The Psychology of Optimal Experience or do carding for fun

Lord777

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There is a great saying: "Make your hobby work and you won't have to work a single day."
You don't have to force yourself to watch an interesting series. Meanwhile, for the brain it is still some kind of work - processing visual information, decoding audio, reading the emotions of characters, turning on memory - in order to follow the plot.

What does this mean?
The tension can be pleasant. If you paid money for watching TV shows, there would be a lot of "workers". But disassemble the viewing of the series into separate types of mental activity:
the designer and photographer are constantly engaged in visual work. Memory, "plot tracking", will be needed by a mathematician and an accountant. Reading emotions, dialogues are the domain of the sales and marketing department.

And this we are considering a narrow example of the series. But there are enough leisure activities in the world to use every part of your brain. From which follows the thesis "any work can be a hobby."

Remember what you are immersed in with your head, what you enjoy to the fullest: running, dancing, drawing, structuring information.
This state is called "flow" or "optimal experience." But are there any laws that govern inspiration?
American professor of psychology, Mihai Csikszentmihalyi, has been researching this topic for several decades.

In his book, he deduces several universal principles of activity that unite the best worker in a factory, an athlete-climber and a successful entrepreneur.

To get into a thread state frequently:
- The activity should be of interest as a process. Choose a business to which your soul lies: it is better to be a good designer than a bad oil tycoon. And look for those elements in your work that can be perceived as an interesting game, and not a routine duty. Remember, the same brain is used to watch a TV show and create an advertising campaign.

- The activity must be challenging. Thoughtless repetition causes boredom, boredom kills interest. You need to constantly add a pancake to the barbell: do something that will require concentration from you and force you to do something new.

- The activity must remain within the limits of possibilities. If you add one pancake to the barbell, it will be interesting. But if you hang twice as much as you lifted last time, it will cause fear. Can you? Will you rip your back? Fear creates negative reinforcement, the bar becomes associated with negative emotions, and the brain begins to avoid it.
 
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