Kwik Brain Episode 20: Hacking Flow for Faster Learning with Steven Kotler

Welcome to Kwik Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik.

Free your mind.

Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity.

I wasn't high, wasn't wired, just clear.

I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know kung fu. Show me.

Welcome back, Kwik Brain.

How do you get into flow for better memory, Focus, learning, and performance. So first of all, what is flow? It's that optimal state of consciousness. You know what I mean, where you perform and you feel your best. You may call it the zone. It's that moment of total absorption where you lose your sense of time, mental and physical ability goes through the roof, and your brain takes in more information per second and it processes it even more deeply. So if you want to learn more, do more, and achieve more, That is what this episode is all about, and I'm bringing you the top expert. I want to introduce you to my friend Steven Kotler. Steven is the New York Times bestselling author of The Rise of Superman and Stealing Fire, amongst other books. He's the director of research for the Flow Genome Project and one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Now, this is a very special session because it's a live talk he did from one of our recent Brainpower Conferences to a group of high achievers. You're about to discover 4 brain hacks to get into flow so you can more easily accelerate and amplify your learning and your accomplishments. So, here's Steven Kotler.

All right. So let me tell you a little bit about how to hack flow because while we don't totally understand everything that's going on in the Flow Genome Project, it's critical to get us from A to B. We do know a lot. So this is stuff— what I'm gonna talk about right now is stuff you may or may have heard before. There are a number— there are 9 initial conditions for flow, but 4 are most important. The first is focus. One of the reasons action and adventure sports athletes have hacked flow so easily is because when your life is on the line, it's pretty easy to focus. When the danger is actually to life and limb, focus is really easy. So there is only one way to hack this. if your life is not on the line. Belief. This is based sort of on work done by Herbert Benson at Harvard. But Herbert Benson, Dr. Benson figured out that if you believe very, very strongly, not only in yourself but in your project— so when people say, oh, you need a goal that's bigger than yourself, this is, as much as it sounds very altruistic and very sweet, and there may be a component there, the real reason is, It has to be massively important to you. Really, really important. To hack flow, you need to believe in it as if your life was on the line. You also need a challenge-skills balance. And this is critical. The challenge has to be slightly harder than your skill set. So you can't overwhelm yourself. You can't go from skiing a blue slope to suddenly trying a double black diamond. It's too much. You're gonna swamp the system. You're gonna have a fight-or-flight response.

It won't work.

But you can't have it too low, otherwise you're gonna get bored. Flow exists on the 45-degree angle directly between anxiety and boredom. So here's something that's interesting about this. This means if you wanna generate a lot of flow in your life, you have to challenge yourself every day. The only easy day was yesterday. Everything you do has to be slightly harder than everything you've already done, otherwise you're gonna get nowhere near flow. Third of all, you need clear goals. So, by clear goals, you can't have a goal like, oh, I want to create world peace. It's too big. You need very specific— oh, today I want to write 4 pages about world peace. That will get you to flow. The big, giant, hairy goal won't get you there. You need clear, measurable goals that you can see and you can sight. And the other thing you need is immediate feedback. Sports work very, very well for this because obviously you are getting constant kinesthetic feedback. It's a little trickier in business. So one of the things that happens in business, if you're only meeting with your employees once every 6 months to give them a performance review, once every 3 months to tell them how they're doing, not gonna work. Not enough feedback. They're not gonna know where they are. They're not going to have access to flow. Now this is a big stumbling block. We know that flow— underpins most breakthroughs. It drives most creativity. And if you want it in your employees, having a 6-month annual review with them to go over their progress, not going to get it done. So the other thing that is really, really, really— if there's one slide I show you that's the most important thing for hacking flow, it's this one. Most people believe that flow is actually one state. It's not. 4 states that we know of, but maybe more. There is a first state. It is a priming state, a loading state. This is, again, Dr. Herbert Benson's work at Harvard. He calls it struggle, and he calls it struggle for a reason. The goal here is to overwhelm yourself with information. So if I'm looking— if I'm working as a writer, this means I have to interview everybody I possibly can. I have to read all the books I possibly can. I have to read all the magazines. I want to be frustrated. I want to be overwhelmed by the information. I want to be overwhelmed by the information. I wanna not know where I am. This is important. Now, the thing is, and here is the key, if you wanna hack flow, you can't attach to the frustration. You need the cortisol release. You need the norepinephrine release. These are chemicals that are released when you're very, very frustrated. You can't avoid them if you're interested in a flow state. But if you attach to the frustration, if you're like, Goddammit, I can't get it to work. I'm never gonna get it to work. You are never going to get it to work. What you have to do is realize that the frustration is actually part of the experience you're going after. stage, and that the sign that you're getting frustrated and frustrated and feeling stupid and not knowing how you're ever going to get it, that is a good thing and not a bad thing. The next stage is a release. It's a moment of absolute relaxation. Herbert Benson calls it the relaxation response. A lot of people go for walks, go to movies, have sex, anything that absolutely takes all that struggle out of your mind. You can't think about it. You have to relax Completely. Then you get your flow state. The thing about a flow state to remember is it's a very, very big high. If you're not used to having those, you do what anybody else does when they're high. Oh, look, pretty trees. That kind of stuff. You have to stay focused. This is a state of ultimate performance. They don't come along every day, and you are being given a chance to stretch your potential Like never before. The impossible happens in flow states, so you don't want to waste it. You don't want to waste it for 2 reasons. One, you'll waste the state. The second is you're training your brain. The more flow you have, the more flow you have. So the longer you can stretch out that flow state, the longer you can stretch out the next one. The next thing, and this is very important also, is there is a recovery period. There is a learning and a memory consolidation state. Now flow, we know Massively amplifies learning and it enhances memory. But the other thing to know is that the neurochemicals that produce flow are expensive to produce. They take a lot of energy. You need certain foods. You need sunlight. You need certain vitamins. They're gone from your brain. So what's gonna happen is you're gonna be depressed after a flow state. Flow states usually last a couple of hours. You'll go to sleep. The next morning you'll wake up. You'll probably feel great. A couple hours later, you're gonna be really down. You are not going to feel like Superman. You're going to feel like crap. And if you get too hung up on this, if you get hung up on this feeling and you get frustrated again, you're not going to move into the next stage. Because the next stage, again, is struggle. So who wants to go from feeling like crap into struggle? You can't get up for it. So again, just like the struggle phase, you have to know that this is natural. It's part of a 4-stage cycle and you can't attach too much to it. So, I know that a lot of people are giving you kind of actionable steps to move your lives forward. And most of them are fairly small things that you can do. I don't have any small things for you. What I want to tell you is that the people who are very, very good at flow states, and these are the highest performers in the world on almost any stage, as a general rule, they haven't made slight tweaks in their life. They've thrown their entire life out and they've started over and they started with, I am only going to do those things that produce flow. For example, my life, and I'm not putting myself in the same category as those action sport athletes, but I write for a living, I work with animals for a living, and I like the action and adventure sports. Why do I do only these 3 things and why do I live in a tiny town in the mountains? Because I don't want distractions. I write for a living and that means I need flow Otherwise, it's not gonna get published. So the writing produces flow. Altruism produces a very unusual flow state called helper's high. This is based on work done by Alan Lukes, who founded Big Brothers Big Sisters. Unlike normal flow states, which last 2 to 3 hours, the flow state brought on by altruism— and we're not sure why this happens, it may have something to do with oxytocin— but this flow state brought on by altruism lasts 2 to 3 days sometimes. Very, very powerful. And the last thing I do is, of course, huck the meat carcass down a mountain. Again, produces flow states. The more flow states I get writing, the more flow states I get in the mountains, the more with the dogs, etc., etc. One thing feeds off another. This is the same thing with the action sport athletes. If you talk to action sport athletes, what do they do in their free time? A lot of them play music. A lot of them play video games. A lot of them do both. Video games produce a low-grade flow state. It's more of a dopamine loop than a flow state, but it's similar. Music, very, very, very flowy. Sports, very, very flowy. So people who are good at this have redesigned their entire life around flow state. They have made it the most important thing in their life.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. You can see the important flow state slide that Steven referred to in our private Facebook group and our show notes. I'll catch you and your quick brain in the flow. Want to double your brain speed and memory power? If you'd like to learn rapidly and get ahead faster, I'd like to give you my brand new Quick Brain Accelerator program. You will discover exactly what I teach my clients to learn, read, and remember anything in half the time. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. That's kwikbrain.com, or simply text the word podcast to 916-822-7246 and we'll send you a direct link. That's 916-82-BRAIN. Growing up struggling with learning challenges from a childhood brain injury, it's been my life's mission to help you have your very best brain so you can win more every single day. Now, want more Kwik Brain? Here are 4 ways to fast-track your results and lock in what you just learned into your long-term memory. Remember FAST. F-A-S-T. The F stands for Facebook. You're not alone on this journey. I invite you to join our free private online group. There you can connect with me, your fellow brain lovers, links to resources, and even submit your questions for me to answer in future episodes. Go to kwikbrain.com. That's K-W-I-K brain dot com. The A stands for apply. Act on what you learned today. Remember, knowledge is not power, it's potential power. It only becomes power when you use it. So use what you just learned. The S stands for subscribe. Don't miss the next episode and other free brain training. And finally, the T stands for teach. You want to learn faster now? The key is to lock it in right away by teaching it to someone else. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Here's a simple way to do that. Leave a review on iTunes. Leave a review with your biggest takeaway from this episode. You could also post and share this podcast on your social media. It helps us spread our mission of building better, brighter brains. And of course, tag us so our team can properly thank you. #KwikBrain, K-W-I-K Brain. Mine is @JimKwik, K-W-I-K, on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. So What does FAST stand for? Facebook, Apply, Subscribe, Teach. I'll see you in our next episode of Kwik Brain. Until then, remember, you are faster and smarter than you think.