The Flow of You: A River’s Guide to Finding Focus, Joy, and Depth

We experiences moments stretching, when time seems to dissolve. Maybe you feel it while painting or playing sports, writing code, skating, dancing, cooking, or even when deeply absorbed in conversation. The world falls away and you lose thoughts of yourself, of space around you, and of time passing. You’re just fully present in it – a deep effortless absorption psychology calls flow.

Flow is a mental state where our attention, skills, and motivation align so completely we feel both focused and free. Psychology Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihályi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high") coined flow following interviews with especially creative, innovative and productive persons. A flowing river was a common metaphor describing their experiences with their work, “it was like floating” or “I was carried away.”

Flow isn’t forcing ourselves to concentrate. It’s not tediously grinding away at a boring homework assignment no matter how skilled you are. Flow is intrinsic motivation, when you have skills pushed by a challenge you find so meaningful and interesting it holds your attention.

When people experience flow, they often describe it as:

• Intense focus in the present
• Merging of ourselves with action (I am the writing, the music, the dance)
• Losing self-consciousness
• Sense of mastery and control
• Losing track of time (hours pass like minutes)
• Deep feeling of enjoyment and purpose

Flow is possibly the most productive and most emotionally nourishing state we can experience. Experiencing flow is linked to happiness, creativity, resilience, and intrinsic motivation (Csikszentmihályi, 1997; Fong et al., 2015).

Some people are naturally more prone to flow. While flow is a state of consciousness, dispositional flow is a personality traits, a general tendency to experience flow in daily life, but especially during meaningful work and hobbies (Moneta, 2017).

I enter flow regularly. When I’m roller skating I can find it jarring when the rink session ends like I didn't notice hours pass. I can lose myself in research design and statistics analysis. Some people find reaching flow foreign. It's an individual difference we can benefit from being aware of, like when I ask for quiet but somebody interrupts me from writing for “just for a minute.” They're not being mean. They just don't realize how it's not a minute I lose, but all my creativity vanishing as I lose flow.

Dispositional flow isn’t so much a talent or intelligence (Ullén et al., 2012), but how we relate to challenges, time, and ourselves.

Exactly how flow is trait is unclear, but we see correlates. People who are more easily hypnotized, more easily surrender to suggestions in the moment, enter flow more easily (Bowers et al., 2018). Sports Psychology describes successful athletes who can endure grueling training as having mental toughness, an ability to persevere through challenges, stay focused, and solve problems. And people who are mental tough enter flow more easily (Crust & Swann, 2013). So do people with high openness to new experiences.

We might describe a high tendency to experience flow as a personality trait with opposites: like intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation, and a focus on means versus ends. A person with little tendency to experience flow is exotelic, they derive satisfaction from achieving goals, but a person with a high tendency to experience flow is autotelic, they find fulfillment in the process of pursuing their goals (Tse et al., 2020).

I adapted measures from psychology studies of flow. You completed a self-report of your experience with flow and 7 sub-scales of autotelic personality. Let’s consider each to give you a map of your tendency toward and experience of flow.

You directly reported how often you feel you experience flow.

This subscale reflects your ability to direct and sustain focus. People with high attentional control can tune out distractions and stay centered in the task at hand. It’s a core ingredient of flow.

Being able to steer your attention, like holding the rudder of your mind steady, can help you enter flow more easily. You can build this capacity with small practices like meditation, mindfulness, and even just turning off notifications.

This subscale measured how easily you can transform feelings of boredom into moments of enjoyment, maybe by reframing the task, increasing the challenge, looking deeper, or finding personal meaning in the work.

Boredom is often seen as an enemy of learning, but considering flow, it becomes an opportunity. Boredom tells us what we're doing is too easy or lacking purpose.

This subscale reflects how much you embrace challenges—and even enjoy transforming them into personal growth. People high in this trait often meet hard things with energy and purpose.

If this trait feels low, that’s okay. Try framing challenges you face as invitations, rather than tests. Even a small “I wonder if I could…” can shift your current.

This subscale measures how often you approach the world with a sense of wonder. It reflects a love of learning, exploring, and asking big questions.

Curiosity can be quiet or loud. Try following even small “what if”s and “how come”s when they come to mind. They keep your internal river alive.

This subscale reflects how much your actions are fueled by your genuine interest and purpose, rather than rewards or pressure from others. It’s the heartbeat of flow.

If this score feels low, please don’t blame yourself. Ask of things you would like to achieve, “What would make this matter to me?” Intrinsic motivation grows where meaning and curiosity meet.

This subscale reflects how steadily you move through difficulty. It’s less about grit and more about endurance - sticking with what matters, even when it’s hard.

Persistence is practice. It often grows when we pause, breathe, and remember why we began.

This subscale reflects how freely we can act without worrying what others think. It’s about comfort in your own skin and maybe ignoring the judgements of others.

If self-consciousness trips you up, try intentionally giving attention to what you care about, rather than seeking it. Flow grows when we focus on the moment, not the mirror.

Your autotelic personality rating is simply an average of the seven facets of a personality giving you a tendency to experience flow. For our own growth, it’s probably less helpful than the facets, but it gives you an overall map of where you are in your journey towards flow.

Your flow profile isn’t a label imposed upon you. It’s a reflection. A way we can begin asking, “How does my energy catch fire?” and “Where am I pulled out of the moment?” and “What helps me stay in it?”

The scales don’t define you.They’re like stones along a riverbed - shaped by your experience, context, and choice. All of them can shift, and we can make them shift. For example, two facets show a gender differences and they fit gender role expectations. Men report greater enjoyment of facing challenges (majority 4.0 to 5.7 vs 3.7 to 5.1) and less feelings of self-consciousness when facing judgements of others (majority: 2.2 to 4.3 vs 1.9 to 4.2).

Some traits might feel more like your natural habitat. Others might feel unfamiliar. That’s okay. Flow is a process of tuning in, again and again, to the kinds of experiences making you feel real, alive, and fully engaged.

You don’t need to be a certain kind of person to experience flow. You just need to create the right conditions. Here are a few ways research and reflection suggest matter most:

Clear Goals: Know what you’re trying to do, even if you’re just “exploring” and “staying curious.”

Immediate Feedback: Notice when you feel you’re on the right track, not necessarily from others, but from the experience.

Balanced Challenge: Choose tasks not so hard they’re overwhelming but not so easy they’re boring

Focused Attention: Reduce distractions.

Bertrand Russell, a philosopher, had a habit of sitting at his typewriter alone and write for 15 minutes each morning. Many days, that’s all he would write. But some days he hit flow and that’s how he wrote over a hundred books and articles about everything from math and science to religion and politics.

Psychology researchers became fascinated with flow because our society cares about productivity and innovation. Clearly flow matters. But please remember flow doesn’t always look productive. Sometimes it’s resting so fully time vanishes. Sometimes it’s humming along to music while folding laundry.And sometimes its twirling in a skating rink.

Wherever you are now - you belong in this river.

Uneasy Feelings about Your Results?
Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.

Scholarly Information?
You're welcome to use Copernican Revolution activities and essays for your thesis and studies. Having information about scholarly aspects like psychometric data, activity design details, and norm calculations may help. The primary focus of my essays is connecting educated laypersons with psychology. To help people like you, with advanced academic interests, I add an appendix with each activity.

Abuhamdeh, S. (2000). The autotelic personality: A group of traits central to flow experience. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Claremont Graduate University.

Bowers, K. S., Laurence, J. R., & Hart, D. (2018). The experience of hypnotic involvement. In Nash, M. R., & Barnier, A. J. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis: Theory, Research, and Practice (pp. 273–299). Oxford University Press.

Buckingham, M., & Clifton, D. O. (2001). Now, discover your strengths. The Free Press.

Crust, L., & Swann, C. (2013). The relationship between mental toughness and dispositional flow. European Journal of Sport Science, 13(2), 215–220.

Csikszentmihályi, M. (1997). Finding flow: The psychology of engagement with everyday life. Basic Books.

Fong, C. J., Zaleski, D. J., & Leach, J. K. (2015). The challenge–skill balance and antecedents of flow: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 425–446

Moneta, G. B. (2017). Measuring flow in occupational settings: The Short Flow in Work Scale (SFWS). In Peifer, C., & Engeser, S. (Eds.), Advances in Flow Research (pp. 91–109). Springer.

Tse, D. C. K., Lau, V. W., Perlman, R., & McLaughlin, M. (2020). The development and validation of the autotelic personality questionnaire. Journal of Personality Assessment, 102(1), 88–101.

Ullén, F., de Manzano, O., Theorell, T., Harmat, L., & Madison, G. (2012). The physiology of effortlessness: Correlates of dispositional flow and skill-challenge balance. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 1–7.