The Art of Flowing
& Other Things I Learned This Week - 2/18/24
Flowing
Two weeks ago I touched on flow and how trying too hard to fall asleep was futile as it disrupted the natural "flow" to the falling asleep process. I didn't write the post with the goal of linking my inability to sleep to flow disruption - the post organically went in that direction as I reflected on the experience - which made ending the post challenging, as it was tough to find a good conclusion to a post on a topic that as I wrote and read about, I realized I knew so little about.
I ended up being able to find an ending (that working too hard can disrupt flow, inhibiting our ability to perform), but not the ending I would be happy with. The research and knowledge that exists about flow states is so deep that leaving the post as is with no follow-up felt like I wasn't doing justice to the topic and work that's been done here. So buckle in, because I'm about to go on an adventure to dive even deeper on flow. Still at the tip of the iceberg, but am discovering so many insights that are relevant to many of the topics I've written about over the weeks (happiness, optimal performance, goals, etc.). We're at the start of what should be a multi-part series on flow.
I was in Vegas about a year ago with a group of friends having a boozy pre-going out dinner, and the conversation turned uncharacteristically philosophical (for Vegas, at least). The topic of conversation was what the north star in our life was - and an acquaintance at the dinner said something that struck me and has stuck with me. Rather than describe her north star as an end point, as most of the rest of us were doing, she described it with a term that was more akin to a journey, a consistent state of being - her north star was to be a person in flow.
I think the comment struck me because while flow should've been an unfamiliar concept to me, as I hadn't spent much time on it before, I immediately felt an innate understanding of what flow was, and why it mattered. For a concept that should've been so foreign, to have such an intuitive sense of what it was, so quickly - that felt… odd. But also, at the same time, so right. Like seeing a long lost friend for the first time in decades.
More than all of that, I think the comment stuck with me because I realized instantaneously that it was what I'd been missing for a while. I wasn't having the greatest time finding joy at work, and was in the midst of a journey to figure out why. I had everything I wanted, really - dream job, aligned mission - but somehow the joy and excitement I had started my job with faded away with time. But it was clear to me in that moment that it was my loss of access to flow states caused the loss of joy in my work.
I've spent the last year trying to re-find that flow, with some success - but until the post two weeks ago, had tried to approach it in a more intuitive way - attempting to naturally recreate the flowy-ness I had possessed in prior periods of my life. I think that approach has gotten me decently far along - but now seems like the time to adopt a more methodical, precise approach to it - to really understand what's already been discovered and learned about flow, in order to better harness it in my life to create more joy than I already do have.
What is Flow?
My guess that we've all felt flow at some point in our lives. Moments - whether seconds, minutes, hours, days, even weeks or months - when we've entered a state where actions and thoughts flow naturally and effortlessly. Where freed from doubt and fears, we act like the most natural versions of ourselves - focused, determined, immersed in the present. Time slows down, all our senses - mind, body - are heightened. In the process, we transform into the best, most optimal versions of ourselves, performing at the peak of our present abilities.
I've experienced it many times - playing tennis matches, taking exams, interviewing for jobs - but really I have grown to understand it best from the moments when flow's been absent. Tennis matches where the need to win and stress of letting down my teammates cloud my thoughts, turning simple actions, like hitting a second serve, into the challenging obstacles. Interviews where I instantaneously question even the simplest of responses, and in looking backwards take crucial mental resources away from focusing on the present, toward crafting the best responses possible.
The father of flow, University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, pioneered much of the early work on the flow state. He was focused on discovering the roots of happiness - having grown up during WWII and seeing firsthand the emotional toil that the war had on the people around him. He was particularly interested in creative people who would spend their lives on pursuits that they didn't expect would give them fame or fortune, and what drove them to continue their pursuits in spite of the challenges, and gave their life meaning.
What he found was that many of his interviewees described their peak moments of happiness and fulfilment in a similar way - one of being in the flow. And this was the same across different domains and industries - like the composer who said that on his best days, the music would just "flow out" without much effort, or the figure skater who describes being 'merged' with music and actions as being 'automatic'.
As Czikszentmihalyi defined it, flow is 'a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.' He notes the following characteristics of flow, as experienced by the individual in flow:
Focus - being completely involved in what we are doing
Ecstasy - mentally, we are detached from the mundanity of day to day life
Inner Clarity - knowing intuitively what needs to be done without much effort
Serenity - lack of self criticism and self-awareness, calmness
Timelessness - concept of time fades away; time can either speed up or slow down
The Benefits of Flow
Czikszentmihalyi saw flow as the basis of happiness - that people who were consistently finding flow in their life and their careers were the happiest people that he saw, and he spent substantial time and effort trying to help figure out how to ensure that individuals were spending as much of their lives in flow as possible.
In more recent years, as we've improved our understanding of brain chemistry, Czikszentmihalyi's belief about flow being the root of happiness has been corroborated by scientific studies, which have found that in a flow state, our brain secretes a strong cocktail of brain chemicals that are key drivers of happiness - dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, endorphins, and anandamide. A pretty wild fact, since if we are able to develop the ability to flow as often as possible, then wouldn't we be able to "manufacture" happiness in our lives?
In addition to this, I've been astounded by the numerous other benefits that flow has been tied to.
Studies have shown that flow can dramatically improve creativity. When a study in Australia gave participants a tricky problem to solve, none of the 40 participants solved it. But when flow was artificially induced - 23 (!!) of the participants solved it, in record time. Participants in flow states have shown a whopping 400-700% more creativity than those outside of flow states - which is quite remarkable (although I'll admit that I wonder about how one could quantify creativity).
Flow has also been shown to improve learning - with US military studies showing that soldiers in flow learned 400+% faster than they did when they weren't in flow. Also productivity - a McKinsey study showed that flow states enabled executives to be 500% more productive.
Even without the various other benefits - reduced stress, added motivation, meaning, and fulfilment, among others - that come with flow, the reading and research I've done on flow has me kicking myself for not having come across it and having tried to understand it earlier. Flow is an incredibly powerful weapon to have in our mental toolkits that can help improve our lives in so many ways - not learning how to harness it seems like such a waste.
How can we find more flow in our lives?
There seem to be several key elements to finding flow. First, the ability to fully focus on the activity at hand, for any distractions can easily disrupt our flow states. Second, having control over our actions, the sense that we have control over outcomes and can be an active participant in the activity. Third, loss of self-consciousness, such that our self-critical parts of the brain get turned off and we can move and think effortlessly and without self-doubt. Fourth, the activity has to involve clear goals with constant feedback, so we know what we are working towards, and have the right input to alter our actions to improve our outcomes. Fifth, finding tasks and goals that are the right balance between challenge and skill - not too easy that it is boring, but not too hard that it becomes anxiety inducing - akin to points A1 and A4 on the diagram below:
Source: Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
And sixth, having these activities and goals be set and chosen internally, rather than externally, for intrinsic motivators are far more powerful catalysts for flow than extrinsic motivators. When we find in activities these six factors, then we are more likely to achieve flow. But how can we do this?
I'm still at the beginning of my journey hope to iterate on this over time, but here are some hypotheses:
Finding "flow-ier" activities
We could start by including in our lives more activities that are naturally more flow-y. I would imagine that it is easier to find flow in active, individual-oriented recreational activities like sports and the arts (music, dance), given 1) we choose to do them ourselves (intrinsic motivation), 2) while doing them, we have more agency over our own actions, and 3) they naturally offer very clear and real-time feedback (i.e. did I win my tennis match / did that song I just played sound good?). This likely also extends towards certain knowledge-based pursuits like learning a new language, or game-based pursuits like getting better at the crossword or sudoku. And conversely, using these pursuits to replace less naturally flow-y activities, like television watching and social media doom-scrolling.
Making "flow-ier" choices at work
But of course, not all our lives can be focused on recreation - we all have real needs and responsibilities to care for. I wonder if we can move towards a flow-ier life by making career decisions that are flow-enabling. By definition, many traditional jobs where bureaucracy and politics are rampant are not flowy, as our ability to control outcomes and our ability to get proper feedback that improves our ability to be effective at the job are extremely limited. Working within organizations that are more decentralized, or jobs that are more self-driven (e.g. sales, founding companies) - seems to me to be a possibly fruitful route to finding flow at work.
Dialing up the "flow-iness"
But of course, to think that we all have full freedom to choose our jobs would be naïve. As such, there will always be parts of our lives that will be un-flowy activities - whether jobs we are stuck in, or even the mundane part of our lives - brushing our teeth, making food, driving to work - that we have to get through. Interestingly, many of the elements of flow mentioned above - focus, freedom from self-criticism, the challenge/skill balance - aren't fixed. We have substantial control over how much of these elements we incorporate even in un-flowy activities, and understanding how we can dial up these elements can introduce more flow into parts of our lives that might not naturally be flowy.
Csikszentmihalyi had an interesting example in his book for how to do this. Driving is largely a mundane activity that many of us see as a chore or mindless activity. However, if one can find a way to set "mini-goals", like learning the right speed to drive to hit each intersection as the traffic light turns green, one can create the right conditions to find flow even in the most mundane moments. He terms this microflowing - finding smaller moments of flow within largely un-flowy activities.
This seems very applicable to work as well, for when we are stuck doing repetitive, boring tasks - setting mini goals tangential to the task at hand, such as figuring out how to navigate around a word document without using a mouse, or timing the speed at which you do a frequent repetitive task - could help create the right conditions for flow, in the process allowing us to harness the power of flow in our everyday activities.
--
That's it for this week. Funnily, I struggled to write find flow in writing this post on flow, given the pressure to get the post out and my present lack of understanding of the topic at hand. Much to learn!