Theories about the relation between flow, habit and addiction

Xiao Tan

Abstract
There’s always a blurry line between flow and addiction while the fine line between habit and addiction is already settled. The new CSI model describe the different roles of Challenge, Skill and Interest in this topic. I am still trying to find a way to add a fourth property to this model which may lead to the generation of a four-dimensional model.

1. The introduction of the new CSI model

The new model is based on a fundamental model covered in the material from the lectures: CS model or Flow Chart. The old CS model pointed out a clear area when Challenge and Skill reached a balance spot which is known as “flow area”. Above the “flow” section where Challenge is high and the Skill of individual is low indicates the part that individual gets anxiety and below the “flow” section where Challenge is low and the Skill of individual is high shows the part that individual gets boredom. So here is when an idea came to my mind that there should be a third variable considering this model. Otherwise there should not be anyone who is really excited about doing the work he/she is familiar to, since the Challenge is low and Skill of individual is high. In my point of view, there are a few personalities should be considered. However, what matters more among those characteristics is Personal Interest. Therefore, I am adding the third axis to the original Flow Chart: Interest, which makes the model to become a three-dimensional model.

Above is an example of the CSI Model after I put some theoretical data in the chart. The data should be acquired throughout some serious and meticulous research and investigation. But since this is a theoretical paper, I simply put some theoretical data that I acquired through my simulation in the chart.

The new CSI Model is designed to demonstrate the relations between Skill, Challenge and Personal Interest, so the whole chart can be divided into three different two-dimensional charts: Challenge-Skill chart, Skill-Interest chart, and Challenge-Interest chart.

Among these three charts, the Challenge-Skill chart is already discussed during the lecture. It indicates that as the challenge decreases, the individual is intended to get boring if the skill of this individual remains in a high level; in the other hand, the individual is going to be anxious if the challenge stays in the higher level that the individual’s skill is not ready to handle.

The Challenge-Interest chart that I carried out is a chart that shows the blurry line between frustration, target-orientation, and indifference. All of the hypotheses I mentioned here are based on the premises that the personal interest is actually increasing as the challenge increases and starts to decrease after the challenge reached a certain level. If the challenge keeps increasing without the certain increase on personal interest, it is likely to find that the individual is getting frustration, since the challenge is far beyond their acceptable capability and they have no motivation to solve the problems. However, if both personal interest and challenge stay at a low level, it will probably lead to “indifference” which means the individual totally does not care about the work and will finally result in low efficiency, bad working quality and depressed motivation. As I mentioned earlier, the personal interest starts to decrease after the challenge reached a certain level, so where is this certain challenge level? I call this certain challenge level “the Flow Point”. In my point of view, the reason why a person gets into “flow” depends not only on the person’s skill and the challenge of the mission, but also depends on Interest. The more interests an individual has on a certain target, the more likely the person will get into “flow” when he/she is trying to complete the work. So my best guess is the point that a person is most likely to get “flow” is the point when personal interest starts to decrease as the challenge level goes higher. With the balance between interests and challenge, an individual can experience a feeling that may be called “target oriented” which means the individual is fully aware of the work and has the motivation to dig into the problems. The phenomenon of people experiencing the “flow point” is hard to define, but I think there is no other word better than “excitement”. The example of this kind of phenomenon is easy to find; especially in the Sports competition, when athletes with professional skills competing with each other, they feel the excitement in their blood and that is when they reach “flow point” and gain extreme concentration.

The Skill-Interest chart came to my mind when I remembered one of the oldest saying in China: Interest is the best teacher of all time. The quotation is simply meaning that the strong interest can lead to a strong performance no matter in academic field or in other fields. But here is the idea of Skill-Interest chart: the more interest an individual has on a certain thing, the harder this individual may work on this certain object, therefore the skill that individual used on the work may be improved through time. However, the premises and context of this chart is not that simple. There are two different premises of this chart though all of which start from “low skill”, that is: starting with a low interest while obtaining interests and skills by doing the work, or starting with a high interest however losing interests while acquiring skills by doing the work. I used two different lines in this chart to represent both conditions which may break the whole chart into four parts. I referred to these four parts as: 3 minutes passion section, cliché section, hopeful/ambitious section, and sweet spot section.

The 3 minutes passion section is where individuals have low skills and somehow moderate interest towards a certain object. In this section, an individual is likely to develop a motivation I called “3 minutes passion” meaning that this individual may lose interest to the object easily if he/she does not have the tendency to proceed to the next section. This “3 minutes passion” phenomenon is quite frequent considering modern society, since a lot of people give up their dreams because “they are too difficult” or “they are not what I imagined”

The “3 minutes passion” section may take huge amount of people a long time to come out and proceed to the next section, but if individuals hang on and successfully overcome the difficulties in this section, there are two different sections they may enter: hopeful/ambitious section, and cliché section.

The hopeful/ambitious section is when personal interest of individual stays high and the skill of individuals’ increases to a certain level. There is a saying that with greater ability comes the greater responsibility, and I think that with greater ability also comes the greater hope of success and ambition. If an individual is strongly interested in something and he/she has a good skill to accomplish the goal, the ambition will certainly start to grow, because according to some research in psychology, human beings are mostly potentially seeking for “better” after they have achieved a “good”. One the other hand, the cliché section is when personal interest drops to a certain level while gaining some good skills of the work. When this happens, the people simply start to feel boring just as they are having a low challenge work with high individual skills.

Finally, when personal interests balance quite perfectly with skills, the individual reaches the “sweet spot” section where the individual gets into “flow” easier than ever and obtains super concentration on the target. This might not be a perfect example, but the sweet spot section in the Skill-Interest chart is somehow similar to the “sweet spot” in a sports game. At this point, the individual may experience confidence, satisfaction, concentration, and other different positive psychological feeling.

The ideal way to get a CSI model is through monitoring huge amount of data collection and merge the three sub-chart into a final CSI model. But since the paper is still remain in the theoretical process, the whole model is based on simulated data.

2. The Boredom Bouncing Effect
The Boredom Bouncing Effect is an interesting phenomenon that came to my mind and lead to the generation of my CSI model. I started to pay attention to this effect when I knew the “flow” phenomenon. As we all known, the right balance between challenge and skill can lead an individual to enter “flow”; high level of challenge with low level of skill may lead to anxiety of a person; and low level of challenge with high level of skill may cause an individual to feel bored. However, there is an interesting phenomenon among people, especially younger people playing video games, sports, or any leisure activities that including a certain level of competition. In this circumstance, we consider the level of competition as the level of challenge in the Challenge-Skill chart we mentioned above. Here’s something important: a friend of mine played a video game on his computer for a period of time; the game required the player to be cooperative, creative, and calm; my friend was quite interesting in this game, but as a matter of fact, he was a terrible player. So after a long time of struggle in the game, he quitted. He quitted the game because he feel the game “Boring”! The experience of my friend brought me a question: according to the Challenge-Skill chart that considering the “flow” effect, high level of challenge and low level of skills should lead to anxiety, but in fact my friend quit the game because of boredom, which should be resulted from having high level of skills with low level of challenge. So what happened?

After doing some research, I found that the phenomenon is not special. There are tremendous amount of people who actually feel boring when their skills are too poor for the mission they are asked to finish. I called this phenomenon “Boredom Bouncing”. You can simply imagine that the whole thing is like a ball bouncing to the ground, if it reaches the limit point, it will bounce back. So my hypothesis is that, there is a line – a bottom line that hold the level of individual’s mental position in Challenge-Skill chart. An individual gets anxiety because deep in mind this individual has the confidence or the cognition that he/she has the skill to finish the task. However, if the imbalance between level of challenge and skill goes across that “bottom line”, the individual will no longer feel anxious, instead, he/she feels boring.

3. Flow and Addiction
When I heard about the term “flow” the first time, I thought that this is exactly the same as addiction! The definition of Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. One of the characteristic of entering flow is losing the awareness of the time passing, which is another similarity to addiction. After I read a few materials and went all over the definition and examples of flow and addiction again, I think there should be a blurry line between flow and addiction which set this two thing apart. This blurry line could be crossed unconsciously so that people may not be aware of their current situation: whether they are in flow or addiction. I don't have a precise method to determine this blurry line between flow and addiction, since I haven’t done enough research in this area. But I do have a hypothesis considering about this boundary between flow and addiction: the blurry line between flow and addiction depends on the level of an individual’s self-control. In an easier expression, the blurry line between flow and addiction depends on who is in charge, you or the object that let you enter the flow. Take video games as an example: do you control the video games or the video games controls you? Playing video games does not matter; there are plenty of professional players who actually play the video games as their living. When those professional players gathering and having a competition, a lot of them get into the flow to help themselves focus. But without the game, they are just normal people. They have their own lives, parties, activities, and so on. In a word, they are taking control of the games. However, there are some people out there, who are so cared about the games they are playing that they forget eating, sleeping, communicating with family or other people outside; or even worse, losing the awareness of reality. I heard a tragedy that a college student in China threw himself from a 10-floor building and killed himself. Because after 72 hours behind a computer playing an online video game without eating or sleeping, he thought he was one of the characters in that game and had a special ability of flying. This kind of mental disorder caused him to “fly” out of his bedroom’s window and die. This is a real example of game taking control of the player and this is an example of addiction.

4. Summary
By adding a third variable to the original Challenge-Skill chart, the new CSI model considers the relations between challenge level, individual’s skill, and personal interests. With part of the help from CSI model, a phenomenon called “Boredom Bouncing” can be found when the level of challenge continue to increase while the individual has a low level of skills to finish the objects. The blurry line between flow and addiction should be considered with individuals’ self-control level. And after building the CSI model, a question should be asked is that whether there is a fourth variable that may affect the CSI model? If we add Time as the fourth element of the model, can we generate a four-dimensional model that can solve the addiction problem over time?

Reference
Brown, Stuart L., and Christopher C. Vaughan. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery, 2009. Print.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Print.