So buckle up.
Here’s why: Flow is built around automatic processing, but automatization requires work. You master skills slowly and consciously, before the brain can execute flawlessly and unconsciously. Flawless unconscious processing is one reason flow feels flowy. When the brain knows what to do, it does. But first, we have to learn what to do, which is what happens in struggle.
For a writer, struggle is when you’re mastering your subject, conducting interviews, reading relevant material, making chapter outlines, punching the floor because those outlines suck, diagramming possible plot structures on your freshly painted office walls in permanent red Magic Marker because you’re too goddamn dumb to hold them in your freaking head—or maybe that’s just me.
For an engineer, struggle is about outlining the problem, determining boundary conditions, designing mathematical models, weighing probable outcomes, and the like.
For an athlete, struggle can be skill acquisition. In football, it’s a wide receiver learning how to run precise routes, then learning how to use their body to block out defenders, then learning how to make a one-handed catch in traffic. Flow, meanwhile, is what happens when all these automatized skills snap together for one “catch of the year” shining moment.
During this process, unpleasantness is nearly unavoidable. Struggle is about learning, yet working memory is a limited resource. Once we’ve acquired three or four new pieces of data, the space is used up. We’re tapped out. Everything we try to cram in there afterward produces feelings of frustration. And, because the unconscious loves a lot of data to work with, you really need to push yourself right to the edge of overload to maximize this process.
In struggle, we again discover that abiding peak performance lesson: our emotions don’t mean what we think they mean. The stage is frustrating by design. For most people, frustration is a sign that they’re moving in the wrong direction, that it’s time to stop, rethink, and regroup. But in struggle, frustration is a sign that you’re moving in the right direction. This way lies flow. Keep going.
That’s why this book starts with the motivation triad of drive, grit, and goals. It’s why we spent so much time on learning and creativity. Without these abilities in place, we stall in struggle. And here’s the rub: Flow is what actually redeems the struggle. It is our reward for all that hard work. Psychologist Abraham Maslow—who called flow by its earlier name, “peak experiences”—explained it this way:
The peak experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment. . . . It is felt to be a highly valuable—even uniquely valuable—experience, so great an experience sometimes that even to attempt to justify it takes away from its dignity and worth. As a matter of fact, so many people find this so great and high an experience that it justifies not only itself, but even living itself. Peak experiences can make life worthwhile by their occasional occurrence. They give meaning to life itself. They prove it to be worthwhile. To say this in a negative way, I would guess that peak experiences help to prevent suicide.2
But if you can’t handle the frustration of struggle, you can’t get access to flow, which means you can’t redeem the suffering of struggle. And that suffering shows up whether struggle lasts for milliseconds or months.
Neurobiologically, flow arises moments after our senses detect a serious uptick in salience. New, critical information is pouring into the brain. If you don’t know how to handle this influx, if you’re tired or sad or stressed, the results can be frustration and overwhelm. If the situation is dangerous, that information influx can become traumatic stress and learned helplessness. Yet, if this influx arrives and you’ve trained for that moment and automatized your responses, the brain decides to “fight back.”
This decision is the “fight” side of what’s long been described as the fight-or-flight response. The nomenclature is no longer exact, as work done by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman shows that fight and flight are actually different responses produced by different parts of the brain.3
On the fight side, the signal is generated in the center of the thalamus, the brain’s relay station. When triggered, we experience a paradox: the sensation we get is frustration, yet we love this feeling. Humans, allowed to self-stimulate any area of the brain, will zap this spot again and again. Why? Not because we enjoy being frustrated but rather because this particular frustration is woven through a feeling we can’t get enough of: courage.
Struggle is a conversation. When that influx of information arrives, the brain asks a question: “Hey, this thing you’re doing, it’s a lot harder than you expected. Do you want to expend a ton of energy and fight back, or do you want to back off and look for other options?”
Flow starts with the decision to fight back. Frustration is transformed into courage by our answer to the brain’s question. We say, “Hell yes, I’ll fight. This is where I make my stand!”
This is another reason why the habit of ferocity is so critical. Without the ability to instinctively rise to any challenge, most of the time we’ll shrink. If we haven’t automatized “fight,” we tend to look for those other options.
This, too, is biology. The brain is an energy hog. It uses 25 percent of our energy yet contains less than 2 percent of our body mass. So its first order of business is efficiency. Always conserve calories. Thus, in most circumstances, the brain favors the option to flee.
Flow starts when we say yes to the fight.
On a final practical note: When you’re in struggle, use the triggers to your advantage. Never struggle outside the challenge-skills sweet spot, without clear goals or structures in place to provide immediate feedback. If you’re really stuck, deploy novelty, complexity, and unpredictability—meaning go struggle someplace new and novel. Make sure that the pattern recognition system is well stocked and that you’re not blocking creativity with a bad mood (and, if you are, deploy gratitude, mindfulness, exercise, sleep, and so on, to reset your mood).
The one trigger to avoid in struggle is “high consequences.” Certainly, you need enough danger to keep you in the challenge-skills sweet spot, but trying to force the issue rarely works out well—which is something every action sport athlete learns the hard way. In my own case, I so clearly remember telling myself, “Just ski off this cliff and afterward you’ll be in flow for the rest of the day.” Well, what actually happened was that I spent the rest of the day in the hospital, and all of that night in surgery, and when it was all said and done, yes, they did manage to reattach my hand to my wrist, but there was no flow to be had along the way.
Risks are things to take once you’re in flow, as a way to deepen the state. As a rule, risks are not a way to drive yourself into the state, unless, of course, you also want to drive yourself to the hospital.
STAGE TWO: RELEASE
The second stage of the cycle is the release phase.
During struggle, the prefrontal cortex is hyperactive. It’s working feverishly to solve a problem. In release, we want to relax and let go. The goal is to take your mind off the problem. This allows us to pass information processing responsibilities from the conscious to the unconscious. Executive attention disengages and the default mode network takes over. Release is an incubation period. It’s about allowing the brain’s pattern recognition system to chew on the problem for a while—while you do other things.
What kinds of other things?
For release, the research shows that low-grade physical activity works best. Go for a long car drive. Build model airplanes. Work in the garden. Play guitar. I like to draw, hike, or read. Albert Einstein famously liked to sail a boat into the middle of Lake Geneva. Unfortunately, Einstein couldn’t swim and wasn’t much of a sailor.4 As the area is prone to freak storms, he was regularly rescued from the middle of that lake. Yet, so important to his work process was the release of sailing, he chose to risk drowning rather than give it up.
Also, use the release phase as a time to utilize the MacGyver method. Program your release phase both to take your mind off th
e problem and to help you solve that problem. This also gives hard chargers—the ones who never want to stop working—a reason to stop. With this method, you also have the knowledge that when you return to the task, you’ll be farther along than you were before you stopped.
Three things to know.
First, don’t exhaust yourself during release. The stage requires taking your mind off the problem for now, but you’ll need energy to dive back in later on. If you do exhaust yourself—with a hard workout, for example—you’ll need to eat and sleep before restarting.
Second, TV won’t work. Release requires brain waves in the alpha range, but the quick cuts of television keep pulling us back to beta.
Third, not all struggles are the same. When engaged in a long struggle phase—like trying to write a book or start a company or learn the ins and outs of probability theory—following a hard work session with a release activity makes sense. But for those situations when the struggle arrives in an instant—when you’re out for a mountain bike ride and suddenly the trail gets steep and dangerous—how do you then move from struggle to release?
Same process, smaller time frame. You need to trigger that fight response to enter flow, so move into attack mode. Expend the effort. Push through the brain’s desire to conserve energy.
Then, immediately, relax.
“Trust your training,” as the Navy SEALs say. Dive into the problem, then believe in your brain’s ability to find and execute the perfect solution. It’s why you struggled in struggle, to automatize those action plans. Now, get out of the way. That’s the actual release in release—you’re releasing the conscious mind so the unconscious can take over.
On a final practical note: deep embodiment is the trigger to reach for during release. That’s what a low-grade physical activity is really about. That’s also why Zlotoff and so many other people have insights in the shower. You come home from failing to solve a problem while at work, take a shower to wash away the toil, and the relaxing combination of water beating on your body and your own hand moving the soap is enough to pull this trigger and slide you into release and flow.
STAGE THREE: FLOW
Finally, we’ve arrived, the third stage in the cycle—the flow state itself.
Since we already know how flow feels, we’re going to focus on ways to maximize our time in the state.
Let’s start with flow preservation.
Once in the zone, the easiest way to stay there is to avoid the four dreaded “flow blockers,” or the fastest ways to get kicked out of the zone.5
Distraction: Interruptions are the number one reason people get knocked out of flow. And once out, it’s hard to get back in. In studies run on computer coders, researchers discovered that once kicked out of the zone, it takes a minimum of fifteen minutes to get back in—that is, if you can return at all.
This is another reason to practice distraction management, and why you should turn off anything that can interrupt focus—and thus flow—the night before. Seriously, why take the chance?
Negative Thinking: Remember why a good mood was so critical to creativity? Because it allows the anterior cingulate cortex to hunt for remote associations between ideas. Flow is a highly creative state, where the brain is hunting these very associations. The minute you start thinking negatively, you lose this ability. Worse, this reengages the prefrontal cortex, turning the inner critic back on, and KO’ing the whole enterprise.
Nonoptimal Arousal: This is another reason we trained up motivation. If you don’t have the energy to fight, you can’t get into flow. But the same thing holds true once in flow. If you don’t have the energy to sustain that fight, you’ll succumb to fatigue and won’t get to play in the zone for long. This is also why nutrition, active recovery, sleep hygiene, and regular exercise matter. All give you the best chance of optimal arousal in every situation.
Lack of Preparation: This could mean physical or mental preparation. In either case, if you haven’t automatized key skills and abilities, you can’t get into flow.
Meanwhile, once in flow, if the challenge level increases—often for reasons beyond our control—you’ll need the skills to meet this new challenge. My suggestion: when learning anything, surround the problem. Come at it from every angle, so there are no weak links in your game. In short, master mastery.
Next up: flow amplification.
What’s better than flow? More flow. Longer-lasting experiences. Deeper flow states. What’s the secret? Better living through neurochemistry.
Essentially, if you’re in flow, the way to turn a microflow state into a macroflow state is via dopamine and norepinephrine. The flow triggers are how this happens. If you’re in flow and want to stay longer or go deeper, layer in more triggers. Up the level of novelty, complexity, or unpredictability in what you’re doing. Get more creative in your approach. Increase the challenge level ever so slightly. Add in a little more risk.
Yes, risk.
In flow, when we’re already performing at our best, we can really lean on “high consequences” to drive us deeper into a state. For example, if you’re giving a speech (an activity packed with flow triggers and one that often tends to produce the state), occasionally coming off script and improvising for a minute or two is a fantastic way to deepen that state (and, by extension, improve the quality of that speech).
Simultaneously, stay focused and exercise a bit of thought control. We have to remove external distractions to get into flow, but once in the state, we become prone to internal distractions. It happens because pattern recognition is jacked up and we’re flooded with “amazing” ideas. Because the dopamine and norepinephrine in our systems are already generating feelings of interest and excitement, it doesn’t take much for us to want to explore those ideas and get sucked down the rabbit hole of a tangent.
You have to learn a bit of self-restraint. Follow the tangent for sure—this is where creative insights live—but recognize dead-end streets. Know when to cut your losses and return focus to the task at hand. It takes a little practice. Expect to waste a few flow states along the way. Being in flow, learning to maximize the experience—this, too, takes work.
Which brings us to a few words of caution. Despite the power of flow, the state is ideal for some tasks but unsuitable for others. In flow, with large chunks of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, there’s not much logical decision-making or long-term planning. So have deep insights in the state but wait until afterward to make step-by-step plans for turning them into realities.
Also, know that we make errors in flow, but they don’t feel like errors. The one-two punch of jacked-up pattern recognition and feel-good neurochemistry means earthshaking realizations could really be pedestrian bad decisions. For example, never go clothes shopping in flow. With long-term planning dialed down and pattern recognition amped up, everything looks great on, and your decision to single-handedly revise ’70s polyester disco fashion is going to seem smart. In short, one hard-and-fast rule: Never Trust the Dopamine.
STAGE FOUR: RECOVERY
Flow is a high-energy state. But what goes up must come down. This is why, on the back end of flow, there’s a recovery phase.
In recovery, we’re recharging our batteries. The neurochemicals used in flow are expensive for the brain to produce. It can take a little while to fill those tanks again. Nutrition matters, sunlight matters, sleep matters.
Actually, sleep matters a lot. Learning is significantly amplified in flow. But for the brain to move information from short-term holding into long-term storage, deep delta-wave sleep is required. Memory consolidation, as the process is known, demands these delta waves. This is another reason it’s hard to live a high-flow lifestyle without regular rest.
But recovery isn’t just about sleep.
A high-flow lifestyle demands an active recovery protocol. It’s why recovery is a grit skill. And not all recovery strategies are created equal. Passive recovery—TV and a beer—won’t work.6 Active recovery is mindfulness, saunas, stretching,
Epsom salt baths, massage, ice baths, and the like.
And active recovery takes work.
After a hard day, even the extra energy it takes to take a long bath can feel like a Herculean task. Well, Hercules up, because there’s no choice.
If your interest is in moving through the flow cycle as quickly as possible—so you can get back into state—then you have to get serious about recovery. If you don’t refill the tanks in this stage, then you’ll never be ready for what comes next: the hard fight of struggle. And if you can’t get up for struggle, then you can’t get back into flow.
Finally, learn to use your recovery phase.
In flow, with pattern recognition on high, every idea feels like a great idea. In recovery, with feel-good neurochemistry gone and the inner critic back online, we’re in the perfect mind-frame to vet those possibly great ideas.
But don’t overdo it.
For me, if I got into flow while writing, I’ll go through an active recovery protocol that night, then check my work the next morning. I’m still in recovery mode—so I won’t try to solve any of the problems I discover. Instead, I just make a note to revisit them during my next struggle stage and then get back to chilling out. Without the happy neurochemistry to shade my opinions, if I still like my work, then the work is worth liking.
And once those recovery tanks are topped off, then onward into struggle, and we start the cycle again.
23
All Together Now
Over the course of this book, we’ve explored a considerable number of high-performance tips, techniques, tactics, strategies, and the like. In this final chapter, I want to give you a framework for tying all these ideas together. This is a meta-strategy for consistent peak performance. In simpler terms: impossible is a checklist. This is a chapter about all the items that need to go on that checklist.
The Art of Impossible Page 23