![]() One way to kind of explore flow triggers, there's a cluster of them that are predominantly dopamine triggers. Flow only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here, right now. There was a study where they found that coders in flow, if they get knocked out by distraction, a knock at the door, a text alert, or whatever, it can take 'em 15 minutes to get back into flow if they can get back in at all. So you wanna turn off your phones, turn off email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, all your messages, all your alerts. Practice distraction management ahead of time. And then you wanna try to block out 90 to 120 minutes for uninterrupted concentration. My wife doesn't wake up 'til five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night. I like to wake up at 3:30, four o'clock in the morning. You really wanna sorta start your work session if you can in relationship to your physiology. The most basic of flow triggers- complete concentration. There are probably way, way more, but so far, researchers have identified 22. So there are a number of different things you can do to sort of prepare yourself and prepare the environment to drop into flow. ![]() So, to do this work and to get good at it, you have to get good at being comfortable with being uncomfortable. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skillset. The challenge-skills balance is often called the "golden rule to flow." And the idea here is pretty simple. You either do what the voice is telling you to do or you tend to crash. ![]() But one of the things that athletes talk about a lot is what they call "the voice." Often, when I'm skiing in flow, I will get directions- right, left, do this, do that, and it's very quick. You're so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, everything else just seems to disappear. "I'm in this altered state of consciousness where every action, every decision I make, seems to flow effortlessly, perfectly, seamlessly from the last." Flow actually feels 'flowy.' More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. Everywhere he went, people said the same thing. He was very interested in sort of well-being, meaning of life, and he went around the world talking to people about the times in their lives when they felt their best, and they performed their best. William James worked on the topic, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is often referred to as the Godfather of Flow Psychology. I'm a writer and a researcher, and my latest book is "The Art of Impossible." Flow itself, actually, the term is coined by Goethe, who uses the German word "rausch," which means overflowing with joy. ![]() This is a constant issue in my marriage where my wife thinks I'm mad at her or somebody and I'm like, "No, no, I'm just thinking. And what that frowning is, is a sign that the brain is doing work. And our frown muscles tend to be paralyzed. This is a basketball player in the zone, seeing the hoop and suddenly it's as big as a hula hoop. ![]() Occasionally, it'll slow down, you get a freeze-frame effect, I mean, anybody who's been in a car crash for example. Time is gonna dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it's gonna pass strangely. STEVEN KOTLER: Flow is often described as a state of kind of 'effortless effort.' We feel like we're propelled through the activity. ![]()
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