A Complete Guide to the Flow State
You may have experienced a flow state at some point — that sense of fluidity between your body and mind, where you are totally absorbed by and deeply focused on something, beyond the point of distraction. Time feels like it has slowed down. Your senses are heightened. You are at one with the task at hand, as action and awareness sync to create an effortless momentum. You are totally in the zone. This is the flow state and it’s accessible to everyone, whether you’re engaged in a physical activity, a creative pursuit, or even a simple day-to-day task.
This idea was popularized by positive psychologist Mihali Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura and who describe the mental state of flow as, “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
“There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback”
This was said by Csikszentmihalyi in a 2004 TED Talk. Csikszentmihalyi and Nakamura reached this conclusion by interviewing a variety of self-actualized, high-performing people: including mountain climbers, chess players, surgeons, and ballet dancers.
The Benefits of Flow
You may have already got an idea about how the flow state is beneficial for you. Let me list some of the benefits just make it clear:
- Flow can lead to improved performance. Researchers have found that flow can enhance performance in a wide variety of areas including teaching, learning, athletics, and artistic creativity.
- Flow can also lead to an increase in learning rates and skill development.
- Flow can double, triple, or even quadruple your productivity. Research has shown that the average businessman is in a state of flow for only about 5 percent of the workday. If conditions were right to increase Flow experience to 15 percent, productivity would double.
- Flow focuses your attention on what’s important and positive. When you’re in a Flow state, you shut down self-consciousness and negative mind-wandering. You focus on the task at hand and find it intrinsically rewarding. You’re not thinking about perceived inadequacies, all the things on your To-Do list, or how fast you can “just get over with this”.
- Flow is the ultimate eustress experience. Eustress or positive cognitive response to stressors lets us feel fulfillment, enjoyment, hope, and meaning. Flow is the most challenging yet the most joyous and enjoyable moment of our lives.
How do you know if you’re in Flow?
According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are ten factors that accompany the experience of flow. It is not necessary for you to experience all of these to be in a state of flow.
- Clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable.
- Strong concentration and focused attention.
- The activity is intrinsically rewarding.
- Feelings of serenity; a loss of feelings of self-consciousness.
- Timelessness; a distorted sense of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing.
- Immediate feedback.
- Knowing that the task is doable; a balance between skill level and the challenge presented.
- Feelings of personal control over the situation and the outcome.
- Lack of awareness of physical needs.
- Complete focus on the activity itself.
How to achieve Flow
In his book, Csikszentmihalyi explains that flow is likely to occur when an individual is faced with a task that has clear goals that require specific responses.
While flow tends to happen naturally when we’re performing certain tasks but the are systematic ways in which we can enter a Flow state to get all those benefits mentioned above.
According to author and journalist, Steven Kotler, who has been researching the flow state for more than a decade, one of the ways to get into a flow state is to release Dopamine. Dopamine is responsible for doing a lot of things in our brain but it is also a flow trigger. It is a focusing drug.
There are five different flow triggers that are all triggered by Dopamine.
They are:
- Risk: Whenever we come across risk, our brain releases Dopamine.
- Complexity produces Dopamine.
- Novelty produces Dopamine.
- Unpredictability also produces Dopamine.
- Pattern Recognition which means linking ideas together also helps in the production of Dopamine.
Try to use relate or incorporate these flow triggers to your important tasks and it should give you a flow booster.
Here are some more guided steps to help you achieve the flow state:
Don’t work if hungry: Don’t try to work if you’re hungry unless it’s absolutely necessary and there is no other way around. It doesn’t mean that you need to snack continuously. Take in quality foods and avoid high sugar junk foods and energy drinks. Yes, these can give you a short energy boost but in the long run, you’re eventually gonna burn out if you consume these in large amounts.
As Chris Bailey from a Life of Productivity writes in this article,
“When you eat anything processed, the oil refinery in your stomach converts it into a heap of glucose that storms your brain all at once, which causes your energy levels to rollercoaster.”
Choose work you love: If you dread a task, you’ll have a hard time losing yourself in it. If your job is made up of stuff you hate, you might want to consider finding another job. Or consider seeking projects you love to do within your current job. At any rate, be sure that whatever task you choose is something you can be passionate about.
Make sure it’s challenging, but not too hard. If a task is too easy, you will be able to complete it without much thought or effort. A task shouldbe challenging enough to require your full concentration. However, if it is too hard, you will find it difficult to lose yourself in it, as you will spend most of your concentration just trying to figure out how to do it — either that, or you’ll end up discouraged. It may take some trial and error to find tasks of the appropriate level of difficulty. Also, the balance of perceived challenges and skills are important factors in flow (Nakamura et al., 2009). On the one hand, when a challenge is bigger than one’s level of skills, one becomes anxious and stressed. On the other hand, when the level of skill exceeds the size of the challenge, one becomes bored and distracted.
Since the experience of this state is just in the middle, the balance is essential.
“Inducing flow is about the balance between the level of skill and the size of the challenge at hand” (Nakamura et al., 2009).
Cut out all the noise. It’s important to note that one can’t experience flow if distractions disrupt the experience (Nakamura et al., 2009). Thus, to experience this state, one has to stay away from the attention-robbers common in a modern fast-paced life. A first step would be to turn off your smartphone when seeking flow. Aside from finding a quiet time and place to work, you’ll want to clear away all other distractions. That means turning off distracting music (unless you find music that helps you focus), turning off phones, email and DM notifications, Twitter and Growl, and anything else that might pop up or make noise to interrupt your thoughts. I also find it helpful to clear my desk, even if that means sweeping miscellaneous papers into a folder to be sorted through later.
Enjoy yourself. Losing yourself in Flow is an amazing thing, in my experience. It feels great to be able to really pour yourself into something worthwhile, to make great progress on a project or important task, to do something you’re passionate about. Take the time to appreciate this feeling (perhaps after the fact — it’s hard to appreciate it while you’re in Flow). Csikszentmihalyi reports that the loss of self-consciousness is critical for the experience of flow. This means that while a person is in a state of flow (e.g., on the dance floor performing an intricate move), this person cannot be asked and cannot report on her state of mind.
Flow Blockers
Here are some factors that block flow. They can be different for everybody, so I suggest you read through them and find out what is blocking your flow.
Overwhelm
Saying yes to everything is alluring. The idea of saying no — and potentially missing an opportunity or experience is cringeworthy.
Yes to everything puts you into a state of overwhelm and anxiety which actually takes a real toll on your performance.
Here are some quick tips you can deploy immediately to reduce your overwhelm and get more flow:
Eliminate As Much As Possible: Do a serious audit of your life. List everything you’re doing. Find out what’s non-essential. Then eliminate it… or at least put it off until you’ve got the bandwidth.
Slow Down To Speed Up: Peak-performers are more like snipers than first-person shooters. They take the time needed to identify the highest value target. Then they make sure to hit it. Then they repeat. They do not spray bullets everywhere, trying to hit every target in sight.
Take a Moment: If you don’t have some form of mindfulness practice — meditation, breathwork, gratitude journaling, walking in nature — then get one immediately. Like right now. Twenty minutes a day should do the trick. If you’re already doing some kind of mindfulness then double the amount of time you’re spending on it. Simple as that.
Don’t let overwhelm get the better of you!
Burnout
Burnout is no joke. Often it sneaks up on us in an unsuspecting way. We may not be totally aware that we’re about to hit a wall. The problem is after we hit that wall there’s no going back.
After burning out you can’t just return to your old way of working. If you do, you’re going to bash right back into that wall.
The real key is to first avoid burnout entirely. That means making changes as soon as possible.
The second, longer-term solve, is to overhaul your approach to work so that “burnout creep” never happens again.
Here are some quick tips you can deploy immediately to help you reduce and avoid burnout:
Get Serious About Recovery: Take recovery as seriously as you take your work. That means adding it to your to-do list, putting it on your calendar, making sure it happens. By recovery — we mean active recovery. Doing things that are going to speed up your return to baseline.
Make Your Life Binary: This means living a life where you’re always either fully on, or fully off. At any given time, you should either be working as intensely and productively as possible or you should be recovering as deeply as possible. Anything in between is the grey zone. The grey zone should be ruthlessly eliminated.
Assess Your Input to Output Ratio: Oftentimes burnout is about a lack of progress. It’s not just about overworking. It’s actually about getting little to no rewards for your efforts. Is this happening to you? Are you only putting it in without getting it out? If so, then you’re situation needs some reassessing.
Exhaustion
Luckily — this is actually the easiest flow blocker to solve.
Sleep is a basic form of flow hygiene. If you aren’t well slept, your chances of getting into flow are slim to none.
When underslept, our ability to focus is a fraction of what it is when rested.
As they say at the Flow Research Collective, flow follows focus. If you can’t focus, say goodbye to flow.
Here are three tips to sleep properly to unlock flow:
Sleep Hygiene: The stuff you’ve heard a million times. Don’t eat less than two hours before bed. Cold room. Totally dark. No screens before bed. No caffeine after 12 PM. Exercise. A good routine to wind down before bed. Get all the basics locked in as your first port of call.
Train To Sleep, While Awake: Dr. Andrew Huberman of Stanford, talks about the need to practice relaxation while awake. And it makes sense — we all want to sleep better but we rarely actually practice sleeping. A simple way to do this is to get good at dropping into an incredibly relaxed state. The better you can do this, the better you’ll sleep. A great starting point is by doing Yoga Nidra, a guided relaxation exercise. You can just Youtube search for an audio and you’ll find one.
Nine Hours In Bed For Eight Hours Asleep: The golden rule of sleep is to spend nine hours in bed if you want eight hours of sleep. Want to wake up at 6 AM? You better be in bed by 9 PM the night prior.
Clarity
Being clear on where you want to go, and exactly how you’re going to get there is incredibly important for flow. Without clear goals, the mind can’t focus. It gets stuck in analysis mode — trying to determine what direction to go, more than actually moving forward in that direction.
The good news is, this is very solvable. You don’t need to map out your destiny in great detail to harness the benefits of having clarity. You just need to pick a direction and move. The key point is it’s better to move forward in the wrong direction that to not move forward at all.
Clarity is made up of your Massively Transformative Purpose, your High-Hard Goals, and your Clear Goals.
Pick A Massively Transformative Purpose: This is your north star. An aspirational, infinite endpoint that you want your life to be pointed at. Dig into a mission or a cause that you’re passionate about and pick something that resonates. Don’t dither. Again — better the wrong thing than nothing.
Set Some High Hard Goals: These should be specific and measurable. You should have ones that are 1, 3, and 5 years out. Ideally, they all converge into your Massively Transformative Purpose. Map them out somewhere you can see them regularly.
Set Daily Clear Goals: Every day you should derive clear goals from your high hard goals. These are hyper-specific action steps, to be completed daily that will inch you toward your high-hard goals. You can never be too clear with your clear goals. Excessive detail is encouraged.
Perfection
“Make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
That’s a quote from William James, a high-performance psychologist.
Don’t try to nail every task that you do. Instead, consider sticking to that task for a continued amount of time even if the results are not top-notch.
Consistency Itself Is A High-Performance Skill. It’s not enough to have all the habits and practices dialed in. Consistent execution is key.
In fact, when it comes to producing results, consistency often matters more than what you’re actually doing.
Imagine working out flawlessly, five days a week for a month straight, then taking a month off and derailing your diet and repeating this cycle for an entire year.
Now imagine working out twice per week. Every week, for an entire year.
The latter option involves 156 less total workouts than the month on, a month off approach. But I’ll bet you’d end up with much better results with twice a week workouts all year long.
Try sticking to a habit. Over time your consistency will improve.
Avoid Perfection. The pursuit of perfection all too often cripples performance.
You shouldn’t derail all plans and declare the entire day as a failure — simply because some notion of perfection was taken off the table. It’s the behavioral equivalent of getting a slight crack in your iPhone screen and then taking out a hammer and smashing the screen to pieces (because it’s no longer perfect).
The idea is that your success is equal to the average of your default day.
When you think of it like that, having a 6/10 non-perfect day is a hell of a lot better than throwing the towel in entirely.
Poor Time Management
Time is an ever-elusive phenomenon. It morphs in all sorts of ways depending on how you play with it.
Despite what you may feel — more time is not the solution. Becoming a master of allocating your time is. The real problem with poor time management for flow is that you can’t get into flow if you’re always in a frenetic state of reactivity.
You need space and time to be able to garner the focus required to plunge into flow.
Here are 3 time management tips to help you get back in the saddle with your time management:
Become acutely aware of “Parkinson’s Law”: This law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It’s shockingly true. Get ruthless about setting deadlines for yourself. Create a container for your work and do not let it expand past that container.
Apply the XDS Approach To Your Commitments: Audit absolutely everything you’re currently doing in any given week. Write it all down. Then ask yourself what can I eliminate entirely (X), what can I delegate (D) and what can I systematize (S). Here’s the golden rule: If in doubt, do it. That means if you “kind-of-maybe” think you can eliminate something, you definitely can. Be ruthless.
Rocks Before Sand: This relates to time management classic of important before urgent. It’s simple but time tested. Do the important things first. The urgent stuff will get done on top of the important. However, if you flip it, as most people do, and go urgent first, important second, the important just won’t get done. It’s just the way it works. A visual to hammer this one home: Imagine a jar. Your important tasks are rocks. They should go in the jar first. Your urgent tasks are sand. They should be poured in on top of the rocks. If you put the sand in first, the rocks aren’t going to fit.
Stress
Stress isn’t all bad. A certain level of stress is critical for growth and progress. The problem comes when you are experiencing excessive stress levels. This is not ideal.
Excessive stress causes all sorts of physical challenges — headaches, high blood pressure, heart issues, diabetes, skin conditions, asthma, arthritis, depression, and anxiety.
Here’s a quick tip on each that you can deploy immediately to help you reduce stress and unwind:
Do an 80/20 audit on stress: Find out what 20% of things, people, or situations in your life are causing you the most stress. You can do this with pen and paper — just jot down everything you’re currently doing and rank them by stress levels. You’ll find a few offending outliers. The next step is to eliminate outliers.
Cope Better With Stress: This is often about mindset. Turns out that using cognitive reframing to shift your perception of stress is enough to alter its impact on the body. Research at the University of Wisconsin found that when participants told themselves they liked the feeling of stress, they were alleviated from the physical symptoms of stress.
Become Stress-Proof: This relates more to your physiology. Exercise, breathwork, cold and hot therapy, sensory deprivation, meditation. All of these things are going to increase your body’s resilience to stress. That’s always a good thing.
Thanks a lot for reading this guide. I hope this will help you in crushing your Become Stress-Proof goals and contribute towards greater self-confidence, mental clarity, and happiness in your life.
