This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is psychic entropy? How can psychic entropy sabotage your goals?
When you encounter information that doesn’t fit with your goals, it can cause psychic entropy or disorder. Long-term disruptions to consciousness may cause you to abandon a goal entirely.
Here is more information about psychic entropy with real-life examples.
What Is Psychic Entropy?
You evaluate every piece of information you encounter to determine whether it supports or threatens your goals. When you encounter information that doesn’t fit with your goals, it can cause psychic entropy, or disorder, when your consciousness is diverted from your goals. You may experience emotions like fear, worry, or jealousy, that make it difficult to work on your goals. You have to divert part of your attention to dealing with the information so that it no longer poses a threat. Long-term disruptions to consciousness may cause you to abandon a goal entirely.
Note: The information that you receive may not be inherently positive or negative, but you may evaluate it through the lens of your goals, attach a negative meaning to it, and decide you’re under threat.
Psychic Entropy Examples
Example 1: Julio Martinez, a factory worker, discovered that his vehicle had a flat tire. He needed to get it repaired, or get a new tire. Either way, he wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the repair until his paycheck came through the next week. He depended on the car to get to work, and maintaining his job was of utmost importance to him because all of his goals depended on earning money. On the factory floor, he could usually do his part and have time to talk with his coworkers on the assembly line before the next item came down the belt. But during the time he had the car trouble, he felt distracted, could barely finish the work on each item before the next one came along, and he snapped at a coworker who commented on his slowness that day. If Julio had had more self-confidence and trusted himself to overcome the issue, he might not have considered the situation as threatening and wouldn’t have been so distracted and irritable.
Example 2: Jim Harris was a high school sophomore whose parents had divorced a year before. Jim lived with his mother during the week and spent the weekend with his dad. There were two problems with this arrangement. First, Jim’s friends were too busy to spend time with him during the week, but his dad lived too far away for Jim to spend time with his friends on the weekends. Second, Jim’s parents got angry at him whenever he expressed a positive sentiment about one parent in front of the other. One day, Jim’s sister found him lying in bed with an empty bottle of aspirin nearby. They were able to get Jim to the hospital in time to save him. From then on, his parents were more careful about how they treated Jim and how they talked about each other. If Jim’s identity hadn’t been so tied up with his relationship with his parents, he might not have felt so threatened by the split.
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- Why people feel the happiest when they're in the "flow state"
- What activities and personality traits promote flow
- Why you may have a paradoxical relationship with work and leisure
