Master Optimal Performance: How To Get Into Flow Under Pressure

Every time you think you're on the right track or you sense you're on the right track, you get a little dopamine drip. So think about like breadcrumbs all along to the payoff. We have misunderstood dopamine as the thing that you get when you win the race, when you win the battle. Dopamine is designed to pull you along, but that's the key. So forward movement is going to engage the right circuits. So you don't have to know all the neuro nomenclature. If you do, great. But if not, forward action is what it's all about.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again.

Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance.

Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your tallest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Rich, I met— we were just trying to figure this out— 7 years ago, shortly after I wrote Rise of Superman, and he brought me in to give a talk to the SEALs when he was there, and we have been friends ever since. And when it comes to leading teams, extremely high-performing teams through crisis situations at a tactical, practical, strategic, human level, most importantly human level, I don't think there's anybody better in the world that I know. Andrew Huberman is a more recent friend, but we have become very, very close and he's become one of my favorite people in neuroscience. And one of the more creative thinkers I've encountered in neuroscience as well. But, he has great expertise when it comes to fear. And, Andrew and I have been working very slowly on mapping exactly what goes on in the brain during the first 2 seconds of a flow state. So, as we drop into flow, what happens almost immediately in those first 2 seconds? And, we've been looking at that problem. And, when he talks a little about fear and what he's learned about the fight response, We'll maybe fill in a little detail as we go. But for now, I want to sort of kick it over to these guys because when it comes to high performance in the face of crisis, they're two of the best in the world, and I want to give them a chance to talk.

First of all, delighted to be here. You know, I'm surrounded here in cyberspace by some of the most impressive people that I know. Stephen alluded to, as you know, the convergence point between theory and practice and where neuroscience fits in is, I think, really where the whole world of science of flow is headed and what it's really about. One thing that I think we'll talk about today, and Rich can comment about his real-world experience with this, is that there really is no entry to flow without some level of what we would call autonomic arousal. And we can talk about autonomic arousal, but autonomic arousal is sometimes talked about in terms of stress, or rest and digest, you hear those two things, stress or rest, fight or flight or rest and digest. That is just one dimension of what autonomic arousal can create for somebody. And Steve and I talked about this a lot, that there's no way to enter a highly desired state like flow without going through a few gates. And the gates are really neural gates, meaning these are gonna be brain areas and connections between the brain and body. So anytime we talk about brain, we're probably talking about the whole nervous system, brain and body. We'll use mind and brain interchangeably. There's no way to access a highly desirable state like flow without going through a gate of autonomic arousal. It's like saying you want to get from here, California, to New York, but you don't want to have to drive or get on a plane or get on a train. It just doesn't work. You can't teleport there. One of the gates that's so crucial is this autonomic arousal. Autonomic arousal has some signature features. Like increased heart rate, increased breathing rate, dilation of the pupils, which makes your visual field literally have less depth. You can't see as much. There's literally a change in the optics of the eye. The photographers out there will understand this. It's like changing the way the lens is set so that you see certain things better than others. There are a lot of evolutionary reasons why autonomic arousal does this. But the thing to keep in mind is it's not bad. It's not stress. That elevated level of arousal is exactly the same thing you feel when you fall in love and you, We have these phrases like you only have eyes for one person or something. That's because literally, they're changing the visual field under these high states of autonomic arousal. It changes the way they view the world. Entering flow requires getting intimate with that sensation and understanding that you have to go to it and you have to go— I don't want to say through it because you want to bring it forward with you. It's like picking up a satchel of goods that are going to stay with you on your race. It's not like moving through a gate and leaving it behind. Autonomic arousal in the world of flow and the discussions that we've been having, when I say we, I mean Steven and Rich, is a good thing. In other words, heartbeat rate going up, a little bit of fear, a little bit of heightened sense of disorientation even, that's your indication you're heading in the right direction. You don't want to stay in that state. but that is the entry point. I'll say it one more way. I'll offer up one more analogy. You can't— unless you're some keto freak, you can't make a cake without flour, all right? Or how about this? You can't make a cake without a pan. If you're in ketosis or something, you'd be like, well, I made a cake without flour. But you get their point. It's an essential ingredient of the flow process, what we would typically call stress.

Thank you, Andrew. Let me put a little framing around this for people that may help. What it looks like, so if you know anything about the flow cycle, flow doesn't work like a binary, it's a 4-stage process. The first stage is a struggle phase. Normally, we think of that as a loading phase. You're building up skills so you can perform them essentially unconsciously. You're trying to turn skills into habits so you can perform them unconsciously, which is what happens in flow. But struggle can also be very, very, very brief, really short, and we think it happens no matter what. As Andrew pointed out, at the front end of a flow state. So, there's always going to be a bit of a flight response. So, you're riding your mountain bike, suddenly the terrain gets really hard, you got to go, "Ah," and just sort of dive into it and really attack it. I could be writing and my work is the same way and I just got to sort of really take that stress like you said and really turn it in, use it to focus my attention onto the task at hand, and that's a gateway to flow. That's something that the SEALs train for, right? To take that energy, that fear, and turn it into focus for the task at hand. With that, I'll pass it over to Rich.

Yeah, well, first of all, let me just say again how wonderful it is to be on with all of you. Stephen and I have known each other for, you know, 7 years now. Andrew and I have known each other for 3 years and have been working on this. And really, just to give everybody in the audience a background, uh, one of the things that Andrew and I came together on and found that we were both interested in was this idea of how to operate and perform in uncertainty, stress, and anxiety. And, you know, obviously I was always interested in deconstructing what we did in, in our community, uh, and Andrew was interested in kind of looking at the lab and seeing how it maps out neuroscientifically. And so we automatically kind of gelled on that topic. And one of the things that we discovered. Um, and I think this is funny, Stephen, because I think you and I had this quote argument when we first met. And, and it's funny because, you know, I was the first on the phone with you. You said something like, um, hey, you guys, I'd love to come talk to you guys. You guys must do this Flow stuff all the time. And I was like, no, no, I want you to come talk to us because we need to do more of it, right? And the idea is that Flow is obviously awesome, but it's also— it's tough sometimes to get. It's a tough It's a tough state to find, which is why the work you're doing is so important. When you are in uncertainty and stress and overwhelm, sometimes flow is not easy to come by. And so how— so I would say that, that guys who served in, in communities such as mine and continue to serve in communities such as mine actually are better at operating optimally versus at a peak. And, and we, we often talk about peak performance, and that's really, of course, the goal. Can you achieve peak performance? But peak, we have to remember, is an apex from which you can only come down, and it's sometimes tough to sustain because you can't sustain that top end for too long. There has to be some sort of curve. So I would always tell people that, you know, SEALs or Spec Ops guys are really— you could talk about most demographic of high performer— really aren't as much peak performers as they are optimal performers. We trained to be optimal performers, and that's what Andrew and I have really begun to figure out and deconstruct. What is optimal performance? Well, optimal performance could actually in fact look like peak, and it could look very flowy, but optimal performance could also be moving step by step. It could be just simply surviving. Optimal performance really is how can I do the very best I can in the moment that I'm in. And that might look like peak, and that also might look like I'm surviving minute by minute. The funny kind of example I had, and Andrew and I would joke about, is when I was in SEAL training, freezing in the surf zone, any one of us, there was nothing peak about our performance, right? It was just, hey, I got to get through minute by minute. And so when we think about today's environment, when we think about people in any environment where they're just, they're wrecked with challenge or stress or anxiety. It's okay to not be in flow. It's okay not to be in peak. The key is, can you move? Can you perform? If it's just step by step, that's okay too. That is optimal performance. I'm just going to move step by step. And I think what Andrew is saying about this idea of autonomic arousal and fear is this idea, and I'm going to let Andrew kind of get into the science of it because he's so good at explaining it, but fear is designed to get us moving. It's designed to make us do something, and it's a switch in our brain, and we can use it effectively to get moving and to do and to become and to push through. And we actually get rewarded because of it. We get dopamine, we get chemical rewards because of that. So that's certainly something I'd love for Andrew to expound upon, and I'll shut up so he can.

Thanks, Richard, for lending the Those insights. Yeah, you know, we've been talking about this for a while. We, again, that's everyone you see here today in various conversations. So the autonomic nervous system— autonomic means automatic, and it's thought to be the parts of the nervous system that just happen and that you don't have any control over. It's a total misnomer. It's one of the worst names in all of neuroanatomy because you actually can control the autonomic nervous system, and we can talk about how to do that. We'll We'll definitely get into that a little bit later in this test. But this autonomic arousal stress, yeah, so the autonomic nervous system is just this set of connections between the brain and body. If you take away nothing from what I'm about to say, just remember it's the connections between the brain and body. And the stress response, believe it or not, was designed to focus you. The stress response was not designed to make you uncomfortable, injure, hurt you. Give you PTSD, none of that. Those are all cognitive interpretations about the stress response. The stress response was designed to focus your visual attention and your auditory attention to a particular location in space, and then for your body to follow what was going on in that particular location in space. So let's use an example where if you perceive something as a threat, your ability to track that threat visually and with your hearing is going to be heightened. Just simply because of the way that the brain and body start communicating. Your body is going to be filled with things like adrenaline, and you're going to feel that as agitation. We don't like that feeling of agitation, but we need to kind of pull back a layer on what we call stress and agitation. If what we're saying is that it's a prerequisite to getting into flow, because it is, and understand why agitation. Well, agitation was designed to get you to move. It was designed to get you to do something, to move from whatever position and place you're in to a new position and place. That could be by walking, by running, by writing, by thinking. That agitation you feel, and if you start labeling it as frustration, like, "Ah, it's not getting me where I want to go," when you get frustrated, you're giving that too much weight. You are asking yourself to teleport from California to New York. It can't happen. What you need to do is understand the agitation was designed to get you to move down a track. Stephen has this great example, maybe you can share it with us, Stephen, again, about in mountain biking, how when you drop into singletrack, I'm not a mountain biker, so I'm not familiar with this, but how your visual world can actually change by virtue of changing your physical world, your mental world, excuse me, can change as a result of your physical world changing, and all those things aligning. Just understand you're going to get that first gate is going to be fear, stress, anxiety, frustration. and your job is to move through it and collect something from that experience and move forward. But there's no way into flow without that.

Yeah. So it's a, it's a really common experience, uh, in mountain biking. And it was the experiment we were talking about running. So one of the things that's very common in mountain biking is you can do— be doing 50 miles an hour across an open field, just kind of be normal in your riding, and you drop into single track in the trees. And when your vision compresses wildly this quickly, it drives you into flow very quickly. And, you know, what the point I made when we were first talking about it, Andrew, and I'm not 100% this could be a just-so story, but my thinking was evolution, design, flow. And if you think about the human brain, the fastest we can run 23, 24 miles an hour. If we're running down a mountain, maybe we can increase that 26, 27. But your feet are going to start to get ahead of you and gravity is going to pull you too fast and you're not going to be possible. So there's a lower point on that threshold somewhere where the brain goes, oh my God, you're running at top speed. You must be running towards a predator, you know, towards something you want to eat or away from a predator and you need peak performance at this moment. So it'll drop you into flow. And another way that happens is when frame rate goes by and suddenly things are passing by your eye very quickly. Signal to your brain that, "Oh, wow, there's a lot of consequences," really have to dial you in is what I was thinking. I want to reference one thing Rich said earlier because I think he's right and it's worth hitting on again, which is sort of the difference between a peak state like flow and optimal performance. And, I always say my favorite day, for example, skiing or writing is when I do something out of a flow state, completely out of a flow state, that I have done previously in flow. So, I'll get into a flow state skiing, I'll level up my game, I'll be able to do stuff I've not done before in ways I haven't done it before. And then, 2, 3 weeks, maybe a month, 2 months of work go by and I learn how to do all those same skills without flow. And, there's usually a day when I'm tired and don't really have it and can't get into flow, but I managed to pull off everything I had done on the previous time with flow. Without flow. And I think that's one of the reasons we train, right? You train to be able to get into flow and then lay down the skills quickly in flow so you can use them in situations where flow isn't even possible, like you in the surf where it's freezing and it's just too grueling, is my thinking on that.

One quick thing, I want to give Rich an opportunity to respond, but there was two questions popped up in the margins that I want to make sure that we're clear on our terms. A couple people said, wait, I thought the frontal cortex, which is involved in decision-making, is really important for flow and that stress shuts down the frontal cortex. The modern neuroscience literature tells us that stress does not shut down the frontal cortex. In fact, frontal cortex is invariably involved in the stress response. But it just— literally, the optics of your eye changes when you have high levels of autonomic arousal or stress. You're able to track individual things and you're not able to see the big picture, you literally lose depth of field. It's like using portrait mode on your phone where the background is blurry. Your perception, your reality changes by virtue of changes in your eye. Your frontal cortex also becomes— there's a shift in the neural circuit so that you're able to think about specific things much faster, but you're not able to hold as many things in register at once. This is, I think, your example of mountain biking and going from wide field to narrow track exemplifies that also, Stephen. So the frontal cortex, your ability to think clearly, is enhanced by stress, but the number of things that— the number of operations that you can carry out is reduced. And so it doesn't lend itself very well to multitasking. It doesn't lend itself to perspective and input across different time domains and things that we could talk about. But think about stress as narrowing your focus and constraining you, but it's a narrow tube, then flows on the outside of that narrow tube, right, or through that narrow tube. So that's kind of the visual that we're kind of creating here.

To bring that back, Andrew, in terms of productivity at home and things like that, I think that would then suggest if people's baseline level of autonomic arousal and stress is increased, then simple ideas like single-tasking, keeping phones shut off, avoiding distractions become infinitely more important. Is that right?

Absolutely. I think it's a great, great point. What most people think of as stress is actually discombobulation, where you have so many things coming at you. You're trying to do 20 things at once. You're doing the dishes, then you're tending to something else, then you're looking at your phone, then you're text messaging. This is a wonderful device, and I use it all the time, but it is— think of it like another brain area. Actually, think of it as like Brodman, the famous neuroanatomist, talked about 43 brain Brodmann 43 brain areas. This is like area 44 through 50. You've got memory, you've got stored photographs, you've got people that want your attention. There's people in there that you probably shouldn't be talking to, but you want to or don't want to. You've got all sorts of notifications. This is like another brain area, and we carry it around kind of like this, right? Like, oh, I'm gonna— like, got this brain-machine interface, and I'm gonna let this control my nervous system. You want to be a slave to this nervous system, not this one. I use this, but I definitely want people to be aware that when stress level goes up, you're going to want— just as Rian said, you want to focus into a more narrow trench. Rich, I think this is probably a good opportunity, if you would, or if you're willing rather, to talk about this notion of— you hear SEALs talk about control what you can control in the face of stress, like be in action, you know, keep your center of mass forward. You know, you hear these things, um, you know, I'd love to hear maybe, you know, what your real-world experience of what that might look like, because you guys are obviously— an entry-level requirement for SEAL teams is an ability to not get discombobulated to the point of dissolving into a puddle of tears or so, or whatever it is that The guys who don't make it through buds do.

That's what I do.

Yeah, that's, uh, that's right.

One is actually dissolved in their own puddle of tears, as far as I know.

All right. No, no, sir, I, I think that's a great segue into that topic, and I think one of the things we should probably talk about as we get into that is this idea again, and I'll credit Andrew for this when we first began our conversations, but talking about what fear actually is, right? And I think we kind of decided, and I think through Andrew's research, you really kind of realize this, that anxiety plus uncertainty equals fear. So if you think about that for a second, if you have anxiety without uncertainty, that might be you're nervous for— you're nervous about a presentation you're going to give at work or whatever, right? That's anxiety without uncertainty. You know what's coming up, you're just a little anxious about it or nervous, right? Uncertainty without anxiety, well, that's every kid on Christmas Eve, right? So separating those two becomes somewhat of an antidote to fear and a way that you can perform. So if you find yourself in overwhelm, the idea would be to begin to, as you can, buy down one of those, right? So buying down anxiety, Andrew is extraordinarily good at this and has tips. And I mean, understanding your autonomic nervous system Understanding the physiological things that you can do to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic and buy down some of that anxiety, that's one thing. It's probably the easier route because we're much more in control of our internal systems and our internal landscapes than the external because so often, if not almost all the time, the uncertainty is coming from external cues, right? So, so it's a lot tougher sometimes to buy down the uncertainty in an environment. And so But you can do it. And what I think what SEALs do and high performers do is that we look at, we take an environment and we immediately start to ask ourselves, what can we control? What can we control and what can we become certain about? And I kind of used to nickname it chunking certainty, right? Chunking certain elements. I think that's something Steven and I once talked about. What elements of this environment can I chunk into certainty and do I know? And can I buy that down by doing and understanding those things so that uncertainty begins to go from maybe 100% down to whatever percentage, 50% or lower. And then of course you have to be okay with a certain level of uncertainty. But how do you take control of your environment? We start, you know, start looking at what you can control. It really depends on, it's very, very subjective, right? If I'm in the surf zone and I don't know how long I'm gonna be there and I'm freezing, and I don't want to quit. Well, what can I control? I can control my internal thoughts. Maybe I can control my muscle movements. Maybe I can control my mind so I can think about something funny. You know, control my attitude, right? So if you're in a situation where you're at work and things aren't going the way that you feel like they should be, you're in a meeting or something, what are those things you can control? I think part of this process means asking more effective questions. Our brains are, and I'll have the neuroscientists back me up on this, but our brains are designed to answer questions. We are answering question machines because we're designed to make certainty out of our environments. And we do that through questions, oftentimes unconscious ones, but we can do it consciously as well. And just asking and reframing the questions you ask yourself, what about this do I know? What about this do I understand? What about this can I control? Your brain will begin to come up with answers. And I think that high performers begin to do this habitually, and they reframe their questions in a way that are positive. So we all do this. Most of us are guilty of doing this unconsciously, and we do it negatively. Why does this always happen to me? Why am I so bad at this? Right? You start asking yourself those questions, your brain is going to start giving you answers, and some of them, most of them will be, you know, bad ones and probably untrue. But if you reframe those questions, you get the same type of answering machine. What can I learn about this? What about this can I become stronger from? Those are, I think, habits that high performers, especially ones that are consistently finding themselves in challenging situations, begin to do. Asking themselves empowering questions, utilizing that very effective, really by design, you know, neurology that allows us to start putting better certainty into our environment.

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The reason that, you know, the SEAL community is of interest to me is because, um, you know, the— obviously in wartime, the consequences for making the wrong decisions can be quite dire, but that the selection process is really about exactly what Rich is talking about. They are not kind of— they are masters of this process, which is controlling what you can control in order to be able to have broader broader spectrum of control, your internal world and the external world. One thing that he said really rung in my mind here, which is that, you know, the idea of controlling something— someone put up a note, yeah, good luck trying to focus when you've got kids at home and the phone is ringing and you've got all this chaos. That's exactly the point. It's conditions like those where you pick one thing, maybe it's making yourself a cup of coffee from start to finish, and you're suppressing spontaneity and you're in the act of starting something and moving through it and completing it, that it's not about the cup of coffee. It's about restoring order to your neural processes so that you are reactivating the decision-action neural circuits. Think about it this way. It's like careening down a hill in a car and there's no one in the driver's seat. You're in the backseat. You can scream, you can shout, you can put your hands out to the sun, or if you do whatever you want, you're not going to steer or stop that car. What Rich is talking about is crawling into the front seat and grabbing a hold of the steering wheel. Okay, but how you move into the front seat, you know, metaphorically speaking, is in this case, it's almost irrelevant as long as you don't do something that's counter to your goals, like I'm going to decide to scream at my kids, or I'm going to decide to, you know, uh, you know put my hand through a window, which would be a bad idea. As long as you're doing something that's either neutral or in the direction of where you want to go, you restore the ability to steer the car, which is essentially you restore control over that frontal cortex, limbic circuitry, basal ganglia. Basal ganglia being involved in movement, frontal cortex being involved in decision-making and kind of general orchestrating of things, the limbic system, the sort of fear and anxiety pathways that we're talking about. So you're getting, you're grabbing a hold of your neural circuitry. I took one note here, which is, you know, in some ways focus can be thought of as the ability to suppress spontaneity, right? We love spontaneity. It's like, oh, look at this, I'm going to look at that. If you think about a puppy or a baby child, you know, a young child, you tell them they're red kids, a baby, they call them babies, infants. Everything is a stimulus. You know, when my bulldog was a little puppy, I'd let him into a room and he'd pick up a cord and chew on it, he'd drop it, then he'd chew on the couch and he'd just As that dog gets older or a child gets older, not everything is a stimulus. And what happens, the reason for that is that the forebrain starts developing. It exerts what's called top-down control on these limbic circuits. People have frontal damage, right? Everything's a stimulus. They just kind of pick a plan of action and go, and then they're switching to something else. It's ADD. We are all subject to these ADD-like behaviors. So picking something and controlling something that you can control is about training up the circuitry It's not just about making the cup of coffee, if that's your choice. It's about training the circuitry that allows you to set things aside and make an action plan and exert an action plan. Then you can start pivoting into action plans that are more in line with what you need to do. When you're feeling you're in a spin, you've got to pick something that's either neutral or in the direction that you want to go. Just like if you want to access flow, you need to ride that elevated level of autonomic arousal to a more narrow point with the trust and understanding that there's a more elaborate open landscape for you to access flow beyond that. One other thing, what about body and brain? Are most people feeling stress in their head or in their body? Varies a lot. Some people are very somatic-oriented. They feel like they feel things in their gut. Some people even have told me, I think in feels. I don't know what it is. I tend to be more kind of up in my head. Some people feel these things simultaneously. The stress response and autonomic arousal and focus and flow, people are gonna experience those quite differently. It's a little bit subjective.

Hey, let me just, if I could pop in on one thing about kids here, because as a parent, I've had to learn this and I'm continuing to learn it. And it kind of ties into what Andrew's saying about this idea that we have our limbic brain and we have our forebrain and the limbic brain really absorbing and in charge of taking in all of our emotions and really kind of telling us what to feel, and the forebrain, if and when it's developed, helping us exert some top-down control. Well, I mean, the forebrain isn't fully developed until, I don't know what, early 20s, Andrew, I think it is. So we have to understand as parents that when we're leading our kids, because that's what we're doing, we have to set that example, right? We're the ones who have the forebrain, the top-down control. Our kids don't. Their forebrain is still developing. They are coming from largely limbic areas, which means they're highly emotional, and your logic as a parent is not necessarily going to resonate with them as kids. And so we have to remember this neurology sometimes when we're dealing with our kids, because it, it matters. It really does. And it's something I've had to learn. My wife has had to remind me, because she's really naturally good at this. And we just have to know, because if we, if we try to inflict knowledge on our kids, it typically doesn't go well.

So I want to jump in and just take something that Andrew was talking about and make it a little more practical. The cup of coffee example was a phenomenal example, right? Do something. One of the other things is that was alluded to a bunch— forward motion calms you down. We're agitated, we want to act. Forward motion actually calms you down. Moving in a direction is something the brain There's two— we take in a ton of information every second, and there are two major filters for this information. One is fear, the second is your goals. And those are the two main things that screen most of the data that's coming in. And how you want the equation to work in your favor is you want more focus on your goals because you'll get less fear as a result. This is one of the reasons we really stress— we talk about clear goals is a flow trigger. And clear goals are different from big goals, and they're different from what you could call a massively transformative purpose, which is what we call it in Bold. Massively transformative purpose is a mission statement for your life. Then there are the big goals. These are, I want to go to college, or I want to write a book, or something long that's going to take a while. And clear goals are, what are you going to do today? And the emphasis when you say goals, especially the most Westerners, You say something like clear goals, they're gonna focus on the goals and not hear the clear. And actually, the emphasis is on clear. Your brain wants to know, what am I doing now? What am I doing next? So it can keep that forward motion because it keeps anxiety down. So at the start of a day, especially, especially, especially, especially in times of stress and crisis, you definitely want to make a to-do list. You want your clear goals list to be as kind of specific as you can be. Don't go too long. Take 5, 6 minutes. But before you start work in the morning— and this is two things, right? It allows you to kind of focus yourself. It helps focus, drives flow, and it also allows you to win the day. Cross off those things on your list. You get a little dopamine, makes you feel better. And by the end of it, right, you had 10 things on your to-do list. You've got them all done. You won your day. You can now go relax. And your body can relax because you've accomplished what you need to accomplish. This is really foundational stuff and it doesn't— it sounds really weird for how effective it is. But as everybody has alluded to and I've said over and over, most of what we mean by peak performance is getting your biology to work for you rather than against you. And that's what this does. It gets your biology working for you. With that, I'll shut up.

Those are great points. What part of the forebrain? I'm referring mainly to the medial prefrontal cortex. There are other subregions of the cortex we get into it. I don't know if we want to get too far down in the weeds. You can always send me a note or something for the aficionados if you want to dive into that.

Okay, since you went there, I got to ask the geek. All right, so now we're going to ask a geeky flow question because I have to. So, the medial prefrontal cortex, most of the prefrontal cortex deactivates in flow, right? Especially the lateral, the sides, which is where you get a lot of that inner critic, that nagging. Self-monitoring voice. Medial prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain— lay people like to say it governs creative self-expression. What that really means is it helps you select from a variety of— you're faced with a problem, I can go in 30 directions. The medial prefrontal cortex is going to help you pick the action plan. This is the right action plan. And then if that action plan is totally right, meaning you execute it and the result is better than you expected and better than you expected, That's the front end of a flow state. So you've kind of got this fight response that we talked about earlier. Stress comes in. I got to focus. Then the medial prefrontal cortex gets active. It chooses an action plan. And then once it's selected and executed, the rest of the prefrontal cortex falls away. It gets very quiet because the action plan was executed and it went really, really well, which is what happens in flow or what happens with optimal or peak performance. You no longer have to have conscious interference to steer your action. You know what you're doing, so you could execute it at much greater speeds. You can start to take in way more information. You can notice way more patterns, and that's essentially flow. So, my question, Andrew, is when you just said earlier the prefrontal cortex gets active with stress to a point, right? And then, do we think all of it drops?

You raise a really important point. It's not that all of it is dropping out. I mean, you've got Subsets of these areas, like I think areas like the ACC, like the anterior cingulate cortex, and some of the areas adjacent to prefrontal cortex start getting heightened levels of activity. We start self-reflecting, part of the stress response, because we become somatically engaged in sort of like what's happening with our body. We start self-reflecting, oh goodness, I'm stressed, or my cheeks are flushing, or maybe my voice is shifting and people can hear it. And we start doing that, the self-monitoring, right? That's what stress heightens in the frontal cortex. The creative aspects of cortex are a few steps further down the line. Those are the ones you want to get to. Those ones are transiently suppressed as far as we know. Earlier, one way to put it into common language is the focus. We think about focus as suppressing spontaneity, like Rich moving through BUD/S or any kind of op he might have done where he's got to— it can't be about spontaneity. But spontaneity is kind of the hallmark of really high performance. We can think of creativity as kind of spontaneity with a purpose. It's not just random. You know, a writer like Stephen— I'm writing a book right now, so I think about Stephen a lot, like what's his process. He's done this so many times. He can sit down and he knows how to find creativity, but he doesn't find it randomly. He's not just— there's an arena in which he knows that it's going to show up. So there's spontaneity but with a purpose. So he needs new elements that he can arrange and do in different ways. but it can't be every element available to him in his world because that would just be chaos. So you constrain the number of elements. That's the equivalent of, you know, entry point is a constraint process. You're going to go down this trench where certain parts of the frontal cortex are going to be more activated and others are not. Then the medial prefrontal cortex is what you're going to open up into that gallery of sort of new ideas you can arrange in new ways and spontaneity. I'm going to venture a guess that Rich moving through bugs or through a particularly challenging op where he performed very well and team performed very well might have been ultra-focused, suppress all spontaneity, protocol, protocol, protocol. And then all of a sudden, the option to introduce some uncertainty shows up and to start playing with novel elements. And all of a sudden, people find themselves performing at a level they never— they kind of knew they could and should. But you couldn't force yourself through it. You couldn't cram yourself there from the start. You had to go through that narrow trench first. So I'm not trying to be too metaphorical here. I think that creativity is spontaneity with a purpose. That's how I'm defining it. You know, focus is suppressing spontaneity. And so that focus— you need to suppress spontaneity, head in the right direction, and then invite spontaneity back in. But I don't want to make it seem like you deliberately invite spontaneity back in because it's going to find you. Anyone that says, I'm going to go be creative, that's very—

Yeah, well, creativity. I got a chance to spend some time with the Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler, and she makes this point over and over and over again. I think she's totally right with it, which is creativity is the thing that emerges when you do the thing. The example I like to give that reflects exactly on what you talked about is football. In football, there are 11 people on offense, 11 people on defense. And everybody's got a job to do for the first 7 to 8 seconds of the play. And if the play is still going at that point, then it means everything's gone to hell, and then it's time to be creative with a purpose, just as Andrew said. So I think that's a really good sort of way to think about the way you're coming at this. Rich, what do you think?

I totally agree. I mean, I think, you know, in the context of, of life, I mean, life is really about uncertainty, right? So as we move through, understanding purpose becomes of vast importance, which helps enable creativity. But yeah, I mean, I couldn't say it better than the neuroscientist or the, uh, or the bestselling author. So, so I will say I agree.

One thing about forward action that I think, uh, cuz we didn't really touch on forward action too much. If some of you are listening to this and thinking, okay, well this sounds interesting, you know, like frontal cortex, ACC, limbic, you know, writings, creativity, funny seals. Think about it this way: the circuitry that we're talking about, about narrowing and pushing away spontaneity and going through this narrow trench, trust that on the other side of that there's this kind of open vista where you're going to be able to access new things and things like flow state. That process has to require forward movement because— and normally I don't talk about research from my lab too much because I'd rather— it's more fun for me to talk about the work of my colleagues, but We published a paper in Nature in 2018, we meaning Lindsay Saleh, a graduate student in my lab, she did the work, I just oversaw the work, where she discovered that in response to a feeling of threat and anxiety, a visual threat, but it could be other kinds of threats too, animals and humans have these circuits too that put them into one of three modes. One is to freeze. Now freeze doesn't necessarily have to be frozen and paralyzed in fear. We can also call it pause, where you're assessing your options. And there was another response to threats, which was to run away and flee. And then the third response, which was forward movement. And what was really interesting about forward movement is, first of all, it has its own distinct circuit in the brain. And when animals or people engage in forward movement, there's literally an activation of specific limbic to cortical networks that are required for more forward action. The cool thing is, is she found what's called a collateral, little side road from that pathway in the brain to the area of the brain that releases dopamine. Only through this forward action could dopamine be released. Forward action, even if it starts from a place of intense discomfort, stimulates the release of dopamine, which has an amplifying effect on moving your ability and sense that you can move forward. It takes what would otherwise just be uncomfortable, and it allows the forward action to start becoming something more of comfort or even pleasure. This is deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology. Think about any animal that got hungry. It's not just going to get dopamine when it gets food because why would it head off in one direction versus another? It would start foraging and sniffing and say, "Oh, wait. There's a scent," or if it's a sighthound or it's a human, "There's something I see. Well, no, I guess not." Every time you think you're on the right track or you sense you're on the right track, you get a little dopamine drip. Think about breadcrumbs all along to the big payoff. We have misunderstood dopamine as the thing that you get when you win the race, when you win the battle. Dopamine is designed to pull you along, but that's the key. Forward movement is going to engage the right circuits. You don't have to know all the neuro-nomenclature. If you do, great, but if not, forward action is what it's all about. This speaks to Rich's example earlier as well.

So I do a lot of traveling for work and when it's 4 or 5 cities in a row, it gets really exhausting and it's really, you know, it can get, you know, you're not sleeping. So I'll often just to like get through airports, right? I'll, A, I'll rely on the forward action, but I'll set myself little chunk goals. Just make it to the gate, just make it onto the plane, just make it into the seat so you can go to sleep, right? Like little tiny goals and the combination of like achieving these little ridiculous goals while moving through an airport exhausted, it just makes— I get the dopamine from the forward movement with a little bit of dopamine from ticking off my goals. Oh, I got to the gate. It's just enough to sort of keep you going under conditions of exhaustion or stress.

Yeah. Instead of it being like this, a degradative process across the day, it's like this or even like this. I've traveled a lot with Rich, and it's really interesting to see just how he moves through general spaces. He's always doing this checkpoint thing. I'm about to imagine this. He's like, "We're here. Now we're going to go to there. We're going to go there." I don't have a TSA 3, and they're always pulling me aside because I travel with a GNC's worth of supplements. I always get secondary screened. I'm always getting delayed, and by the time I get to the gate, I'm just exhausted, depleted, and angry. Rich, even though he's had to wait for me 20 minutes on the other side of the security check line, he's just marking off these milestones. Honestly, I'm not just saying this because he's my friend, but I've never seen him have that kind of depleted stress response. I've started applying it in little things. I've done it in my laboratory and in my scientific career, but the ability to wick this out into multiple domains of life is really powerful. I think a lot of people have a little bit of a shame about doing it in environments that don't seem directly related to something crucial. But it's precisely because you don't want to be depleted by things that aren't crucial that you need to apply this process in environments that we're all forced to deal with. It's depleting unless you think of this— you can actually turn it into a bit of a fun process as long— while adhering to the steps. So DaVinci and Kotler know how to do this inherently. I know the science, but I don't know how to do it.

I don't implement it.

I know how to do it. I don't implement it.

I want to also add this because I want to hopefully normalize it a little bit because, and I think Andrew, you'll agree with me because we've talked about this, but you know, that step forward that you're talking about, it does not necessarily have to be physical. It can be cognitive. It can be a decision, a conscious decision to, for example, sometimes the right decision is to do nothing and just collect more information. That could be a conscious decision in the dopamine case to move forward. I'm making a decision to stop and collect more information. It could, in fact, sometimes be a step backward. So forward, I don't want people to understand or misunderstand that you have to be moving forward no matter what. I mean, if the edge of the cliff is one step forward, you may not want to move forward. You may want to move sideways or backwards, or you may want to make a decision to stop and collect more information, right? So in times of uncertainty, the idea is forward movement, either physically or cognitively, so that you are at a minimum changing perspective. And once you change perspective, whether you move forward, back, or there's like the mountain climber who, you know, climbs up, you know, the face and realizes there's nothing up, I have to now go down this, down and right to get the next possible handhold, right? So it's not necessarily in the direction of the peak. He has to move, he or she has to move down and right so that they can get another look at what's available, right? So that is also technically forward motion. So, so there's a bunch of different nuances. Some decision is I'm going to stop, do nothing, collect more information, because you don't want to run into the, uh, into the fire without thinking.

So to summarize a little bit, life is a maze, not a sprint or a marathon. Therefore, a step back or sideways is still forward movement, which I think sounds like that in there nicely, Rich. And then Drew, I've got a question, well, for all three of you guys, but just building off something I've heard you talk about for Andrew, which is kind of the idea of there being 3 forms of stress mitigation with tools that raise your ceiling on what you perceive as stress, tools that reduce the stress response after it's been activated, and then tools designed to bring your state up if you're under-aroused, which I'm assuming are less necessary right now. Would love if you could give folks a few examples of those kinds of tools, probably in the first 2 categories.

You don't want autonomic arousal and stress to spin out and take you to levels where you're discombobulated. You can organize your behavior. How do you know if you're too You can't organize your behavior. Little known fact, if you're experiencing peaks in stress, like periodic peaks in stress, everyone loves to talk about how stress inhibits the immune system, but believe it or not, the organs of the body that release T cells and create and release T cells are actually stimulated by stress. If you're experiencing peaks in stress, you were wired for this. That actually will enhance your immune system, believe it or not. Or not. Think about it, and I realize I'm going a little tangent, but I'll circle back on this. Evolutionarily, right, it makes sense that your immune system will get a boost under times where you were under immense challenge. You've experienced this if you've ever worked, worked, worked, worked really hard, and then you rest completely, and then you get sick at the end. Or, boy, you care for a loved one, or you're studying for finals, and at the end you get hammered with a cold or flu. The reason is, is that the— literally, it's the nervous system that innervates things like the thymus and has you make more T cells. Things like that. If you're experiencing stress, I don't want to demonize stress, but when stress isn't like this, when it's not phasic and it's more tonically high, you need to have tools that you can use to suppress it a bit. I like to talk about real-time tools, which are if you're feeling stressed, you can push back on stress in that moment. The two that I'm the biggest fan of are going into panoramic vision because your eyes have a very— and your way of viewing the world has a very powerful effect on your internal state. Panoramic vision is keeping your eyes and head stationary, so you're not moving your eyes. You're dilating out your field of view to be broader and broader until you can actually see yourself in the environment that you're in. The cool thing about this is you can do it even covertly while you're talking or moving through space. Your actual reaction times go up. They're 4 times faster in that mode of vision. For the aficionados, it's called magnuscular vision. It's carried by big neurons, fast transmission, as opposed to looking at something very narrowly. That's one way to do it. The other one is doing what I call a proper sigh. Instead of take a deep breath when you get stressed, there's a set of neurons in your brainstem that literally control sighing. Animals, in particular dogs, do this. If you watch them right when they fall asleep, they start doing this. You do this in your sleep and you do it subconsciously throughout the day. It goes like this. You're gonna inhale through your nose, and at the top, inhale again. And then exhale, and then exhale completely. So it's— so it's an inhale, and then another inhale at the top, and then a long exhale. Why does that work? This is not me just making this up. The neurons that I'm talking about, they cause the alveoli of the lungs to expand and bring in more oxygen, and then when you exhale, they bring in— take out carbon dioxide from the bloodstream and expel it. The process of taking a deep breath when you're stressed, it's not quite right. Long exhales, I've talked a lot about before on social media and other platforms. That's half the story. You want to go inhale, inhale, and then exhale. That's a proper sigh. There are literally neurons that control that, and that immediately puts your system into more parasympathetic dominance. It sometimes only takes 1 or 3 of these, which is nothing. You're talking about 10 seconds. Panoramic vision, inhale what I call a double it. It's kind of inhale, inhale, and then long exhale. If you can't do it through your nose because you have a deviated septum or something like that, don't worry about it. You can use your mouth, but ideally, nose, nose, mouth. Inhale, inhale, mouth. Now, those are real-time tools. The other thing that I'm a big proponent of, and Rich and I have talked a lot about this and work on this, is offline tools. What are you going to do so that when you meet stress the next time, you're operating at a higher level? Build resilience, right? For that, you want to take your nervous system in the other direction. You want to deliberately enhance your level of autonomic arousal. So for that, you're going to do a practice away from stress, maybe once a day, and it's going to look a little bit like Wim Hof breathing. So, you know, kudos to Wim. It's similar to tummo breathing. If you remember the pictures of the monks sitting there in the cold and heating up towels, that's tummo breathing. And Wim Hof breathing is kind of a derivative Tumo breathing. It goes like this. I don't want to be too loud, but it's going to involve doing big inhales and then just letting the air fall out of your mouth. Big inhale, fall out of your mouth. You would do 30 of those. You're going to be tingly and not feeling great when you finish those 30. Then what you're going to do is you're going to exhale all your air and hold and sit peacefully for about 15 seconds. Don't strain. If you need to take a breath, take a breath. 30 breaths, big deep inhale, quick exhale, big deep inhale, quick exhale, 30 times. Exhale, hold your breath for 15 seconds. You might feel kind of jittery and not good. Don't do this near water, you don't want to pass out and drown. Don't do it while you're driving. But if you do this and you do a second round of 25, 30 breaths that way and then exhale, you're going to notice you're immensely calm despite having heightened levels of adrenaline in your system. You do this as an offline practice. This has two major effects. First of all, there's a great paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, not by my group, but by another group, that shows that this pattern of breathing stimulates the innate immune system to secrete these bacteria and virus-fighting molecules. They injected people with E. coli, and the people who did this breathing prior were able to suppress the symptoms. In about 80% of cases, they had no symptoms. Everyone else was like vomiting, diarrhea, and fever. Proof positive in that study that elevating your nervous system starts the immune system. If you do this as an offline practice— I tend to do it in the morning because I wake up really slowly. I need like 4 cups of coffee before I can do anything. I start doing this, you shift over more quickly to that alert, alert state. As the chair of psychiatry— I don't know if he's still the chair— my colleague David Spiegel says— he's a psychiatrist at Stanford, works on hypnosis and trauma— he said it's not is not just the state you're in, but how you got there and whether or not you had something to do with it. So when you are deliberately bringing yourself into a heightened state of what we would call stress, the interpretation of that is completely different. And what this allows to happen is when you look at your phone and you go and you get that text message, which is the oh my goodness, that kind of stress response slams you in the face. This resets what your system, what your body and brain consider stressful. And you'll find is if you're a regular practitioner of this kind of thing, you will not be as triggered by things because being in that heightened state of arousal is a familiar place. It's like, okay, I'm not totally calm here, but I'm comfortable being uncomfortable— a term that Rich can tell us a lot about. Steve can tell us a lot about. So I riffed along, but I wanted to make sure you guys had those tools. I think those were what you asked for. Those weren't what you were asking for, you should have cut me off 5 minutes ago.

I want to jump in and Answer a question and echo something you said. What's the difference between eustress and distress? And are we talking about that? And yes, eustress is positive stress. It's stress that we interpret as a good thing. Distress is the opposite. And there's work on flow as eustress going back almost 50 years at this point. But the thing I wanted to hit on is there's also studies in longevity that show it's It's not the people who live stress-free lives who live the longest and have the healthiest lives. It's people who have positive stressful lives who live the longest and seem to have the healthiest and happiest lives. So, there's a direct reflection there.

Andrew, actually, I'd love to hear your answer to this one based on what we were talking about at the beginning. What is the best way to immediately get back into flow after being interrupted? And, that's one of the things we've been talking about actually in our new training is this idea of kind of distraction. Recovery or interruption recovery. So any, any thoughts on that?

I mean, I think it's gonna depend on how far out of flow you were sent, right? I mean, if you— I'm not gonna say that you need to go all the way back to the beginning, right? But I think let's think about the frustration that comes with that. If you are gonna be focused on the frustration that you got bumped off your flow track, you know, your flow's out of flow state, you're going to have to quickly learn how to channel that frustration into a tighter, more narrow focus because frustration is really sort of discontent with spontaneity that's showing up here. I'm kind of using spontaneity repeatedly here, but for thematic purposes. But it's going to involve some very deliberate decision-making. I don't think we can— I don't believe that we can control our thoughts at the level of suppressing thinking. I think we can control our thoughts at the level of thoughts that we introduce in addition to whatever else is going on. The idea that— I might anger some people with this, but I don't know who made up the story that every cell in your body hears every thought you have, but last time I checked, cells didn't have ears. So it's just simply not true. It just sounds kind of cool and it's kind of catchy, nice new agey stuff, but This is not true, but here's what is true is that your mode of thinking is powerful. I think that's more or less what it's about. It is powerful, but it's very hard to not think about negative thoughts or not entertain negative thoughts or not be frustrated. So rather than focus on suppressing thoughts, like I'm not going to be frustrated, put something else in its place. I can't move this pen and do something else with my hand at the same time. Thoughts are a lot like deliberate actions. You have to get into a mode of deliberate thinking. Many of us train behaviors, and many of us struggle immensely to suppress negative thoughts. Very few people practice the art of introducing positive thought on top of whatever else, and negative self-talk, and whatever else is going on in there. If right now I want to have a thought, just like I would write a sentence, I can do that. One reason why I think journaling is so powerful is that it's deliberate action linked to thought. You kind of go, duh, so is a text message or so is speech, but not really because you're creating a physical manifestation of a thought. So, if you are struggling with frustration, you've been knocked out of a flow state, start introducing positive thoughts on top of whatever else is going on and trust that, like the example Rich gave earlier, that's going to put your compass back on track.

Yeah, Andrew, we're doing— so we've teamed up with Glenn Fox. I don't know if you've worked with Glenn. He's at USC. He's a neuroscientist who studies gratitude. We're doing a long series of experiments with him, and we just got data back, early data that shows really clearly people with a regular gratitude practice have higher flow lifestyles. And what we're starting to test is exactly what you were talking about, which is Can you use gratitude in the moment as a way of reframing and getting rid of stress? Will it work in acute situations?

I love that. I think gratitude— people confuse gratitude and they think that it's like belly button, like navel gazing or whatever it's called, where if you just feel content with what you've got in the moment, you're not going to want anything more. And then you're just going to be content to just sit there with nothing and you're not going to be in achievement. but that completely misunderstands the neurobiology behind it. So the molecule dopamine is secreted anytime our goals, our actual vision, or our mindset is centered on things outside our immediate reach, really outside the extent of my reach. Okay? I'm not the first person to talk about this. People talk about serotonin, oxytocin, and the opioid system as the here and now molecules being content within my body and my immediate sphere of experiences, and dopamine being the more and more and more. If you look at drugs of abuse, that emphasize dopamine, like amphetamine and cocaine, which I'm not recommending, they tend to make people rabid in the pursuit of things that are not in their immediate sphere. Think about drugs of abuse that tend to enhance serotonin and some of the other molecules, like heroin and things that tend to make people just— they're content to just kind of sit there and bathe in their own neurochemistry. Isn't it interesting? Two neurochemicals, both in the same body. One inspires outward motion and looking and seeking. and the other inspires to be placid and just essentially just self-contained. Gratitude is very interesting because gratitude probably strikes a chord with each of these neurochemical systems. People who practice gratitude regularly, I didn't know that they enter flow states more easily. That's very interesting. They have this ability to then restore their excitement for pursuit. It's not like, oh, I'm going to just be so happy and bathe in these neurochemicals. So that tells us it actually inspires them for more forward action. It makes possibility seem real again. And all the drugs that are designed to treat depression are trying to tap into the norepinephrine and dopaminergic pathways in addition to serotonin, because it inspires the idea and the feeling there's stuff, there are things out there to go pursue, which is kind of a hallmark of not being depressed, right? So the point being that gratitude is a phenomenal way to enhance the neurochemicals that make feel well enough in the moment, but also that inspire seeking and forward action and your sense of possibility in the world.

Andrew, can I ask another geeky question from the guy in sweatshirt? Nobody is exactly certain what is the neurochemical order, the cascade flow, like which chemicals show up first. It's very clear, obviously, you're going to get norepinephrine, cortisol, and maybe dopamine on the front end of a flow state because you're driving somewhere. But for a long time, flow has been associated with endorphins. And I have sort of long argued for many of the reasons that you just laid out, that if endorphins are showing up in flow, and they are, we have, we have good data on it. They tend to show up later on in the flow state for the very reason that you're talking about. Because if you're driving in a particular direction, I flood you with endorphins, you may slow down on your driving.

Yeah, the endorphin system is not as well understood as some of these other systems I've talked about. It's not as heavily studied, but the endorphin system is probably what— I'm going to venture a guess, what I hope is an educated guess, that as you access flow more readily, let's think of a long race or a long ride or a long bout of work, even in relational flow with someone else, that you start entering these loops more easily. You're actively suppressing a lot of neural circuitry. You're able to access the flow state more readily. Endorphins, just based on their physiology of how they impact neurons, tend to set up rhythmic fire. They tend to engage what we call central pattern generators, repeating the same sorts of behaviors again and again and making that feel good. Remember, evolutionarily, there are going to be a lot of behaviors that Mother Nature wanted animals and people to repeat over and over and over. Maybe it was even just picking the red seeds off the ground and leaving the green ones because those are the ones that are good to take home and have nutrients. And that process, if that was so boring that your attention drifted and you made mistakes, there would be a payment for that or punishment rather. Putting people into states where just repetitive things can feel good, I'm assuming that's going to be further down the flow state process.

You actually nailed it. So, I think the endorphins show up at the point when you've been in flow long enough that everything like you were moving towards— now you've sort of got down and flow at sort of towards the— in the middle of the back end of it, it becomes very, very meditative. And that's when I think the endorphins show up. I also think they show up that way because on the front end you get anandamide, which is a different painkiller, and that it's shorter-lived. And then you get endorphins, so there's, there's enough painkiller in your system so you can go through a longer, harder task. But again, that's a little theory. I mean, there's good neuroscience underneath it, but it's a little theoretical. So, I could be wrong here and we should get off the geeky and get back to the practical. I've been on this for 2 hours.

I got a pretty straightforward one here. Maybe, Rich, you could take a stab at this one. Can you talk about the necessity, not luxury, of rest, including micro rests, to keep going and regroup?

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, all of the tools that Andrew talked about can be implemented really in the moment but also during rest. And one of the things that, you know, Andrew and many people will say is that the, the best recovery tool for anybody is a, is a good night's sleep, right? But there are other things that can also be rejuvenating. And if we think of ourselves as kind of a battery that wakes up hopefully after a good night's rest with a full charge. We're going through our day, whatever that day might look like, and we're just constantly kind of dipping into that power level. So if we're not cognizant of that energy expenditure, we're going to run out of energy at any point during that day, which is why some people need that cup of coffee after lunch, or some people are lucky enough to make it to end of work day or whatever. The hope would be you can manage yourself throughout the day so you get home and even in the evening have a little bit of energy to spare. So recovery in any case becomes important. Micro recovery, something that we really looked at heavily when we were putting together some of the mental techniques in our, in our teams, was something we really focused on. And how could we in effect start to think about doing things that could allow us to what I would call recover in between gunfights, right? And so Breathing techniques and visual techniques, the same ones that Andrew just talked about, are huge. When you— and we're talking— when we talk micro recovery, we're probably talking somewhere in that, you know, you have about a minute, between a minute and 5 minutes, right? What can I do? Can I breathe in a way? Can I do certain things? Can I reframe? Can I visualize? Gratitude is a really important one if you have time. Quick note on gratitude: there's a concept in psychology called counterfactual thinking. If you haven't heard of that, it's just this idea that you create possible alternatives to events that have already occurred that are contrary to what happened. So things like, if I hadn't my seatbelt, I would have really been injured in that accident. Or, hey, this— those people have it way worse than I do. I'm so grateful for what I have. So you can actually, in a positive way, inflict that type of thinking to actually induce gratitude. It works pretty well. That could work in a micro level. If you have more time, you can do things like HRV breathing. That helps. That's a good way. You can do things like visualization. Music is a— you know, we all have certain music that just makes us feel good, right? And if it's making you feel good, it's probably recovering you. But in the moment when you have almost nothing, you don't have your iPod or your iPhone or iTunes or whatever, just the positive positive thoughts that Andrew's talking about. And visualization helps with that a great deal. You can change your physiology and therefore your biology just through positive visualization. If I think about my wife and kids, you know, I can shift my physiology wherever I am. You know, and so that's an important one too. So rest doesn't have to mean sitting still. It can mean mental rest as well. And you can do that by incurring some of these positive thoughts and tools that Andrew's talking about because you're literally, you're changing that biochemical response to one that's rejuvenating versus depleting.

One thing that Rich said that just cued me something, I've been involved in a very extensive collaboration with a guy in psychiatry, David Spiegel, about— we're designing this large-scale breathwork study. Hasn't launched yet, but since he works on stress, PTSD, and pain management and some very intense things, and he's a physician. I said, what's your go-to thing for your patients and for you? And he said something that actually surprised me, but it squares so well with what Rich is saying. He said, what I suggest people do when they're really stressed is that they have a positive memory or even use their, like, just notion of a fantasy of returning to some place that was really wonderful for them and that they go to it. It was so interesting to hear him say that because I thought, wow, that's just purely subjective, right? We don't have any specific neuroscience to link to it. But I've been trying the last few days. It's really interesting. Just pick something that's so positively compelling to you, and you just can kind of drop to that place, and it resets you unbelievably fast. And as Rich, you were saying that, it's another one of these moments where so often when I'm in conversation with Stephen or with Rich, yes, we're hearing these themes come up again and again. Because if you think about it, the brain doesn't have 50 ingredients. There's maybe a dozen, maybe a dozen, but probably more like 8 neurochemicals that have to get aligned in the right sequence in order to access flow states, push back stress, be awake enough to engage, be in relation, be in solitude. These are all neurochemical formulas. What we're talking about are not hacks. To me, I'm not so crazy about the word hacks because Hacks, it seems to me, are kind of hijacking something about the system that it wasn't designed for. This is what the human brain was designed for, to take uncertainty and stress and new elements and reconfigure so that we can move through.

Totally. And then, guys, the last question I'd love to ask both of you is— I'll let you think about it for a sec while I mention Zero to Dangerous— is how to keep teams, whether it's employees, family, colleagues, calm about an unknown future, especially when they don't have awareness of these kinds of physiological tools and this whole space of neuroscience, etc.?

So in teams, obviously, we're, you know, if we're talking about leadership and our businesses or our work teams or even our home teams, I mean, high-performing teams doesn't have to be business, doesn't have to be on the sports field, doesn't have to be in the military. It can be at home too. It can be a great marriage, great friendship, right? So, and leadership in those high-performing teams is actually everywhere. What we have to remember about about leadership is leadership is a behavior. It's not a position. So you behave in a way that allows someone to look at you like a leader. We're not allowed— it's, well, I should say it's my opinion, it has been my experience that we are not allowed to call ourselves leaders. We can't self-designate, right? It's like calling yourself funny. You don't get to choose, the other person has to choose, right? So the idea is you behave in a way that allows someone to look at you and designate you a leader. And that, in essence, is the answer, right? If you want to have your team feel better about uncertainty, be able to perform better in uncertainty, you need to behave in a way that they model and show them these things and tell them these things. Emotion and, you know, well, I'll say this: panic is as contagious as calm, right? So, so if you are panicky, and you can see this as a parent too, right? If you're a parent or just Just take pets too. I mean, pets are empathy machines, right? That's all they say. If you're panicked, your pet's going to be panicked. If you're panicked, your kids are going to be panicked. If you are calm, that'll be a response. So it's contagious, right? So this type of behavior is contagious. A sense of calm, a sense of direction, a sense of purpose, and an understanding of this helps, as does a sense of and a willingness to be vulnerable. You know, in every team, trust is paramount, and part of that trust relationship in a team is the willingness and the ability to be vulnerable. So even as a leader, it's okay to say, hey, listen, I don't have the answer on this. In effect, what that's doing for your teammates is saying, hey, I am not the person with all the answers, and I need you as a team member, as a teammate, right? It shows ownership, it bonds, it bonds teams together, and it shows trust. Because we all know intuitively that if someone is willing to be a little bit vulnerable, willing to show our strengths as well as our weaknesses. That is not only going to gel a team in the skills and attributes sense, but it's also going to gel a team in terms of trust and bonding. So I'll stop there and have Andrew comment as well.

I mean, you know, Rich is my go-to when I want to know about teams. You know, I run a lab, I've run a lab for a decade now and worked in groups, but so he knows far more about this than I do. And My group isn't— I suppose I'd like to think they would think I was the leader, although in science, my goal is that the rules I got in science were very clear from my advisors. It's what I apply, which is give people resources, as many as you possibly can, and then just get the hell out of their way. That's always been my goal, is give people as many resources as I can, and if I can't get them the resources they need, to explain why that's happening. So right now, you know, we're not really in lab. We're doing a minimum of things, but everyone is very engaged. You know, so one thing we did is we used to have lab meetings once a week. We now moved to two short meetings per week because I think in this regime, people's minds start to drift a little bit more. That told me longer meetings are going to be hard and more frequent meetings are going to be better. So we're doing shorter meetings now, and I think that's working well. I've also, you know, I've got people in my group who are new parents and, you know, there's a lot of disruption and just making it clear that they can ask me for anything. I might not be able to deliver, but if they need something, that no request is unreasonable, provided it comes from a place of real need. And, you know, and I think just hearing that was very helpful to them. You know, we don't do breathing as a group or anything like that. You know, we tend to stick to the science, but I noticed everyone in my lab always makes me very happy, has some other thing that they enjoy besides work. And I, and to the extent that they want to share that, I like to know what that is. In this time, one of the things that we talked about is what's the one thing you're doing every day that it's just pure fun? Kind of goes back to what Stephen said earlier, something each day. This can't be all drudgery. We're not going to survive this, right? We're not going to make it, or we'll be so depleted, you know. So what's the thing? Everyone had to think hard about that as one of their projects. So I've been Trying to just give people those kinds of resources. I do try and embody, you know, I don't believe in, you know, do as I say, not as I do. I just think, you know, they're different. There's some hierarchy in my business, but I really just encourage people if they have questions, ask if they want to. We're in the business of challenging each other all the time in science. You're supposed to be skeptical. We're always pushing each other. And also just to know what makes people happy. And so I think I'm noticing tremendous cohesiveness in my group right now, maybe more than we've ever had, to be honest. Since moving to Stanford. I think just because I've made myself a little bit more available and as Rich pointed out, you know, really taking that extra kind of expression of care. You know, I'm not saying this just because he's on here. I've learned a lot about how to organize my group and talk to them and communicate with them through Rich because he has a lot more experience with this Teams bit. And vulnerability part doesn't mean, you know, hugging and crying together, right? That's not what vulnerability means. There's a fine line between vulnerability and oversharing too, right? We're in a culture where vulnerability is promoted, oversharing is punished. And so we have a very professional way of going about things in my lab and in science. But just knowing what's one thing that you're doing every day that you really enjoy, or let's talk more often, shorter meetings. And I'm here if you have a request, I'm here. I may not be able to meet that request, but you never have to feel shy about making that request.

Great. Thanks, guys. That's incredibly helpful. So I've got one on the topic of discipline overall, basically how to maintain discipline. And then also related to that, how to avoid excessive kind of quote unquote self-soothing behaviors like overeating, overindulging in things like maybe television if it's distracting you from things you should be facing. Any advice on that? Maybe, Rich, you could start on that one. I imagine you got some good things to say there.

You're talking to the guy who drinks beer every night. But no, I think goals are important, first of all, having a direction. Discipline for me, it has less to do with self-discipline than it does with, hey, I understand my objective, I understand my goal, and I understand those things that I need to do to get there, right? And so that's why me, and for many people, but certainly my, uh, my entire life, being very goal-oriented and understanding where I wanted to go has been very important. Because I honestly don't consider myself a very self-disciplined person. What causes my discipline is if I have a goal, I have an objective that I need to get at, and then I understand the wickets. And that— what that does is a couple things. First, it kind of goes along with Stephen's to-do list, right? That to-do list is in effect creating certainty even in uncertain environments, right? So, so you can take control of your, of your environment by understanding what your goal is and understanding some of those things. So that's one way. Understand where you want to go, where you want to head. In terms of the phones and the TVs and, and the Netflix binging, right, we just have to understand, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, right? You know, if you, if you want to do it, just under— we have to understand what it is. It's an escape, okay? And And when we are escaping like that, and again, there's nothing wrong with doing it once in a while, we are not allowing our own creative processes to engage, right? So sometimes just allowing ourselves the time to imagine, you know, tuning, you know, shutting things off and allowing our brains to flow and just be open are really important, you know. And it's the, you know, I do this on airplanes. I spend a lot of time on airplanes. So sometimes I just take off my headphones, I turn off the TV, the video monitor in front of me and I just look out the window and I just think, I let my brain just go. And that's time for yourself. Don't deny yourself that time. It's so easy to get locked into the app game on your phone or the next episode of whatever Netflix special you're binging on. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand what it is and what it's not allowing and control it, I think. And just even just an acknowledgement of that alone sometimes is enough.

Super helpful. Thanks, Rich. Either you guys want to chime in on that one, or—

I'll just say that in my experience, the people who are the best at focus and discipline and productive and all those things that everybody wants have a process of, whether or not they realize it or not, of deliberate disengagement. They really understand, I guess what Rich was just talking about, you know, sometimes where you just kind of let yourself do something, you're not hammering on yourself and punishing yourself saying you're being lazy or you're procrastinating, but you're actually— I always joke in my own mind, I don't think I've ever said this out loud, but I'm going to get the most out of my procrastination. I'm going to reset myself. Every once in a while, I kind of remark how many YouTube videos I can watch or how far down a narrow trench of internet research I can do, whether or not it's about science or just some arcane thing that I'm interested in. I realized the other day that I feel like I'm living in this kingdom of possibility, and I love it. I love these things. That's why I'm doing them. It's not because I'm— and to just be in touch with that, and then I realize I need a little less of it. I don't have to do it. It's when I'm kind of flagellating myself over like, "Oh, why am I doing this? I really should be doing something else." To take a lesson out in true divinian philosophy would be enjoy that process, right? And then pivot back into what you're doing because you need to, because you're resetting your ability to do that. I think that rest is incredibly important. It's too much to get into right now, but I've done a couple of podcasts where I've talked about tools for sleep and tools for rest. Learning how to control your stress levels is one side of the coin. Is as you do that, you're going to get better at deliberately decompressing or deliberate disengagement, whatever you want to call it. And sleep is great. If you're not a great sleeper, don't stress it. Have a deep relaxation protocol. If you can't do that, watch a movie and enjoy it or watch some— whatever it is, listen to some music or just play with your kids. Those forms of disengagement are incredibly powerful resets for work. It's not all about work.

That's just a really quick add-on there, Andrew. One of the things I've also heard you talk about is the idea of practicing relaxation and almost like training relaxation in that sleep is something pretty much every human on earth wants to be able to do better and get more of and have it be better. And I think you use the example of yoga nidra as a way of practicing relaxation.

Yeah, I would say, you know, of all the practices I've ever adopted in my own life and that my lab also studies, I would say as important as exercise, nutrition, or anything else is to have a practice of deliberate disengagement. It's not for everybody, but I think for about 80% of people, it's a very powerful practice to do this. I can give you a script. I can give you a URL you can put out. There's a 10-minute one and a 30-minute one. I do the 10-minute or the 30-minute one every day, and I have for 3 years. 3 years. I occasionally miss a day, but if you wake up in the middle of the night, you can't fall back asleep, you do it. Wake up in the morning, you don't feel rested, you do it. If you're feeling fine, you do it once a day. What it involves is learning how to turn off thinking. You can't fall asleep without turning off thinking. A lot of people who are really driven and have a high level of frontal lobe engagement, which is a good thing, they have a hard time falling asleep because they can't turn off thinking. This teaches you how to turn off thinking. By getting more into sensation as opposed to perception. You're not focusing your attention on one sensation. It's a very powerful practice. It's totally free. The health benefits, the sleep benefits, it outscales with anything else I can recommend. I'll give you a link to that.

Super.

That's great.

We'll share that with everyone afterwards then. Thanks a ton, guys. You've both been absolutely epic. Can you guys both give a breakdown of where people can find you, where they can support your work or just follow along. I know Dr. Huberman has a book coming out at some point early 2021, which we're gonna definitely share with all of our audience. And already we're gonna send it out to a good few of our clients. So maybe you wanna talk about that a little bit, Andrew, but I'll let you guys just, yeah, share your resources.

Yeah, well, you can find me right now. You can find me on LinkedIn. Definitely if you wanna get me there, you can. I would highly recommend to, sign up with Andrew Huberman's Instagram. He has some awesome stuff, and a lot of the stuff that he and I have been working on for the last 3 years, we will likely start to give tastes of that on that, and we're doing a lot of work together. So, so more to follow on, on that stuff. I do have a book coming out same time as Andrew's, January 2021, and so I'll, I'll be pushing that out on, on LinkedIn. But the stuff that Andrew and I do together, it'll also be there. And of course, Stephen and Yuri and— well, will know about it as well. So, uh, so there's a couple ways.

So if you want to learn about neuroscience and practical implementation of neuroscience principles, uh, Huberman Lab. So H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-L-A-B on Instagram. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, but, um, you can find me on Instagram. I do that. And then my lab website is hubermanlab.com. It's likely going to get turned over in a little bit, so just, um, Instagram is the best place to find me really if you want resources more closely related to scientific papers and PubMed references, then you can just Google my name and Stanford. It'll take you to my lab webpage and we have a contact form there, but Instagram is where you can find me. And then these guys that are up today, you know, also know how to, you can ask them and we can get resources out to you. I think the links that we mentioned during this are gonna get put out to you through this group. I know I speak for Rich and I, and I hope— Rich, obviously I'll give you a chance to say it too, but I just want to say thanks to Rhiannon for the incredible work you've done putting together this event. Stephen, so gracious, and I always learn so much from you and delighted to be a part of this. And Rich, you know, like my brother in arms and so much work, and I really feel immensely grateful to have the opportunity to work with him today and all time. So I'm Thank you so much. It's really a wonderful thing to let a scientist out of his little cave and let the animal out of the cage to talk to the public and then put them back in.

Thanks a million, guys.

Rhiannon here again. I hope you really enjoyed today's episode with Rich Davini and Dr. Andrew Huberman. Both of those guys are always such a joy to speak with and such a wealth of knowledge, and it was a real pleasure getting to go deep into these topics with them. Learning to manage stress is just such a crucial life skill, and there's, there's no better guys to speak to about this. Now, if you're finding it challenging to drop into flow, if you've got some peak performance blockers within your own life, I strongly suggest that you take our free peak performance diagnostic at flowblocker.com. It takes 3 minutes to complete, and we will let you know which of the 10 flow blockers you're currently struggling with the most and give you some actionable steps that you can take to remove those blockers so that you can start accessing flow more consistently within your own life. So that's flowblocker.com. Takes 3 minutes, and you'll get lots of really actionable free advice in there. So head over to flowblocker.com to check that out. And lastly, quick favor to ask. If what you've just heard with Rich and Andrew has been helpful, please leave us a review or share our content on social media. We really wanna get these practices and principles out to more people, and every review gets read by our team and really helps us get the word out to more folks. So would really appreciate if you'd take 2 minutes to do that as well. And until the next episode, thank you so much for listening, and I'm excited to connect with you again soon. All the best.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today we are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance. Quote: "Undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals." Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness. But what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

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