What Are the Six Signs of Flow?

Steven Kotler defines flow, the term Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced, as an optimal state of consciousness where people feel their best and perform their best. It is rapt attention and total absorption. Focus gets so tight on the task that everything else fades, and mental, physical, and emotional performance rise together.

Csikszentmihalyi asked people around the world when they felt their best and performed their best, and found six core characteristics: complete concentration on the task, a merger of action and awareness, a smaller sense of self, distorted time, a feeling of control over things usually out of reach, and an autotelic quality. Autotelic means the experience is an end in itself. Flow feels so good that people go far out of their way to get more of it. He calls it the most addictive state on earth, and the six signs are how to tell whether a person or a team is in it.