The 9 Psychological Aspects of Optimal Experience
How to avoid boredom and monotony and obtain a higher state of human experience.
Photo by Pascal Habermann on Unsplash
How to avoid boredom and monotony and obtain a higher state of human experience.
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We all know what enjoyment feels like, or at least we think we do.
As our western industrialised consumer culture influences of our concepts of life and work, we have developed a mixed up idea of what constitutes relaxation and enjoyment.
Within our framework for living, we primarily believe that work is hassle and toil, something we’d rather not do given the choice. The opposite of work is rest and enjoyment which usually consists of relaxing on the couch, watching TV, scrolling through social media or socialising etc.
Relaxing for some may involve high-risk-to-health activities such as drinking alcohol, taking drugs, engaging in frivolous sex, excessive shopping and various other compulsive behaviours.
But these activities which most of us associate with enjoyment and relaxation are frivolous, generally of low complexity, non-challenging and passive in nature.
In other words, to engage with these activities doesn’t involve high-level mental capacity or physical effort and brings little if any positive development of the self.
As such, we live our lives pogo-sticking between laborious daily work we hate and frivolous attempts to escape it. Then when we are suddenly presented with a challenge, we have a meltdown.
We find we are incapable of producing an adequate response.
In ordinary everyday life, we feel a constant low-level psychological disturbance, one that’s just about tolerable.
At worst we feel isolated, anxious and depressed, aliens in a hostile world. At best life is just about manageable.
Creativity in Optimal Experience
The human experience seems to consist of relentless unfulfillment and dissatisfaction broken by the occasional spattering of relief from a two-week summer break or Friday nights at the bar.
Why is this?
Why do we willingly forego our own happiness for the sake of work we don’t like and then engage in behaviour that just makes it worse?
Are we meant to merely survive and pay bills?
That’s hardly a reason enough for living, let alone working.
My curiosity regarding the nature of the human condition with respect to happiness in work has led me to research by Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
In the early 1990s, funded by the Spencer Foundation, Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues set out on a four-year research project to establish how the process of creativity unfolded over a lifetime.
The results of which, coupled with 30 years of creativity research, were to culminate in the 1996 publication, Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery & Invention.
In the course of the research, high achieving participants were asked to choose from a list of feelings that best described the sensation they felt when engaged in their work or activity.
The most frequent answer returned, Csikszentmihalyi says, was “designing or discovering something new.”
This seems accurate.
I am an ordinary everyday unknown, and I engage in work such as writing and drawing and making stuff because I enjoy it.
The skills I use, for example in my daily work that pays the bills, I have been using for 30+ years. The work can be said to be the same but the situation is always different.
The solution I must employ from job to job and from place to place always varies and in that there is challenge.
When I sit down to write, the task of hitting the keys on the keyboard is the same, but the reaching and grasping for words to form meaning and convey a message is different every time.
In that, there is constant self-discovery.
I get lost in it.
Novelty seems to create itself through the uniqueness that is you and me.
As such, the world cannot help but be diverse. The exception to this is where you and I try to emulate others — becoming carbon copies just to fit in and be accepted.
The goal for us, therefore in our work, is to reach optimal experience as often as possible.
“The optimal experience is what I have called flow, because many of the respondents described the feeling when things were going well as an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.
- Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi
The 9 Psychological Aspects of Optimal Experience
Csikszentmihalyi suggests that truly creative people, the ones who stand out against the backdrop of mediocrity (my words not his), are the ones who are motivated by the enjoyment that comes from confronting challenges.
Without them, he says, there is no evolution of culture or progress in thought or feeling. Therefore he askes, of what does enjoyment in the optimal experience of Flow involve?
It is from this material that I offer you The following 9 Psychological Aspects of Optimal Experience as laid down by Csikszentmihalyi, expounded upon by (ahem) some of my personal experience.
Participants in the research, artists, sportspeople, academics, and ordinary working people reported in almost identical terms, their experience of Flow in the course of their work.
Researchers found nine main elements that were mentioned many times over in describing how enjoyment feels.
#1 Clear Goals Exist
In the flow state, we appear to always know what needs to be done. Tasks are goal-directed and bounded by rules. There is, in the majority of cases, clarity of purpose.
These goal-directed activities require skills that have taken many years to develop, to such an extent that the work almost performs itself.
I can relate to this.
In my daily work, I often find myself disappeared. Absent for a short period in a particular task and find all of a sudden that whatever it is seems to be doing itself.
In contrast, I also find times I am completely lost in something ordinary, like the birch trees on my road moving in the breeze, for no apparent reason. Csikszentmihalyi calls this “a spontaneous sense of wellbeing”.
#2 Feedback
Although Csikszentmihalyi talks in the book about the immediate feedback of high-intensity sports such as tennis, feedback is not always so sharp and initial.
When I draw, the feedback I need is not always apparent straight away. It takes time and I won’t see the compound result of 15 mins work until I stop and stand back.
When I draw, feedback is slower, but it is there and it provides direction even though I may not have a clear path to the completed drawing.
Csikszentmihalyi admits that what constitutes feedback is often considerably different from domain to domain.
#3 Balance of Challenge & Skill
This component refers to the matching of our skill level to the challenge at hand. If, for example, we are engaged in a task we are not sufficiently skilled to complete there can be frustration.
On the other hand, if we are over-skilled for the task, there is a lack of stimulation and no growth is possible.
We get bored.
No one enjoys a game in which they get well beaten. Similarly, we don’t enjoy winning by too much. A fine balance, a nip-and-tuck affair is what we are after.
#4 Action & Awareness Merge
In the flow state, one-pointedness of mind is required. There is no room for concern about other things we think we should be doing.
When our skills are required right here and now to deal with the challenges of the situation, we are completely absorbed. Csikszentmihalyi says there is no available psychic energy available for other tasks.
Well, there goes the argument for multitasking!
As a result of this absorption in the activity, behaviour becomes spontaneous, we are consumed quite literally by the task and feedback is immediate. There is no time for consideration.
I feel this way when I draw.
“So much of what we ordinarily do has no value in itself, and we do it only because we have to it, or we expect some future benefit.”
- Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi
#5 Loss of Self Consciousness
In normal everyday life, most human beings have great concern for how they are perceived by the social unit.
We are hiding behind a social mask ready to defend ourselves against attack from our peers and other members of society. Typically, Csikszentmihalyi says, this awareness of self is a burden.
In a flow state, we are too concerned with the activity for the ego to have any influence over our focus and concentration. Once the condition of flow has completed, we can be said to be more centred, more complex than we were before.
Paradoxically, the self expands as a result of ego exclusion during flow.
#6 No Concern For Failure
When engaged completely in an activity, there is no concern for failure. There is only a feeling of complete control of the circumstances.
The idea of failure doesn’t even come into play. This is in contrast to what might otherwise be called arrogance - fear of failure in disguise.
With arrogance, we have already lost.
In a state where we feel merged with the work, there is, as mentioned earlier, no room for thought about the right or wrong move.
There is no mental commentary. We are one with our truest self.
#7 Distractions Are Excluded
We touched on this already. Enjoyment in a flow experience comes about as a result of intense concentration on the present. There is no room for idle thoughts about the weather or our financial problems.
One of the participants, a climber, describes it as follows;
It’s a Zen feeling, like meditation or concentration. Somehow the right thing is done without you even thinking about it or doing anything at all…It just happens.
Csikszentmihalyi says, there appears to be a loss of the sense of self separate from the world, a oneness with the environment. Here, distraction simply doesn’t come into play.
Another note to add regarding distraction is our limited attention capacity. As such, creative people are often considered rude, short-tempered and selfish.
Csikszentmihalyi says that these are not personality traits of creative people, but rather traits we attribute to them on the basis of our perceptions and expectations.
It is the demands of their role and the intensity of their work that often means less attention for others. Creative people, he says, tend to be caring and sensitive.
#8 Timelessness
I love this one.
When I’m writing or drawing or engaged in my daily work at my absolute highest, I lose time completely.
Take for example writing this article; I have been at it for hours, I know I have but I have no care for time. Exactly how much time I don’t know, but often when I come out of my office at the back of the garden the whole family are gone to bed.
I think; Jesus, how long have I been in there!
Csikszentmihalyi’s participants report that time seems to become distorted, it doesn’t pass as it usually does in the surface level world of ordinary mortals (my words again).
The rhythm and pace of the activity dictate our actions in the flow state. Clocks and outside worldly measures fall away as we are taken by the activity.
Hours pass in what seems to be minutes.
#9 Activity Becomes Autotelic
Left to last, a key aspect of optimal experience and perhaps the most significant one is the engagement in the act for its own sake. Optimal experience is an end in itself.
An autotelic experience is one that is self-contained and is not engaged with out of expectation of future reward, but simply because the doing in of itself is reward enough.
When you and I are having an autotelic experience we are paying attention to the activity right here and now. Our mental capacities are undiluted by future consequences.
In other words, if you make art primarily because of the response you expect, you are not making art.
“Loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self. what slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of the self.”
- Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi
In Conclusion
I received particular value from this book and from the related book, Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness, especially from sections dealing with the creative personality and the flow of creativity.
Some of the reports on the creative process from contributing artists, writers and scientists I have resonated with also.
However, where it failed in the reporting of the creative process for me, was in its significant lean towards a competition-based purpose for creative work and the highlighted importance of validation of creative work by critics and peers.
In his closing remarks, Csikszentmihalyi insists that, quote;
“As you can learn to operate within a domain, your life is certainly going to become more creative…”
I wouldn’t be so certain about that Milhaly, carry on.
“…but it should be repeated that this does not guarantee creativity with a capital c. You can be personally creative as you please, but if the domain and field fail to cooperate — as they most always do — your efforts will not be recorded in the history books.”
It’s his book and he can write what he wants, but in the differentiation between what Csikszentmihalyi calls “big C” and “little c” creativity, the true reason for creative expression is lost.
Although he does acknowledge that for most of his subjects, their engagement in their domain of choice was primarily for its inherent enjoyment, he keeps coming back to broader acceptance as being a vital component.
I think perhaps many academics crave peer acceptance and validation and maybe he is voicing his own inherent desires here rather than a universal prerequisite for valid creative expression.
Csikszentmihalyi also refers to luck (several times in both books) as being a component in your commercial success as artists.
What!
I have real trouble with this word and find it remarkable that an academic of his stature would choose to use it.
I may write further on the nonsensical nature of this word, luck. For now, though, suffice it to say that luck is a cheap and nasty wastebasket term used to explain phenomena that we don’t yet understand.
If we are going to use the concept of luck in the reporting of research, we might as well go back to believing in a white-bearded old man sitting on a cloud bestowing fortune and misfortune on us at his discretion.
Final Words
Creativity is fundamentally a means of self-expression and self-definition in the face of what we are not.
Creative expression, the process and the result, are the outward manifestation of something which ultimately cannot be expressed. Such is why we continue to evolve as a species.
Outwardly we expand from the known to the unknown.
We fill the vacuum.
The creative process to me is gestalt, and although we find enjoyment and stimulation from its exploration, we will never get to its core.
For if we did then the cat would be out of the bag. The mystery and curiosity would be lost and life would cease to exist.
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