Brian Johnson explains Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow concept: when your skill matches the challenge, you enter flow. Too much challenge causes anxiety, too little causes boredom. The fix is simple: lower the difficulty or build your skill, or raise the stakes if you're bored.
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You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Another micro class I'm really excited about anxiety, boredom, and getting into flow. I just got this idea suggested by Remy, that I do a microclass on flow. And as it turns out, I had been prepping for this. I've got a stack here pretty thick of ideas that I've sketched out that I am just so excited to share. Tons of them. We're going to have a thousand of these micro classes in the not too distant future, but for now, let's focus on flow. Thank you, Remy. Everyone else, you should be able to submit ideas to me. I see every single one of those and reply to every single one of them. So keep the ideas coming and I will keep the mic classes coming on. Whatever you want to see. In addition to everything I'm already planning. So Flow. This is from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. His great book, Flow. He tells us, among many things, we're gonna do several videos on flow. There are a lot of different things we want to consider, but for right now, we're gonna look at a couple different variables. First, Csikszentmihalyi tells us we need to look at the relationship between our current level of skills and the challenges we're facing. He says this. If your skill level matches the challenge level all the way around along this line here, you're going to be in flow. You're properly matched your skill to your challenge. That feels great. Now, if your skill level is low and your challenge is high, guess what you're going to experience? Anxiety. If your skill level is high, then and your challenge level is low, of course you're going to experience boredom. Now, again, we want to find that connection where you're stretching yourself in your skill matches your challenge, maybe you're a little bit up, that forces you to stress yourself. But if you're too far up and this, the challenge is just way bigger than your current level of skill, you need to do a couple of things or you have a choice, I should say, of a couple of things. You can reduce the challenge level or you can increase your skill, or you can do both, of course, right? Kind of map up. Now, this applies to anything. If you have, say, a physical challenge and you want to exercise a certain amount and you're finding yourself really stressed out, anxious about the goal you set for yourself, well, set an easier goal. Match your current level of skill. There's nothing wrong with doing one push up a day. If that's how you want to build strength over time. You you'll have a nice solid base of consistency and then you can move up. You always want to start with consistency before you go into load. We talk about this in no Sweat by Michelle Seeger now if you're feeling bored, what do you do? Well, one thing you can do is to increase your level of challenge. Make it harder. If you're doing boring work at work, that's kind of grunt work. I always love to make things like that fun by seeing how masterfully I can do it, how quickly can I do it, how excellently can I do it. That increases the challenge and my boredom goes away. There's no need to ever be bored. All you gotta do is make it more interesting, more challenging no matter what it is. If you're mowing the lawn, you can see if you can mow it perfectly. See if you can make perfect lines back and forth. Guess what? You just took a boring activity into flow and that feels good. So that's a quick look at anxiety, boredom and getting into flow. Like I said, we're going to look at a lot more around this idea. Remy, thank you so much for the idea and I look forward to sharing more soon. Hope you have another awesome day. See ya. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that micro class. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson. 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