Big Five Personality and Flow States

Data from a new meta-analysis

Back in the middle of the last century, the prominent psychological models in the United States were behavioral. Essentially, they argued that most human behavior could be explained and shaped by the pattern of rewards and punishments in the environment. The inner life of the human was bracketed off from theory, and the goal was to build a model of human psychology derived strictly from observable behavior. Most of the research was done on rodents and pigeons using apparatuses like the famous Skinner box where different sequences of lever-pecking were rewarded with food pellets.

Behaviorism is incredibly boring from a theoretical perspective, but it works. Behaviorism is the basis of powerful human control systems. You can see it in everything from token economies in classrooms, where kids get gold stars or high-fives for desirable behavior, to airline point systems. Delta Airlines has basically turned me into a trained seal who will balance a ball on my nose in order to move from Zone Four to Zone Three during boarding.

The major challenge to behaviorism is that people put lots of energy into many tasks that don’t have an obvious reward, like making art, playing frisbee, mountain biking, or body surfing. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noticed artists would finish a painting, but instead of putting it over their fireplace and admiring it like a reward, they would simply put the canvas down and start on another painting. The painting was its own reward; there was no metaphorical food pellet dispensed at the end.

Csikszentmihalyi was also a mountain climber, hanging out in Colorado during the 70s boom in climbing culture that brought us companies like Patagonia and North Face. Just like artists, climbers would get to the top of the mountain, but they wouldn’t necessarily sit there and celebrate and talk about how great the top was. They might snap a photo or two, but then they would just climb back down. The top was not serving as a food pellet.

Csikszentmihalyi talked to a climber and asked his motivation for climbing. This being the 70s, the climber said something like, “Dude, when you’re up there climbing, you’re focused on each moment; it’s like you’re in the flow and you are the flow.” That’s how people talked in the 70s and this is where the term flow came to mean the optimal experience that involves deep engagement in a challenging task and sometimes self-transcendence. (Note: I never got to meet Csikszentmihalyi. I had a couple opportunities but it unfortunately never worked out. I am thus paraphrasing scuttlebutt from memory).

Csikszentmihalyi used this label of flow to describe behaviors that were innately or intrinsically motivating or enjoyable. And that is a key point of flow: the reward is generated internally from doing the behavior; the reward is not achieved when completing the behavior like in a Skinner box. We call this intrinsic motivation in psychology.

Csikszentmihalyi spent years studying the flow state. He studied Japanese motorcycle gangs, chess players, surgeons, sailors, and many other groups and found a similar, shared experience of flow in all these different contexts. There might be other words for it—like in athletics, people sometimes talk about being “in the zone”—but the experience is similar.

So what is a flow state? It’s the experience that occurs when your skills and the challenges you’re facing are balanced such that you are forced to focus deeply on the task at hand to succeed. If I’m an intermediate surfer and I go surfing at Doheny Beach with all the beginners, I’m not going to be that excited or interested in what I’m doing and probably won’t enter a flow state. Likewise, if I follow my brother on an adventure to the Mentawais and try to surf double overhead Bank Vaults, I would likely panic and feel fear rather than joy. But if I ended up at a place just a smidge above my ability—let’s say surfing Playa Colorado in Nicaragua, which I love, or a longboard break like Sunzal in El Salvador—I’d have a pretty good chance at entering a flow state. I would be performing at the absolute edge of my (intermediate) ability but not pushed into fear or panic.

The conditions that generate a flow state—the match between challenge and skill—drive internal psychological changes. There needs to be intense focus on what you’re doing. You can’t successfully drop into an overhead wave on a coral reef while thinking about checking your email (well, maybe Kelly Slater can).

Sometimes the focus during flow states gets so intense that self-awareness disappears. Flow then because self-transcendent and perhaps spiritual. There is a very interesting paradox in flow states: when you’re in one, you’re not really aware of it, because if you suddenly realize, “Hey, I’m flowing,” you snap out of the flow state.

The flow state itself has been described as an optimal experience. It can be hard, or it can be joyful, or intense, or energizing and exciting, but something about flow feels good.

Theoretically, the flow state is open to everyone who is willing to engage deeply with a task in life. But Csikszentmihalyi noticed that some people were more drawn to the flow state than others. He called this the autotelic personality. The autotelic personality is one that is self-driven (auto) toward goals (telos). Somebody who is autotelic is choosing their own goals; they are intrinsically motivated and agentic—a Nietzschean self-propelling wheel.

Probably the easiest way to understand the autotelic personality is to map out the personalities of individuals prone to experiencing flow states onto a general model of personality like the Big Five. Fortunately, psychologists have been doing this research for years, and a meta-analysis—a study of studies—on the Big Five personality traits and flow states was just published. As a reminder, the Big Five, or OCEAN, personality traits are Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

When I first saw the meta-analysis, my hunch was that flow states would be primarily aligned with the more dopaminergic aspects of personality, especially extraversion and openness to experience. My experience of flow is mostly around adventure sports. I have a flashbulb memory of snowboarding the back bowls in Sun Valley on a fresh powder day in the late 80s. The snow was shining like crazy diamonds. An old school hot-dogger next to me looked over and said “this is just like an acid trip.”

But flow takes discipline and focus as well as just going for it. So, when you look at the personality data, the largest predictor of flow states is the Big Five trait of conscientiousness. And this is a pretty decent-sized correlation from a personality psychology perspective—a correlation over .3.

There were also somewhat smaller but still decent correlations with extraversion and openness to experience, which I did expect, and then a more modest correlation with agreeableness. As you might have guessed, there was also a negative correlation between flow and neuroticism. It seems reasonable that somebody predisposed to fearfulness, anxiety, and depression would be a little challenged in entering flow states, although I do think flow states can also serve as a buffer to some of these more negative psychological experiences. Figure below created from Buseyne et al. 2025 data:

Here are a few takeaways from these data: First, flow isn’t just about being stoked, pumped, and energized, which was my initial hunch. Instead, flow seems to emerge out of hard work and discipline, and in fact, maybe it could be thought of as an internal reward for intense effort and focus on a single activity. Somebody who works really hard learning to surf, learning how to perform open-heart surgery, learning how to dance, or learning how to write will be more likely to enter flow states than someone who is less disciplined and committed to their hobby, craft, or sport.

When you fuse that hardcore discipline and work ethic with that higher level of extraversion and openness to experience—essentially reward and novelty seeking—you end up with someone who is autotelic, or agentic, or whatever term you want to use for a person who makes things happen in life. And, more broadly, flow states are associated with what we consider a generally positive, high-functioning Big Five personality profile: someone who is conscientious, extraverted, open, agreeable, and emotionally stable, or low in neuroticism.

There is way too much to talk about regarding flow states, but I’ll leave you with one thought about motivation. You can set up your life’s motivational system so you’re chasing external rewards and avoiding punishments. Maybe you’re in sales and you get paid on commission, or you’re an academic and you get promoted based on publications. In both cases, your life is about chasing something. This reinforcement schedule might be effective for reaching your goal of being a successful salesperson or academic, but it might not be very fulfilling when you get there because you are essentially a pigeon pecking a lever trying to get a food pellet.

In contrast, you can improve by focusing on entering flow states rather than chasing external rewards. This is the secret: Flow emerges when your ability and the challenges you face are aligned. The more you enter flow states, the more your ability will increase. The increased ability means you’re naturally going to gravitate towards greater challenges in order to stay in that flow state, or to use Csikszentmihalyi’s more visual metaphor, the flow channel. In the face of greater challenge, you will need to raise your ability again to enter flow, and so forth. A positive feedback loop is created: ability→challenge→flow→ability .

You see this process happen all the time in adventure or extreme sports like skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding, or skydiving. People doing these sports just get better and better because they keep entering flow states, not because they’re chasing big bucks or licensing deals.

The example I usually use in class is skydiving. I’ve only been skydiving once, and it was the day before my grad school comprehensive exams at UNC Chapel Hill. The class figured we might as well change our mental focus, so instead of being anxious about passing onto our PhDs, we were scared of surviving skydiving. And I will confess, my one and only time skydiving was scary and intense. Let’s just say I was grateful to be jumping with someone who was a (very conscientious) professional or I would’ve ended up about twelve feet deep in the earth. I was diving so fast that I thought maybe I would hit the ground and my soul would just keep going…and that sounded kind of cool in the moment.

But what you notice when you skydive is that the people who do it all the time get bored just jumping out of airplanes. They need more challenge to enter a flow state. So you’ll find groups of people jumping out of planes and doing what looks like folk dancing. It’s amazing and it’s in pursuit of flow, not money, fame, or fortune. Or they get even crazier and start base jumping off cliffs or putting on those squirrel suits and gliding through the Alps. Just incredible stuff, all driven by the pursuit of flow.

So, it’s possible to optimize your life around experiencing flow states—acknowledging that these will take discipline and work to get into—and have a very rich and engaged life, while still getting better at what you’re doing. If you live your life just for the applause, or cash, or fear of letting your father down, or to be cool, or whatever, you can get to the same place in life—I know lots of successful people who are driven by primarily by external rewards—but your life will feel a little more like a grind.

Links to my work: Homepage; Peterson Academy; Books on Amazon

Some Citations

Alameda, C., Sanabria, D., & Ciria, L. F. (2022). The brain in flow: A systematic review on the neural basis of the flow state. Cortex, 154, 348-364.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Csikszentmihalyi, I. S. (Eds.). (1992). Optimal experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness. Cambridge university press.

Buseyne, S., Said‐Metwaly, S., Van den Noortgate, W., Depaepe, F., & Raes, A. (2025). The Relationship Between Personality and Flow: A Meta‐Analysis. Journal of Personality.