Flow State (Psychology)

Notes

• Is a mental state in which a person is performing an activity:
  • fully immersed;
  • high focus;
  • full involvement and enjoyment.
• It's the most efficient state when doing a task.
• Lose awareness of all other things.
• The person may lose the sense of time.
• Named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975.
• Three conditions have to be met to achieve a flow state:
  1. Clear goals and progress.
  2. Clear and immediate feedback.
  3. The task difficult must match the person's skill level.
     • If task difficult < person skill: boredom.
     • If task difficult = person skill: flow.
     • If task difficult > person skill: anxiety.
• According to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, we can process about 110 bits of information per second.
  • Person in flow state decided to use all these bits on the task.
  • There is no more attention to be allocated.

References

• Flow (psychology)
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow, the secret to happiness

Backlinks

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