Mihaly Chickson and Mihaly Lai, a teacher at Claremont University in California, put forward and developed the flow theory. He has been paying attention to the positive psychological experience of human beings and has completed a lot of classic research work. He is an authoritative scholar in this field.

About this book

This book systematically expounds the flow theory and the conditions for entering the flow state, and tells people how to enter the flow state from the aspects of daily life, leisure and entertainment, work and interpersonal relationship. For professionals, it is an indispensable theoretical material for understanding positive psychology; For ordinary readers, this is an action guide to improve happiness. Since the publication of 1990, it has been translated into more than 30 languages, affecting many people.

Core content

Flow can bring us a positive life experience, thus injecting a steady stream of spiritual strength into us and improving the quality of life.

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Flow: Best Experience Psychology, the first work of mihaly csikszentmihalyi Lai on flow theory, is a world-class leader in positive psychology.

What's the use of knowing flow? Perhaps you will find that modern people are always in two unhappy States, either because life is dull and boring, or because of too much pressure and anxiety. And the flow theory can resist these unpleasant experiences. Because Mihaly found that concentration can bring happiness.

This book has 200,000 words. I will tell you the core point of this book in 25 minutes: flow can bring us positive life experiences, thus injecting us with a steady stream of spiritual strength and improving the quality of life.

The so-called flow refers to such a state that when people concentrate on doing something, they are immersed in it. This word means flowing in English. You see, expressing that natural psychological feeling is not very vivid. It's like an invisible ocean current at the bottom of the sea. As long as you stay focused on buoyancy, the current can take you swimming under the sea.

Mihaly observed that many top artists, athletes, writers and presenters had such experiences. In fact, you must have had experience of flow, such as drawing, playing chess, surfing the Internet and playing games. When you forget the time, eat or go to the toilet, you are already in the flow.

Mihaly's innovation lies in: firstly, he clearly and accurately describes what psychological experiences people will have in the flow state, extracts the core elements of the flow experience, and systematically expounds what preconditions are needed to realize the flow experience. Secondly, he uses rigorous scientific methods to study flow, such as empirical sampling, which is to record people's flow experience in daily life. It takes a lot of time and energy to collect such data, and the team led by Mihaly has accumulated a lot of valuable data in decades. Therefore, Mihaly made human's understanding of the phenomenon of mobility transcend the level of daily observation and enter the category of scientific research for the first time.

Let's talk about the flow theory from three aspects: first, let's discuss what kind of people can reach the realm of happiness. Only those who learn to control consciousness can decide their own life experience and reach the realm of happiness; Secondly, let's talk about how to control consciousness. The optimal experience can resist the spiritual entropy and keep the consciousness orderly; Thirdly, let's see what conditions need to be created to have the best experience, that is, traffic can appear.

first part

Only those who learn to control consciousness can decide their own life experience and reach the realm of happiness.

We say that to improve the life experience, the foothold lies in the experience. Experience is how people feel about life. It is purely subjective. Whether you are a genius or an ordinary person, it is only related to yourself, but this experience is also your truest feeling. In the final analysis, the happiness we get from life depends on how the brain filters and explains daily experiences. Everyone goes through it every day. Happiness is like an indicator to evaluate the quality of experience. If a person's life experience is not good, there will naturally be no happiness.

Then let's look at the root of human unhappiness, which is why we feel that the experience is not good. To put it bluntly, the creation of the universe was not based on human comfort. From the perspective of biological evolution, our ancestors, like other creatures, survived on this dangerous earth. In addition to avoiding disasters, they must always fight viruses and microorganisms.

Mihaly made a particularly interesting comparison between human and animal consciousness. Under the same harsh conditions, animals just act by instinct and don't think about information unrelated to survival. For example, when a lion is hungry, he just stares at his prey. When he was full, he just lay there in the sun, totally absorbed in the warm sunshine. He hasn't evolved to feel depressed and desperate. As long as there is no external threat, animals can play to their heart's content. You see, the only animal that will cause trouble for itself is human, because the nervous system is too developed compared with animals. Although sensitivity is beneficial to human survival, it also brings bad services to people's hearts. Because human beings only control the external environment for survival, this cannot reduce the sense of chaos brought by the world. In other words, the physiological mechanism of natural selection is only used to serve survival and reproduction, and has no function of increasing happiness.

Of course, nature is not a cold-blooded tyrant. In the process of human evolution, there are still some opportunities to enjoy happiness, that is, sensory enjoyment, such as tasting food and wine, having a rest after eating and drinking, and experiencing sexual pleasure. There are also some people who think that happiness is happiness. Mihaly thinks this is a misinterpretation of happiness. He saw clearly that the essence of people's pursuit of pleasure is actually a reward mechanism set by genes for the continuation of species.

For example, when you are enjoying delicious food, this happiness is to replenish energy for your body and survive. A man is attracted by a beautiful girl and enjoys the beauty of sexual relations. In fact, it is also the layout of genes, in order to encourage fertility and reproduce. There is nothing wrong with enjoying happiness in this behavior pattern from stimulus to response, but this happiness is fleeting and has nothing to do with your long-term happiness. People who are immersed in it are actually led by physiological desires and can't resist the instructions of genes when necessary. How can you say that they chose their own life experience?

Let's look at the root of human unhappiness from a sociological point of view. Facing the vast universe, human beings are always small, and this sense of powerlessness can be read from many ancient myths and religions. Whether Eskimos, hunters in the Amazon basin, Indians, Australian aborigines and China ancestors, they all used myths to build an orderly world and thought that we were the center of the universe. This culture has played a spiritual protection role, protecting her people from worrying about extreme living conditions. It can also be said that this is an extreme social control. Of course, this is ancient times, and human beings have long been far away from the cruel living conditions in ancient times. Living safely is not a problem, but human beings still have growing desires. While ordinary people were still on the verge of starvation, cyrus the great in ancient Persia kept 10,000 chefs.

Nowadays, it is not difficult to enjoy such VIP treatment. When you have enough food and comfortable accommodation, will you be satisfied? Not exactly. Most people will still fall into a vicious circle of rising expectations. The more they get, the more they want. Obviously, although the material strength of human beings has increased thousands of times, the improvement of inner experience has not been significantly improved. Society drives people to pursue more wealth, which is also Mihaly's misinterpretation of happiness.

In modern civilization, wealth and status are important symbols of happiness. People think that with money, life can be changed. Is there a reasonable basis for the formation of this cognition? There is a fable that Midas prayed to God to become the richest man. God gave him the ability to turn stone into gold, and everything he touched turned into gold. He was ecstatic, but he soon starved to death. Because all the food he touched turned into gold. You see, the old fable has long told us that controlling external conditions will not make people live better.

More and more surveys show that after people's wealth reaches a certain level, happiness will not increase with the continuous growth of wealth. In other words, social acceptance is not necessarily related to the quality of life. Mihaly, the author, thinks that it is only a means of social control to gain happiness by acquiring wealth, and happiness is used as bait to immerse people in it. For example, on the one hand, banks shape us as citizens who strive to make money and save money, on the other hand, businesses encourage us to spend our hard-earned money. If you only pursue what society thinks you should pursue, then even if you get these, your satisfaction comes from the recognition of others, and your spiritual life is controlled by society after all.

Therefore, the misunderstanding of social control and gene drive has been clarified. Perhaps you have found that happiness can only be realized when you are the master of your own consciousness. In order to survive in a complex society, human beings really have to endure and sacrifice to achieve some goals, but Mihaly believes that we should not become a puppet because it will only make ourselves a tool to be used. More importantly, don't aim at social returns, but aim at the returns that you can control, and let the power to control self-awareness return to your own hands. The same is true of the physiological desire to get rid of gene drive. Being the master of our own consciousness means that we have the freedom to decide the connotation of our life experience.

Therefore, Mihaly's first point of view is that only those who learn to control consciousness can decide their own life experience, so as to reach the realm of happiness. In the final analysis, the happiness we get from life depends on how the brain filters and explains daily experiences. Our inner harmony has nothing to do with our ability to control the universe, because we only control the external environment of our existence, which can not reduce the sense of chaos brought by the world. Immersing ourselves in the pleasure brought by genes can only bring us temporary happiness, and chasing the wealth goal recognized by society also makes people become puppets of social control. Therefore, the pursuit of inner harmony can only start with controlling consciousness and become your own master.

In order to control consciousness, we need to understand how human consciousness works. Mihaly's greatest innovation in flow theory is to use the concept of "entropy" in physics to consider consciousness, and put forward the concept of "spiritual entropy" to refer to the disordered state of consciousness, which is also the highlight of this book. Next, let's take a look at how the optimal experience resists spiritual entropy and keeps consciousness orderly.

the second part

First, let's explain what "entropy" is. In physics, entropy represents a measure of disorder. Maybe you've heard of the law of conservation of energy. The energy in nature will not decrease or increase, but will only transform into each other. This is the first law of thermodynamics. Then there is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that hot objects will automatically transfer heat to cold objects, and there will be losses in the process of energy conversion, so the concentration of objects always tends to spread, the structure tends to disappear, and the order tends to be out of order. This disordered quantity is entropy. Therefore, in the spontaneous physical process, entropy is always increasing.

This may be a bit abstract. When applied to the level of consciousness, you can simply understand that consciousness is also becoming disordered and chaotic spontaneously. This is the concept of spiritual entropy put forward by Mihaly. Once consciousness becomes disordered, it means that people's hearts lose order and become restless, which is the bad experience brought by spiritual entropy. It must be said that exploring the inner order of human beings from the perspective of physics is indeed a great pioneering work of Mihaly, and no one has ever thought of psychological activities like this. If you think this is too mysterious, we can still explain it from a psychological point of view.

As we all know, the amount of information that the brain can process at the same time is limited. Using the current technology to measure the working efficiency of the central nervous system of the brain, we can observe that it can only process 126 bits of information in one second. According to a person who lives to 70 years old and stays awake 16 hours every day, he can only process185 billion bits of information in his life. And the average person actually uses his brain, which is even lower than this. So everyone has to go through so many things, and what information you allow to enter your consciousness is directly related to your life experience. It is your attention that guards this door. It will pick out the information you need from the millions of bits of information you touch every day and send it to your consciousness. At the same time, search relevant data in your memory, evaluate this information and make a decision. Attention drives your thoughts, feelings and decisions.

Since the brain capacity is limited, attention is a kind of spiritual energy. If you can control it, focus on what is useful to you at any time and place, and let this information help you achieve your goal, then your consciousness can play its greatest role. If used well, it can be a tool to enhance life experience. On the contrary, if you are always disturbed by external information, even if these irrelevant information conflicts with your established goals, you can't work hard to achieve your goals. We usually say fear, anger, anxiety, jealousy and so on, will also emerge.

For example, a young man loves a girl and will do whatever it takes to win her heart. If a fashionable new car can interest a girl, a young man may make money to buy a car as his goal. However, hard work has occupied his fixed climbing time every week. When his mountaineering teammates complain that he always doesn't take part in group activities, he will have a new idea of choosing between girls and leisure life, and his goal will change with the new situation. Do you think the young man's experience will be good at this time? Probably not, not even good. For this young man, making money to buy a car is the most important goal. Once he loses his job, he cannot catch up with the girl he loves. So making money is the most important part of maintaining his internal order. But his attention must be free to eliminate crises, such as the dissatisfaction of teammates, such as his unwillingness to lead a sudden busy life, which consumes most of his energy and reduces his attention to work. At this time, he has actually entered the so-called "inner disorder" state in psychology, that is, his attention is forced to shift to the wrong direction, and he will no longer work hard towards the established goal, and his spiritual energy will be difficult to condense.

This tangled experience can be seen everywhere. For example, if you work overtime, you will write a copy there. You may have countless thoughts in your mind: I lost the game again last night. Why am I working overtime here alone? Will the boss praise me when I finish writing this document? Another example is having a drink with friends after work. While thinking about not coming home early, I feel guilty. At the same time, I am angry at wasting time and money, and all kinds of ideas are running around mentally. After careful analysis, your attention is divided by other trivial matters, or thinking about the results, or calculating the gains and losses, which makes it difficult for you to concentrate on the current thing, so it is difficult to have inner peace.

Both the internal disorder defined from the psychological point of view and the concept of spiritual entropy borrowed from physics are the same. The huge human consciousness system needs order, and the disordered state will make people uneasy, cause great harm to themselves, and make people unable to concentrate, achieve any goals, or have a good experience. Besides, Mihaly said that spiritual entropy is the normal state, which is simply terrible. If we don't do something, doesn't it mean that we will always fall into a chaotic consciousness and be tortured by entanglement?

Fortunately, physicist Schrodinger saw the counterexample in nature and put forward the concept of negative entropy, which is a trend from disorder to order. For example, in the vast universe, the phenomenon of life is a miracle, transforming solar energy into biological energy and developing orderly life from disorder. So what is the opposite of spiritual entropy? That was the best experience. The so-called optimal experience is just the opposite of spiritual entropy. You can understand it as the negative entropy of spirit. It is a state in which the information you receive matches the established goal. At this time, spiritual energy will continue to emerge, and you no longer need to worry or doubt your ability, so you can keep your consciousness in order. This kind of positive feedback can make you pay more attention to and take care of the balance between your inner and outer environment. The best experience also has a name, and that is flow.

You may have played Tetris. Recall that in this game, you didn't save the princess or kill the dragon, and the only result was death. But why do you still like to play? Because of the difficulty and skill of constant adjustment, you have entered a state of flow. In order to experience the happiness of the process, the result is not important. See, this is the psychological mechanism that flow can enhance experience. To put it bluntly, concentration makes people happy, and attention can always stay in the present, without thinking about the result or being distracted. The inner feeling of unity produces a wonderful experience. You won't feel happy when you are in the flow of your heart, because you are so absorbed in your work that you forget whether you are happy or not. But after the task is completed, when you reflect on what just happened, you will have a sense of satisfaction in your heart, which will make you happy.

This is our second point. The optimal experience can resist the spiritual entropy and keep the consciousness orderly. The huge human consciousness system needs order. Disorder will make people uneasy. After a long time, it will do great harm to themselves, and people will no longer be able to concentrate, achieve any goals, or have a good experience. Mihaly invented the word psychological entropy to describe the disordered state of consciousness. He also developed the concept of best experience to counter the disorder of consciousness. Concentration can make people happy. When you devote yourself wholeheartedly to one thing, spiritual energy can emerge continuously. This is flow.

So, when will flow occur?

the third part

Maybe you will think that the happiest moment in life is when you can think nothing and relax completely. In fact, although I feel happy at this time, the best experience does not happen at this time. When a person works hard for a difficult task and exerts his physical strength and intelligence to the extreme, the best experience will appear. Only at this time can people feel that they have the ability to control their actions and dominate their own destiny. This is the best experience. It is entirely created by human beings themselves. Like a swimmer setting a new record, a climber climbed to the top of the mountain. They don't feel happy when fighting, and they may be sore and tired, but after the activity, they will feel particularly satisfied and even realize that this is the best moment in their lives. This accumulated life experience has reached a sense of participation that determines the meaning of life by itself, which is the closest state to happiness that people can imagine.

So what conditions does the emergence of traffic need to meet? First of all, let's talk about the first condition of traffic, that is, clear goals. Psychological experiments have found that when a person is relatively forced to do something, the worst experience is that there is nothing to do and no purpose. As the saying goes, without vitality, he will fall into negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and boredom. And people with clear goals have high self-esteem. William james, an American philosopher and psychologist, said that the strength of self-esteem depends on the ratio of expectations of success. Because the goal is set too high and the number of successes is too small, this person's self-esteem has not been satisfied for a long time and his experience is naturally poor. On the contrary, if there is no goal, let alone the satisfaction of self-esteem. It can be seen that the goal is important to a person. Whether the goal of action is active or passive, it is better than aimless action.

When people face a clear goal, they will take some measures to achieve it. For example, a climber will set himself the goal of reaching the summit, so that he will know what equipment the organization has, which route to take and prepare for possible difficulties. At this time, the heart is clear.

The second is immediate feedback, which can let people know whether they are doing well or not immediately after each step is completed. Climbers know that their position rises with each climb. Clear goals and timely feedback complement each other. Without clear and simple goals, there can be no feedback-because you don't know if you have achieved it. Most people will not stick to their goals easily, because their goals are vague and uncertain. For example, fitness, "try your best every time" is an ambiguous goal, and your brain needs to think repeatedly "Have you tried your best?" It is difficult to invest; However, if the goal is: "each group 12 times, rest for 30 seconds between groups, and put it down if it really doesn't work", this is a clear goal that can be fed back. Real-time feedback can keep you from being confused and always know what you are doing.

In addition to clear goals and immediate feedback, there is also a condition to help realize flow, which is the matching of the difficulty and ability of the challenge. High ability to do things with low challenges is easy to be bored, while low ability to do things with high challenges is easy to be anxious. If doing something is either boring or anxious, how can this experience keep you going? Between anxiety and boredom, there is a magical space in which people can easily enter a state of concentration, which is the flow channel of the mind. More precisely, when the difficulty is slightly higher than the skill 5%- 10%, it is most likely to flow. Those who strive to reach the top also find a balance between challenge and ability.

When the goal is clear, you can get immediate feedback, the challenge and ability are equal, and the three conditions for creating flow are met, people's attention will begin to gather and gradually enter a state of undivided flow. By this time, you have achieved the unity of body and mind, and you can't tolerate irrelevant thoughts and emotions at all. Even you have disappeared, but you feel stronger than usual. The past two hours seem to be only two minutes, and everything will be worth a hundred times, because doing things has become an end in itself, which is an ultimate experience. It is like a magnet, attracting you to exert your superb skills and take the initiative to meet challenges.

Why is it difficult for people to get flow experience now? When I was a child, the fun of being attracted by one thing seemed to disappear. Because it takes a lot of energy to make the heart flow channel appear. People prefer to fill their heads with ready-made movie plots and entertainment programs, and enjoy themselves passively, instead of turning their attention to the more exhausting but rewarding flow experience. This is our third point. Clear goals, immediate feedback, challenges and cooperation of abilities create a flow experience.

abstract

This period ends here. Let's review the key points of book flow.

In the book Flow, Mihaly discussed the happiest time of human beings. First of all, Mihaly thinks that only those who learn to control consciousness can decide their own life experience and reach the realm of happiness. In the final analysis, the happiness we get from life depends on how the brain filters and explains daily experiences. Our inner harmony has nothing to do with our ability to control the universe, because we only control the external environment of our existence, which can not reduce the sense of chaos brought by the world. Immersing ourselves in the pleasure brought by genes can only bring us temporary happiness, and chasing the wealth goal recognized by society also makes people become puppets of social control. Therefore, the pursuit of inner harmony can only start with controlling consciousness and become your own master.

Secondly, being able to resist spiritual entropy is the best experience, which can keep consciousness in order. The huge human consciousness system needs order. Disorder will make people uneasy. After a long time, it will do great harm to themselves, and people will no longer be able to concentrate, achieve any goals, or have a good experience. Mihaly invented the word psychological entropy to describe the disordered state of consciousness. He also developed the concept of best experience to counter the disorder of consciousness. Concentration can make people happy. When you devote yourself wholeheartedly to one thing, spiritual energy can emerge continuously. This is flow.

When will there be traffic? Mihaly found that when there are clear goals, immediate feedback, challenges and ability matching, there will be a flow experience. If you want to create more flow experiences, you should find ways to make what you are doing meet these conditions.