Learning To Go With The Flow
You’ve probably heard of flow. If you haven’t heard of it, you’ve definitely felt it. Maybe while speeding, weaving in and out of traffic unaware of the cop waiting to ticket you, focused only on getting from point A to B.
Or while playing 8 Ball Pool, on your iPhone, against everyone in your contacts, sinking shot after shot until suddenly “You Won” pops up on your screen and you’ve secured bragging rights for the rest of the evening.
Until the red and blue begin to wail in your rearview or the avatar in the upper right corner begins to dance, your mind is absorbing and processing all the information it can, working at full capacity; it enters tunnel vision to seamlessly complete whatever task at hand. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, renowned psychologist and the person who coined the term “flow”, the human brain can process up to 126 bits of information per second. During flow, we’re processing at our full capacity, utilizing every bit of mental RAM available.
Before getting immersed into what flow states are, here’s why you should care:
- The average business person spends less than 5% of their day in flow. If you could increase that to 15%, overall workplace productivity would double.
- Executives in a flow state are five times more productive compared to people not in a flow state. — McKinsey & Company
- 71% of American workers are non engaged because of a lack of flow states. — Gallup
Owen Schaffer, in his white paper on creating flow states, cites that there are six things that indicate activation of flow states:
- Intense and focused concentration on the activity
- Merging of action and awareness of the current task
- The temporary loss of ability to reflect
- A sense of personal control and ownership over the activity
- A distortion of subjective time
- The experience is internally rewarding in and of itself
Flow states are important, both for productivity, well-being, and of course, creativity. If you’ve read some of our other articles, you know how important creativity is in the workplace today.
During a flow state, your creativity is heightened. People report being up to seven times more creative during a flow state than out of it. And although flow states can end prematurely, the creative boost is often sustained.
So that must be it? The cheat code. Just enter flow states, produce, innovate, and go from Eddie Morra to Senator Morra.
If only it were that simple. Like most “too good to be true” things, flow states aren’t the easiest to get into.
There is good news however: there are triggers and certain steps, that you can take to induce a flow state. Listening to the right music, doing a task that’s challenging, yet in your domain of expertise, exercising, drinking coffee.
Or maybe if you really wanted to engage in activating flow states, you could turn to (what do we have up our sleeves?) brain imaging. By monitoring activity in the prefrontal cortex, which seems to slow down during these states, you could even target and sustain the instances in which you enter flow.
While we haven’t found a way to make your flow states more “flow-y”, it seems possible to prolong and sustain flow states, allowing you to be productive and creative for a longer duration.
So, to leave you with a neatly wrapped bundle of good news: by understanding when flow states occur, and actively inducing flow states, biofeedback, specifically neuroimaging, can help you stay in flow states longer.
We hope that the next time we leave you with a bundle of good news, it’ll be shrink wrapped and allow you to tap into the creativity you never knew you had.
We believe that creativity births greatness. We’re working on bringing an innovative neuroimaging and stimulation technology to prolong flow and augment creativity. Sign up for our limited beta.
