Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Consciousness

• Instinct serves basic survival requirements– Sex

– Hunger

– Anger

– Joy

• Consciousness is the clearinghouse for all those sensations and perceptions. It gives us the ability to direct their course.

• Consciousness gives us the ability to direct attention.

“The shape and content of life depend

on how attention has been used.

Entirely different realities will emerge

depending on how it is invested.”

• This is a good day to die

• Adrenaline running

• Find out who I am

• The deepest sense of who you are

• Remember for the rest of your life

• As far as you’re concerned,

nothing else exists.

Flow is the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.

Characteristics of Flow states: – Challenge requiring skill

– Merging of Action and Awareness

– Clear Goals and Feedback

– Deep Concentration

– Loss of Self-Consciousness

– Transformation of Time

Why does flow improve us?

• It’s the key to happiness

– Complexity: differentiation and integration

– The autotelic life

– Liberation from social controls

Complexity

• Differentiation | a movement toward uniqueness

• Integration | to union with other people with ideas.

Differentiation Integration

Autotelic Life

• Greek terms: ‘auto’ meaning self and ‘telos’ meaning goal

• A self contained activity that is done without expectation of benefit

• Reward is in the act itself

Liberation from Social Controls

• Socialization | makes people dependent on social controls to have them respond predictably to rewards and punishments

• Liberation | Power returns to th person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces.

• Flow assist us in taking charge of consciousness and frees us from dictates of the body and social control.

Flow Summary

• Sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with challenges

• Goal-directed action system

• Concentration is so intense that no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant

• Self-consciousness disappears

• Sense of time distorted

• An activity that produces such experiences so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake with little concern for what they will get out of it – even when it’s difficult or dangerous.