Whenever information disrupts the consciousness by threatening its goals, we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy. It is a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention in pursuing its goals.

Psychic energy is attention. Anything that takes away our attention is using our psychic energy. The more psychic energy you can give to a thing, the more it will develop and grow. What you focus on expands.

A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness by distracting us with a problem, or it will create inner order by freeing up psychic energy for our goals. That’s the difference between feeling everything is in order or feeling lost.

The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. Flow is the psychology of optimal experience. It is the state of complete involvement. Where the skill matches the challenge. Time just seems to go by without you perceiving it. It is the experience in which you find what you’re doing as meaningful and enjoyable.

Flow helps to integrate the self because in the state of deep concentration, consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings and all the senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony. When the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and to the world in general.
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The experience of flow is usually the result of being involved in an autotelic activity. Auto and Telos is the greek words for Self and Goal. An autotelic activity is an activity by which itself is the goal. The purpose and meaning of it comes from doing it. It exist for the sake of being experienced. Doing it is its own reward.

Consciousness of self disappears and your awareness is totally wrapped up in the moment you are in. There is only the experience itself. Like dancing and singing. There is no longer the dancer but the dance itself, there is no longer the singer but the song itself. You become one with the activity and you are in harmony with everything within yourself and the universe.

People love to do things that put them in a state of flow because they are able to forget everything else that is unhappy or undesired and to just think only about the thing they are doing.

Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.

If you understand how it works, you can transform life by creating more harmony in it and to liberate the psychic energy that would otherwise be wasted in boredom or worry.

What makes activities conducive to flow is that they were designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve. They have rules that require the learning of skills, they set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible.

When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve. Work becomes purposeful and enjoyable. In flow, we are in control of our psychic energy, and everything we do adds order to consciousness.

The “battle” is not really against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is a battle for the self in establishing control over attention.[/hidepost]