Imagine there is a boy who never has any negative consequences. He punches your brother and your mom says, “Great job honey!” with a big smile. Or maybe he steals a snack pack from little Johnny at school every day and enjoys that great chocolate pudding without a care in the world. He can do what he wants when he wants. That sounds like a good life to me. Well what if the boy grew up like that and the trend continued into his adult life? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Charlie Sheen!

Celebrities are the center of our culture and likely will be for a long time. In the case of little Charlie Sheen, he is positively reinforced for anything he does. This essentially means he is more likely to repeat whatever behavior occurred prior to being reinforced. At the same time he is never punished, which constitutes not receiving consequences that effectively control his behavior.

Let’s say you work for a generic financial sales company. Each week you are positively reinforced with $100 bonus if you meet an average quota of sales that week. But then say your boss triples that weekly bonus and increases the sales level by five percent. How would you react?

You’d probably be pretty excited about making an extra $200 a week just for a little more work. Then two months later you earn $1000 a week to sell an additional five percent. Will that motivate you to continue to sell better? It likely will, and this typifies how the environment can drastically change your behavior.

Now let’s go back to celebrities where their environment is much less orderly. Take Ashton Kutcher as an example of being reinforced for inappropriate behavior. In 2011 he cheats on his wife and subsequently is praised in USweekly by his secret girlfriend as romantic. Additionally, ratings of his show “Two and a Half Men” continue to rise and reinforce his behavior. He continues to make millions and his celebrity status only seems to rise.

The problem here is celebrities are difficult to punish in the behavioral sense. Normal punishments like illegal or other inappropriate behavior don’t seem to apply for celebrities.

There are two big pieces we can take from knowledge of celebrity behavior. The first is that idolizing and trying to emulate celebrities might not always be a good idea. As the drug abuse, early deaths, and conflict of many celebrity lives indicate, it’s not all fun and games. Secondly and more importantly though is learning from celebrity mistakes to achieve our own sense of happiness.

What do celebrities lack when they go off the deep end? Usually they lack direction, control, and appropriate levels of intellectual stimulation.

As human beings, we need to find our flow to counteract these potential issues. The Psychological concept of Flow is when all of skills and talents are thrown at a challenge that is barely manageable. You become consumed in it. You can be in Flow in both physical and intellectual activities.

But as Psychology Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tells us in Psychology Today, Americans tend to report being in such a state markedly less than in European Nations like Germany. His research measures consciousness and attitudes by having participants report their scores at random parts of two hour intervals each day. These scores are interestingly the lowest during pure leisure time like watching T.V.

The concept of Flow isn’t an equation for happiness but you don’t need to be able to pronounce Csikszentmihalyi to understand that involvement is key as a college student.

The next time you’re tempted to take Underwater Basket Weaving II understand that you’re making shortsighted decision and not be interested in the class might even lower you’re grade as well as interest. Additionally, being able to continuously challenge yourself is a skill that is vital in all fields of work.

And speaking of fields of work, understanding what stimulates and challenges you is important in picking a job that is right for you. Lastly, we tend to loaf socially as opposed to spending free time in engaging extracurricular activities or hobbies.

More engaging activities won’t just make your free time more enjoyable but will likely allow you to engage in your work more effectively as well. I hope you’ll forgive my choice of words but just go with the Flow.

— Sofis is a senior in applied behavioral science from Pittsburgh, Pa.