Most people know the feeling of being so absorbed in a task that time seems to disappear. Psychologists call this flow . Ever since psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described it as “optimal experience” in his 1990 book, it has been widely seen as the mind working at its best.

A study published in June 2026 in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice tested whether that reputation holds up. Researchers gave people a timed attention test that rewarded both speed and accuracy. Afterward, they asked how much flow each person had felt while doing it.

People who reported more flow scored only somewhat higher. But the advantage came from speed. They worked faster without making noticeably fewer errors, and they rated their own performance more favorably.

That gap may matter most for intelligent people. When someone is good at something, more of their work goes smoothly, so they spend more time in that easy, absorbed state.

Over time, they also learn that smooth work usually turns out well, and that lesson is often correct. But it means the feeling of ease starts to stand in for actually checking the work, even on the occasions when ease and accuracy part ways. I call this tendency the “flow folly.” It’s the habit of treating how smoothly the work went as evidence of how good the work is.

Why Intelligent Fall For The ‘Flow Folly’

The authors concluded that flow helps attention run more smoothly and makes effort feel better. People in flow also reported less frustration during the test. Flow changed how the work felt more than it changed how accurate the work was.

The study has limits. It used a single attention task rather than the complex work people do in their jobs, and it did not measure whether participants were overconfident. Its central point is still useful. The sense of having done well and the accuracy of what was done can move independently, and flow folly depends on people not noticing when they do.

Psychologists use the term processing fluency to describe how easily the mind handles information. People often judge information that is easy to process as more likely to be true. For someone with real expertise, this shortcut is usually reliable, because their sense of ease is built on genuine understanding. That reliability is exactly what makes the occasional exception hard to catch.

Research on metacognition, the ability to monitor one’s own thinking, consistently finds that confidence and accuracy are only loosely related. Expertise does not close this gap. For intelligent people, an error made in flow can feel no different from their correct work, because both arrive with the same sense of ease. Someone less practiced might feel uncertain and double-check. Someone highly practiced often feels no reason to.

There is also an emotional pull. Flow is rewarding, and going back over work that felt good can seem pointless. The more often smooth work has turned out fine in the past, the stronger that pull becomes.

How To Avoid Flow Folly, Intelligently

The answer is not to avoid flow . The study suggests it helps people get through demanding work with less strain. The answer is to stop asking flow to do a job it isn’t suited for.

Flow is well suited to producing work, where speed matters more than precision. Checking that work is a separate step. It works better after a break, because distance makes it easier to see what is actually on the page rather than what you intended. It also works better when the goal is to find errors rather than to confirm there aren’t any.

For intelligent people, the most useful habit is to check most carefully in the areas where they feel most confident. Those are the areas where their skill makes the work feel easy, and so they are the areas where flow folly is most likely to go unnoticed.

Being good at something makes work feel easier, and that ease is usually earned. The mistake is letting it replace the step of checking. Intelligent people are not more careless than anyone else. Their skill simply makes the feeling of being right more convincing, which is why the habit of checking matters more for them, not less.

Do your best ideas arrive when you lose track of time? Find out how often you slip into deep focus, and what that says about the way you work, with this science-backed test: Flow State Test