Flow & Recovery

22 September 2021

There are (at least) three concepts discussed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that might be of value to those trying to change their lives.  Those concepts are flow, the power of self-knowledge, and the control of consciousness.  (I wrote six blogs on the Delphic Know Thyself in March-April of 2021, for those who want two takes on this idea.)

I see Csikszentmihalyi as the best-known inheritor of Maslow’s mantle.  Both show interest in how human beings evolve through life and how we reach our highest individual potential through self-actualization.  One of the key concepts Csikszentmihalyi raised for me is that those people with the greatest control of their own consciousness are likely to be the most independently well-spirited people.  Much of what we need to know about the control of consciousness is contained in his concept of flow, which we’ll look at today.  To help relate the concepts to recovery, my comments are bracketed; the rest is Csikszentmihalyi.

Over and over again, as people describe how it feels when they thoroughly enjoy themselves, they mention eight distinct dimensions of experience.  These same aspects are reported by Hindu yogis and Japanese teenagers who race motorcycles, by American surgeons and basketball players, by Australian sailors and Navajo shepherds, by champion figure skaters and by chess masters.  These are the characteristic dimensions of the flow experience:

1. Clear goals: an objective is distinctly defined; immediate feedback: one knows instantly how well one is doing.  [Similar to recovery: simple goal, constant feedback loop, harder than hell to begin.]
2. The opportunities for acting decisively are relatively high, and they are matched by one’s perceived ability to act.  In other words, personal skills are well suited to given challenges.  [In recovery, lapses are great resources for highlighting absent skills or skills needing development e.g., reading your own internal tension level ASAP; developing the self-discipline to change contexts immediately when rumination begins...notice his use of the word “perceived.”]
3. Action and awareness merge; one-pointedness of mind.  [Especially true during withdrawal and urges to use.]
4. Concentration on the task at hand; irrelevant stimuli disappear from consciousness, worries and concerns are temporarily suspended. [As above, during the tough times, the goal and the distraction are crystal clear.  Your job is to redirect your focus to the goal: healthy recovery.]
5. A sense of potential control.  [You probably remember your first 24 hours of sobriety.  That day was much harder than today, and you got through it.]
6. Loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of ego boundaries, a sense of growth and of being part of some greater entity.  [In your best moments of sobriety and recovery, when you feel I’ve got this, there is a sense of power over self and of belonging that you want to remember.  It’s elusive and unpredictable but when it rocks, it rocks!]
7. Altered sense of time, which usually seems to pass faster.
8. Experience becomes autotelic [self + end-based or goal directed]: If several of the previous conditions are present, what one does becomes autotelic, or worth doing for its own sake (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, 2018, p. 178-179).  [In an entirely valid sense, as virtue is its own reward, so is recovery its own reward because both aim at the same destination: being well.]

A funny thing happened on the way through that list.  I realized that to many readers that list also describes the experience of getting high during addiction.  Which is a really interesting example of why more researchers are seeing addiction as a learned coping mechanism rather than a disease.  But, of course, there’s a HUGE difference between getting high and finding your own flow zone: addiction destroys your life while productively directed attention, flow—toward creative ends—enhances your life.  The idea is to learn new coping mechanisms so effective that they—you—create positive flow.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.