Finding Flow: Your Life is the Sum of What You Focus On
Every person who ever lived has wanted it.
We all chase it.
So what’s the secret to getting it?
In Flow, Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi (Cheek-sent-me-high) explains that enjoyment, not pleasure, paves the path to happiness. He even reveals how to find rich enjoyment in your life. It all starts with how you pay attention.
Optimal Experience
The human brain processes 126 bits of information every second. That equates to 7,560 bits per minute, or over 185 billion in an average lifespan. When it comes to creating joy in your life, Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes that it matters how you spend this attentional currency. You become what you behold - for better and for worse. Several definitions underly this section of the book:
Attention, or psychic energy, determines what does/doesn’t appear in consciousness
Depending on how you invest your attention, entirely different realities emerge. We create ourselves based on how we direct our psychic energy.
Psychic entropy is the inner disorder that results from information that threatens your goals, scares your ego, disrupts your consciousness (disorganization of self)
You know those dreadful 3am worries? Maybe it’s your mind chewing on past mistakes, or the “Sunday Scaries” as the weekend ends and Monday looms. Csikszentmihalyi helpfully places all our fears and regrets into a bucket labeled psychic entropy. Any thoughts that scare your ego and bring anxiety are simply the mind’s natural process of moving toward disorder. When I first read this, I felt a great sense of liberation. Rather than needing to engage with my worries or regrets when they arise, I can label them all psychic entropy -- this natural process of mental decay. Instead of wrestling with the specific content of my anxiety, this gives permission to step back and see the mental noise properly. Everyone defaults to disorder when not directing their attention more productively. Which leads to….
Optimal experience, or Flow = intrinsically rewarding process where attention is freely invested to achieve a person’s goals (opposite of psychic entropy)
The big kahuna. A Flow experience stretches your body and mind to their limits. Imagine a skilled person learning a tricky new violin piece, skiing the Matterhorn, or rock climbing in Yosemite. These challenging activities require deep concentration and offer a “Goldilocks” challenge - hard enough to be interesting, but reasonable enough to encourage progress without quitting. Engaging in this type of perfectly challenging activity leads to a Flow state, which Csikszentmihalyi describes as an optimal experience. These states have lots of positive benefits:
Moment-to-moment enjoyment
Increased complexity of self (growth)
Attention fully invested in pursuit of goals (no disorder to fix/threats to defend against)
Deep concentration —> well-ordered consciousness
Rather than stewing in unpleasant worry, entering Flow pushes you toward a chosen goal while paying a second-by-second dividend of delightful enjoyment. Challenging yourself feels good, and is also an effective use of your time. The deep concentration required for Flow brings order to your consciousness, leaving you feeling calm and satisfied. With your attention freely invested in pursuing your goal, you have no mental disorder to straighten out, and no external threats for your self (ego) to defend against. All your energy goes toward growth and improvement. Do this enough, and your quality of life will inevitably improve.
Enjoying Your Life
Flow was published in 1990. In the following 30 years, these ideas liberated mankind from their tortured ego minds, jump-starting an unprecedented era of peace, achievement, and enjoy—
Just kidding. Obviously people still have plenty of fear and stress in their lives. Perhaps more today than ever. What gives? Why don’t most people combat their entropic worries with enjoyable, Flow-inducing activities? You can thank the Path of Least Resistance principle. People largely quell their gnawing worries with pleasure.
Sleep, food, entertainment, and sex are all sources of pleasure. While they’re an important part of life, they don’t bring lasting happiness. Csikszentmihalyi explains that while pleasure can restore order to your mind, and quiet your psychic entropy, they don’t create new order in consciousness. They largely don’t help you grow, or add to your “complexity of self”. Flow does. Following an optimal experience of deep concentration, you emerge a more complex person. After finishing a Flow activity, Csikszentmihalyi explains:
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.
Successfully focusing during a Flow activity not only creates order in consciousness. It also strengthens your structure of self. Critically, Csikszentmihalyi explains that this process is an end to itself: Flow activities are intrinsically rewarding and enjoyable. He defines this as an autotelic experience, meaning a self-contained activity done simply because the doing is the reward. Autotelic activities lead to day-to-day enjoyment in your life.
Finding Flow
Thanks to innovations in transportation, household appliances, and communication, we have more free time than ever before. Csikszentmihalyi proceeds to ask why, given our tremendous advancements, few of us are happier than our ancestors? He argues that we fail to turn our free time into true enjoyment. Unfortunately, our culture leaves so much of our precious attention wrapped up in ourselves (looking at you, Instagram) that we lack the “attentional fluidity” to relate to intrinsic goals. Our attention rigidly serves the needs of our self-centered ego, rather than fully immersing ourselves in enjoyable activities for the sake of them. Only by centering our attention on external objects and goals can we build an autotelic personality so devoted to the present task that we’re indifferent to our perceived shortcomings and threats against the self.
Csikszentmihalyi mentions that Flow activities engage your mind and often your muscles, embodying you in the world. He calls the body an “instrument that puts us in touch with the rest of the Universe.” Without developed skills, our bodies are merely flesh. By learning how to use our bodies in complex, intricate ways, the capabilities we develop can be a source of limitless enjoyment.
Call to (Focused) Action
Much of Flow contrasts the enriching joys of optimal experience with the relatively empty pursuit of pleasure. In the nearly thirty years since its publication, opportunities for wasteful distraction have risen exponentially. Candy Crush, TikTok, and Netflix binges beckon constantly, not to mention legalized drugs and unlimited porn. While these outlets distract the mind, they do not lead to growth in our complexity of consciousness. They simply mute your psychic entropy. Flow activities, meanwhile, actually create new order and structure in your mind, both metaphorically and neurophysiologically speaking. You’re not just pausing the mental decay, you’re actively counteracting it.
Unfortunately, in our age of abundance, opportunities for mind-numbing pleasure abound. Csikszentmihalyi explains that the tremendous leisure industry that has emerged to fill our free time is not primarily designed for us, but to make money for others. He goes on:
Many leisure activities — especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media — are not designed to make us happy and strong…If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks.
Between unstimulating consumption and unproductive time at work, we collectively waste the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness each year. But we have a choice. By seeking out perfectly challenging Flow activities, we can deeply enjoy our lives and grow the complexity of our minds. Csikszentmihalyi explains that “the future belongs to the man who learns to use his leisure wisely.
The autotelic, intrinsically motivated person sets proactive goals that lead to more enjoyable Flow, whereas the average person’s goals are set by social conventions and biological drives. Csikszentmihalyi outlines four steps for developing an autotelic self:
Set clear goals to strive for (your own goals)
Become immersed in the activity
Pay attention to what’s happening to you, without worrying about outside perceptions
Learn to enjoy immediate experiences
When we pursue our own goals for intrinsic reasons, we bring harmony into our consciousness. Our feelings, thoughts, and actions snapping into alignment only reinforces this harmony. Rather than letting ourselves be pulled around by social conventions or threats to our ego, we can find Flow and boldly pursue goals that enrich our lives and the world around us. Not only does Flow bring enjoyment to our lives through optimal experience, we serve others in untold ways through our focused, purposeful achievement. Which could just be enough to make us truly happy.
Next time you’re preparing to binge a show or a six pack, consider the more enjoyable Flow activity you’re sacrificing on the altar of immediate pleasure.