The Feeling of Focus and Concentration on What You Are Doing

During our daily lives, we tend to split our attention in multiple directions. To experience flow, however, you must direct your focus and concentration towards a single activity. This single-tasking feels good and is a rewarding experience since it does not overwhelm our minds with other issues.

Flow Cuts You Off From Your Day-to-Day Problems and Stress

During a flow experience, we temporarily lose track of problems and hardships. After all, you cannot worry about mundane issues while playing a video game or painting a picture. If you shifted away to your troubles, you would scatter your attention and make mistakes in your activity. In a way, a flow experience is an escape from reality and a significant source of relief.

Flow Gives You a Sense of Control

Flow gives you a sense of control over your activities that can extend over your entire life. Importantly, it is not a total sense of control, since that would mean your skills far exceed the challenges of your tasks and activities. Instead, during flow, you feel a sense of control right at the edge of your capabilities.

Flow Silences Your Inner Voice or Self-Consciousness.

Once you enter into flow, you lose track of what other people think of you. You are no longer self-conscious about what you do or how ridiculous it might seem to others. This has the major benefit of freeing up mental resources to concentrate on the task. Team activities tend to bring you into this state. At the height of the flow state, you no longer feel like an individual but more as an integral component of the entire team.

Sense of Time Becomes Distorted

Flow changes your perception of time because it adapts to your experience. More often than not, it will seem as if the activity took far less time than it actually did.

What Is the Difference Between Pleasure and Enjoyment?

Flow activities bring you to a state of enjoyment, but not necessarily one of pleasure. Pleasure is a biological response and functions as our body’s way of telling us if what we are doing is valuable for our survival. Food and sex are the quintessential pleasures.

Pleasure does not lead to personal growth. Pleasure can be deceiving since it can lead us to addiction or focusing our lives around basic instincts like food or sex. Flow enjoyment is different since it pushes us to seek new growth experiences.

However, a happy life cannot be achieved by merely having many isolated flow experiences. The path to happiness requires learning to enjoy any situation you encounter. To do this, you need to become a master of your consciousness and personality.

The Five Characteristics and Traits of a Complex and Autotelic Personality

Activities that generate flow are called autotelic. The word comes from the Greek terms “auto” which means self, and “telos” which means purpose.

An autotelic activity is one which you do for its own sake, without seeking an external reward. However, some people can turn every activity into a flow. These people have what’s called an autotelic personality. An autotelic personality isn’t something a person is born with, but it’s nurtured.

Clarity of Purpose, Goals, and Feedback

On a large scale, this means you have set your ambitions and desires in life. But on a smaller scale, it means you have goals and purposes for every activity that you engage in.

The other dimension is the clarity of feedback. This allows you to view the world objectively, without falling prey to fallacies to protect your beliefs. Clarity of feedback opens you to advice and criticism, which allows you to improve yourself.

The Ability to Center

This is the ability to focus and clamp down on a single goal and give it your all. It means clearing your mind and focusing your energy, concentration, and attention on a single point.

Always Having a Choice

This is the awareness that you always have a choice in what you do. Complex and demanding choices aren’t forced upon you. People with autotelic personalities don’t feel trapped in difficult situations. They know their choices lead to these situations, so they own up to the consequences or benefits.

Commitment to a Chosen Activity

People with complex personalities care about all they do and commit themselves. They actively involve themselves in the activity. They will engage with these activities because they genuinely want to.

Challenge Seeking

People with complex personalities are always ready to expand their personalities and skills by taking on new challenges and learning along the way. They explore new concepts and try new things frequently.

How Psychic Entropy Leads to Boredom, Anxiety, and Stress

Consciousness Is How You Experience Things

Activities like driving a car or tying your shoelaces are only possible by paying attention to them. But our attention has limits, which makes it difficult to concentrate on too many activities at once. When your mind is overwhelmed by too many problems, it enters a state of disarray. In this state, your thoughts swirl and prevent you from focusing on the most important goals you have.

This phenomenon is called psychic entropy. It’s the process in which our minds want to go in one direction, but our bodies in another. Subsequently, you could develop a broken consciousness as you cannot satisfy most of your goals.

By clearing your mind of other thoughts and concerns, you allow yourself to concentrate on one activity. Subsequently, you can fully engage with it and enter a peaceful and serene state of flow that is more efficient and enjoyable.

Understanding Boredom and Anxiety

The two mental states most commonly associated with psychic entropy are boredom and anxiety. Working while engaged in these states feels like a chore and an uphill battle.

Boredom has two primary causes. The first one is an insufficiently challenging task. Here, your skills and abilities far exceed the task’s difficulty, so it feels like you aren’t learning. The second cause is insufficient feedback. Insufficient Feedback provides the sensation that what you are doing doesn’t matter and has no impact on the world around you.

Anxiety is an entropic psychological state that emerges when you are overwhelmed by too many tasks or tasks out of your skill level. At this point, you aren’t in control of your consciousness and feel like decisions are made for you. You can’t focus on the required goals.

Avoid Boredom and Anxiety By Doing Things For Their Own Sake

Finding enjoyment requires you to be connected with what’s going on around you. You must find new things to do, and act upon any opportunity that might lead to personal growth. Seek to develop your passions and hobbies. For instance, if you like plants, then try to take up gardening. Alternatively, if you like money, then learn how to set up your own business.

Despite this, you shouldn’t think about external rewards. Do not start a company because you want to be wealthy. Do these activities because you enjoy doing them. For example, practice a musical instrument because you enjoy playing music.

External motivators will mean you won’t appreciate the day-to-day grind. Eventually, this will lead to boredom, anxiety, or any other negative emotional state.

Flow and Its Relationship With Stress

At its core, stress is a survival mechanism designed to keep you alive in difficult moments. Major stress sources are widespread. These stressful experiences can also lead to high psychic entropy. Stress prevents you from concentrating on a single objective. This blocks you from immersing your life into a flow experience and experiencing it as a harmonious experience.

However, stress isn’t always automatic. It’s a reaction to external threats. There are ways we can control these external sources of stress and how they impact us.

Unselfconscious Self-Assurance

The ability of flow to disconnect you from the world, its worries and troubles make it a powerful tool in managing stress. However, some stressful experiences are too powerful to be ignored or fade into the background. One method of preventing a stressful experience from breaking our flow is to detach from it and think objectively. By doing so, you shrink the emotional weight of the problem.

The best way to detach from stress is to be self-assured and confident in your skills. As an example: Imagine driving on the road with heavy traffic. A skilled driver will not be too worried by the required twists, turns, and overtakes. In contrast, a novice driver will experience constant stress. Ironically, this can make it more likely that they will make a mistake as they divert some of their mental capacities to worrying. Even if he doesn’t suffer an accident, the beginner will come out of the experience shaken and exhausted.

Focus Your Attention On the Outside Environment

Even if you are self-assured and confident in your skills, you can find yourself in situations that shake your confidence.

Here, there are two ways you can respond:

• You feel sorry for yourself and ashamed about what happened. You internalize the stress and let it cause chaos in your mind and consciousness.
• You carefully analyze the situation and look at the situation as objectively as you can. By now, you are thoroughly engaged in a process that can better prepare you for similar future situations.

Discover New solutions to the Stressors in Your Life

Confidence in your skills can only take you so far. The next step is to find real solutions to your problems to prevent them from occurring again. This is a learning experience and also fuels you with hope. You know this might be the last time you have to deal with a particular problem.

The Four Habits of an Autotelic Personality

An autotelic personality can transform even the most impossible and traumatic situation into something that can be managed. Also, an autotelic personality helps you enjoy the grind and minutiae of daily life.

Below are the four significant habits that autotelic people have that help them weather stressful situations and lead to a happy and meaningful life.

Ability to Set Goals

As an example, Mihaly described the CEO of a big financial company in the US. This executive had a purpose in mind for every activity he engaged in. This even applied to small events, such as entering a new room full of people or reading a book. The CEO’s reasons for this weren’t manipulative. He wanted to get to know people to learn something about them and see life manifest itself in others.

Knowing How to Pay Attention

People with autotelic personalities can control their attention and what it focuses on. When they concentrate on something, they do it because they want to, not because the urgency of the situation forces them to.

Ability to Immerse in the Activity

The third habit of an autotelic personality kicks in once you have set yourself a goal and concentrated your attention. This habit helps you immerse yourself in the activity to appreciate it for its own sake. Immersion allows you to pick up subtle signals and feedback inherent in the task. Subsequently, you can learn the more complex aspects of the activity. This makes you a participant in whatever happens around you, so you never feel left out or excluded.

Enjoyment of Activities and a Sense of Energy

Put these three steps together and you’ll find you genuinely enjoy the activity you are engaged in. In turn, this gives you energy and liveliness. In social situations, for instance, this flow can translate itself into charisma. For a scientist, it can be a state of daring creativity that leads to a breakthrough idea. For a carpenter, it can be a new perspective that allows him to create an intriguing statue.

Flow Final Summary and Review

Flow is a state of total immersion while doing an activity. Flow comes from the intense concentration around your own actions and their immediate feedback. Think of a painter who carefully observes how straight his lines are or the accuracy of his colors. Think of a chess player who eagerly awaits his opponent’s move, all the while planning his own. Most of us only associate this state of flow with certain activities. However, Mihaly explains that it’s possible to turn all aspects of our lives into a unified, flow experience. In doing so, you can significantly improve your productivity and create a happier life.

Criticism

Csikszentmihalyi neglects the negative aspects of flow experience, which have been extensively studied by psychologists. Additionally, he does not provide a complete theory of consciousness or that there are different interpretations of his research.

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