Mastering Peak Performance: Tips for Aging Gracefully

You state that if you want to rock until you drop, we must train the brain. And you mentioned that if we want to attain peak performance at any age, we must deal with personal forgiveness and traumas of the past.

Anywhere you go inside the field of peak performance aging, you find really astounding, sort of shocking evidence of the mind-body connection at work. So this is really neat. So as we enter our 50s, there are profound changes in the brain. Gotta know who you are in the world, right? What are your values? What are your strengths? What's your purpose? You don't have to have it locked down because obviously that's an evolving, changing, growing thing, but you gotta have enough because by 40 you have to solve what economists call match fit.

I remember first meeting you at LA and I talked with you about meditation back then. You had your concerns.

What has happened is meditation has gotten firm enough that I'm much more comfortable talking about it as a tool because the science has caught up and I want something that bridges the gap between science and spirituality. 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.

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 boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Hey, well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Boyson, and joining me on the other end of the line, he probably doesn't need much introduction, he's been on the show many times, but it's Stephen Kotler joining us from— you're in North Lake Tahoe, right?

I'm actually in, I guess, northeast. Yeah, sort of northeast.

Northeast. Okay. We're going to be talking about his new book called Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad. He's a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and one of the world's leading experts in high performance. He's the author of 8 bestsellers, including Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Tomorrowland, Bold, Abundance, West of Jesus, A Small Fury Prayer, and The Eagle's Quickest for Flight. His writing has been translated into 40 languages, appearing in over 100 publications. Including The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired, and Time. Steve's also the co-founder of Creating Equilibrium, a conference concert innovation accelerator focusing on solving critical environmental challenges. Alongside his wife Joy Nicholson, Steve is a co-founder and— is your ranch still going at the Rancho Chinchilla? Okay, so it's a hospice care for special needs dogs, and it's a sanctuary in the mountains of northern New Mexico. And I gotta commend him on that because I'm a big dog lover. I have two Chihuahuas myself, um, and I rescued both of them. Uh, he's got a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, of which, uh, just, Stephen, for your edification, I was just there seeing Richie Davidson, who's done all the work with the Dalai Lama. And most people don't connect Madison, Wisconsin with work in meditation, mindfulness, compassion, and healing, but it's kind of the biggest center for that. Johns Hopkins University, whenever possibly found hurling himself down mountains at high speeds, maybe now riding in ski parks, which is not about hurling yourself down mountains at high speeds. So Stephen, you chronicled this book. It was great. It was almost like a journal at the beginning. I remember in the webinar you did last Friday, you said, you know, this is one of the hardest books you wrote. Um, well, from the outside it maybe doesn't look like it. Maybe, you know, The Rise of Superman to me seems like it had a lot more research in it, whatever. This had a lot more of you in it. You became the experiment of our country book. At your age 53 and you wanted to master park skiing. You state that if you want to rock until you drop, we must train the brain. That actually came from last Friday's little workshop that you did. What does the research tell us about sustaining peak performance much later in life than we really think possible?

It's a good place to start. So you want to begin at the older idea, the traditional idea about aging, which most of us grew up with, um, believe or still partially believe. And it's what I like to call the long, slow rot theory. It's the idea that all of our mental skills, all of our physical skills, they decline over time, and there's nothing we can really do to stop the slide. And It turns out that's true and false and both at the same time. All of our mental and physical skills do decline over time, but it turns out none of it's inevitable. Every skill you can think of is a use-it-or-lose-it skill. So if you never stop training these skills, you get to hang on to them, even advance them far later in life than anybody thought possible.

Yeah, and it, it is something that for anybody, we're going to get into it. You know, kind of the neural pathways of the brain are a big element to this. When they look at Alzheimer's research now, they're finding so many different ways to help somebody kind of retard the process. And you mentioned that if we want to attain peak performance at any age, we must deal with personal forgiveness and traumas of the past. Now, That's kind of an interesting one because that's really more of a whole psychological element. Why is this such an important element in reaching peak performance? Because most of the listeners out there, Stephen, we're not going to correlate me giving forgiveness to whether or not I'm going to be a peak performer.

It's anywhere you go inside the field of peak performance aging, you find really astounding, like sort of shocking evidence of the mind-body connection at work. And this is one of those places. So this is really neat and maybe a little troubling, but really neat. So as we enter our 50s, there are profound changes in the brain. Some of this is genetics that certain genes only activate with experience. Some of this is that the brain, in our late 40s, early 50s, it starts to recruit underutilized regions. And in our 50s, the two halves of the brain start working together like never before. Most of our life, they're, they're not quite in opposition, but they're a little bit in opposition. And they really start to come together in our 50s. And this process peaks in our 80s. And as a result, we gain access to whole new levels of intelligence, wisdom, empathy, and creativity. We can go much deeper into that topic in a minute if you want, but these are real cognitive superpowers. But, but like a lot of things in psychology, this is adult development. This is a natural thing that happens in what the field of adult development, but adult development is not automatic. So childhood development is kind of automatic. Kid's gonna go through the terrible twos. When they're too, you know, in that window span, it happens automatically. Adult development, we have to pass through gateways. There are moderators, which is a psychological word for if-then conditions. So there are certain things you need to accomplish at every decade, basically, to unlock these superpowers, which is why I always say peak performance aging starts young. And some of the reasons that start young are these psychological reasons we're talking about. So If you want to thrive in our later years and you want access to these superpowers that I talked about, you have to, by age 30-ish, solve the crisis of identity. Gotta know who you are in the world, right? What are your values? What are your strengths? What do you stand for? What are your goals? What are your passions? What's your purpose? Some— you don't have to have it locked down because obviously that's an evolving, changing, growing thing, but you gotta, you gotta have enough because by 40 you have to solve what economists call match-fit. You need a tight alignment between your vocation and your identity or your avocation. How you spend your time has to be aligned with passion. Purpose has to give you regular access to flow. It's got to draw on your strengths. It's got to align with your values. Otherwise, you have problems. And then at 50, you have to forgive yourself. You have to forgive those who have done you harm. And this seems weird, right? Like, why would, why would that matter for peak performance aging? Like, you can see from a psychological perspective, Oh, I don't want to grow into a bitter old man or bitter old woman, right? Okay, that makes some sense. But like, why does it matter elsewhere? Some of it has to do with we get access to new levels of creativity, intelligence. Some of the intelligence that comes on, for example, is multi-perspectival thinking. We learn to see things from other people's perspectives, but we can't forgive ourselves, we can't forgive other people. That doesn't start to come online. Empathy. Is blocked if we can't forgive ourselves and forgive other people. So that whole superpower that really deepens in our 50s, 60s, and 70s and really helps us do incredible things goes away, and wisdom is blocked. So you have to— it's this weird developmental challenge. But most interesting thing is, let's tie it all the way back. You started with my alma mater, Go Badgers, Wisconsin, work of Richard Davidson. Richard's work has been on predominantly compassion meditation, loving kindness.

Exactly.

He and I were working on the best tool in in the world, this is how you do this. How do you forgive yourself? How do you forgive others? You can— I did some funky things in the book, and there's the big NAR style quest to like solve some of the big stuff. But on a day-to-day basis, loving-kindness meditation, um, truly matters. And even better, like, it's got all the benefits. We could go— we could spend the next hour on the benefits of loving-kindness meditation, but it's got distinct anti-aging properties. This is the craziest one. So this is work that Barbara Fredrickson did in the University of North Carolina. She was looking at telomere attrition. Telomeres are the caps on chromosomes.

Yes.

And as you duplicate, they get shorter, then they stop working. This is one of the reasons we age, right? And it turns out loving-kindness meditation actually enhances our telomeres and they decline at a slower rate. They tested loving-kindness meditation against focused meditation and a positive— a bunch of different systems. And it turns out not only does loving-kindness meditation help us get through some of the gateways of adult development, it also helps us fight aging at a really like core biological level. So that's kind of neat too.

Well, you know what's really neat about you? I remember first meeting you at LA at a conference, and then we went and had dinner together, and I talked with you about meditation way back then. This goes, I think it was whatever that conference was, and you now are a super advocate of meditation. Back then you had your concerns, you weren't quite there yet, because I remember having a distinct conversation with you at dinner when I brought it up, and I didn't get pushback, but I also didn't get that you were totally engaged with it. But I can see now you have.

Well, Greg, you have not— I've been meditating, I mean, on a— on a— not daily, daily's overstating it, but a regular basis.

For how long?

Since the early '90s.

Okay.

Actually, probably 1987, when I dropped out of college and moved to Santa Fe, is when I really started meditating on a regular basis.

And who got you into it?

I got myself into it through just interest in philosophy and consciousness and, you know, both Eastern and Western approaches and things like that. I wasn't closed off. What I think is that Meditation on its own for most of us is weak sauce. I think meditation is a great complement to a whole bunch of stuff. I, I'm a big believer. There's data going back to the early 1980s and work done by Michael Posner up in Oregon showing that focused meditation enhances access to flow. So I've always been a proponent of using— I think flow, um, is an equally powerful, if not more powerful tool. But meditation used in concert with flow, and like I wrote in Stealing Fire, different altered states are tools and ways of altering our consciousness, our tools, and they're best combined. You know what I mean? You can use them together. It's combinatory therapies that are the most interesting to me and have always been. And this work is starting to really get done, right? This is, for example, what we were just talking about is an example of comparative, you know, altered states of consciousness research on compare. So what has happened is meditation has gotten firm enough that I'm really, I'm much more comfortable talking about it as a tool because the science has caught up. And all of the— I didn't like the— what the— I wanted to put flow research on a, on a strong neurobiological footing. That's always been mission one. And when the New Age was controlling the dialogue on meditation, I wanted nothing to do with it because it's not like— that's not a dialogue. That's a very closed-minded approach to meditation as far as I'm concerned. And I want something that bridges the gap between science and spirituality, which is what Richie Davidson, what my mentor Andy Newberg, what like a lot of the pioneers in my field did. They, they went into the spiritual community, they found great people— Dalai Lama, Mingyur Rinpoche, um, a couple others— and they said, yeah, what are you experiencing? What, you know, what— this is what our research can tell us. And they started building those bridges. So I love that, love having the conversations. I didn't like it back then because I felt the spiritual spiritual community was so closed-minded towards the science community. It wasn't— it didn't strike into the science community. They were closed-minded to the spiritual community in like the '80s, right? But around, like, around the time you and I had that conversation, the bias had switched and it was in the spiritual community. And I felt it very unhelpful for what I was trying to do.

Well, you know, Richie Davidson has taken it a long way. I don't— he's— I think he's written more papers for NIH than anybody about the neuroscience of this and what it actually does. And, you know, I spent the full day with him and 9 other people, and I was just amazed with the, with the amount of research. I mean, if you want to look at science, he is the de facto, in my estimation, as far as science regarding meditation and the benefits of meditation. But in particularly because the Dalai Lama told him 30 years ago Why are you working on depression? And why don't you switch and go to compassion? And that was the biggest flip in his life, right, was to study the effects of compassion.

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I, I'm inside— there are a ton of people. Richie was great, and, and, and Dan Goldman, and I think they paved the way, but there's a lot of unsung here. I'm thinking, I'm sure, Willoughby Britton at Brown was there really early, or at Brown Um, was there really early, same time. There are a lot of other people who sort of were working on this because it was— and the reason I'm mentioning this, it's not that Richie didn't work incredibly hard, it's that this was a huge fight. Like, this was the '90s for hundreds of people, myself included, right? How do we take these altered states of consciousness, these things that science has spent 100 years saying are not real, how do we— how do we validate them? Are there— that they're real? Nobody remembers this anymore. But so a lot of— in peak performance aging, one of the things that's really important is a robust social life. And when you look under the hood of what does that mean, there's categories that are belonging. So we find people with strong religious affiliations, um, do, do better, and people with like robust social connections and active social— all that.

Yeah.

And you have to sort of look at that belonging and the religious connections and say, well, what is this? And nobody remembers this, but we had to spend the '90s proving that, like, if you went to church or you had a regular meditation practice or anything, this was good for you. And then we started to decode it and figure out, okay, the altruistic activity that you get from religious belonging, plus the social connections, plus the gratitude, regular gratitude practices, are the things that make that's special. And we understand the neurobiology of all of that now, but it had to start with like, hey, this stuff is good for you, right?

Like, you know, I don't know if anyone's done any studies, you know, but I came about meditation through Joel and Michelle Levy, I think, first. And then I ended up getting involved with Self-Realization Fellowship. And here's the point I'm going to make real quick, and then I'm going to move the next question because it's a real important one, is I don't find a lot of camaraderie at SRF. What I do find is the energy that's being held to get into some very deep meditations that I may not be able to get into on my own because I actually like the energy that the temple holds or the meditation grounds hold. But what I will say is you're not finding a lot of people glad-handling afterwards saying, hey, let's go do coffee, let's go do this, so let's go do that. It isn't that kind of place. But look, you are the foremost thought leader on flow, the flow research initiative that you're working on and have been working on. Yeah, sorry, collective you've been working on forever. And I'm going to direct our listeners to that as well. Well, I believe the listeners might know what flow is. I think coming from you, it'd be nice to have a definition as we speak about flow and aging and how they go hand in hand. You know, it's one thing to talk about flow and say, hey, look, I'm trying to get into a flow state. I want to hack flow. I want to, you know, I'm going to do, I'm going to microdose something to get into flow, whatever it might be. My point is, is how do the two go hand in hand with aging?

Yeah. So this is really, this is really super interesting. But let's start with the definition. Flow is scientifically, right? It's defined as an optimal state of consciousness. We feel our best and we perform our best. And more specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention, total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing, on the task at hand, Greg, everything else just starts to disappear, right? Sense of self, self-consciousness, the voice in your head get really quiet. Time passes strangely. Usually you just get so sucked into what you're doing that like 5 hours go by in what feels like 5 minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So there's a huge amplification in about a dozen different mental and physical skills, maybe more, that happen in flow. Flow is how humans do peak performance. It's a built-in function. Anybody listening can get into flow, right? It's kind of baked into all you— most mammals can get into flow, actually. But it turns out, for a handful of different reasons, flow is deeply tied to adult development and successful aging. In fact, the godfather of flow psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, spent, I would almost be willing to say, the bulk of his career literally working on this issue on flow as one of the major drivers of adult development. Quick version of this is flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. And a short version of one of them is that when we're using our skills to the utmost, right, when we're pushing on our skills and we're stretching beyond our normal capabilities, that drives us into flow as a result. And flow then amplifies performance. So we're trying to onboard new skills, we're pushing We're pushing really hard, and then flow amplifies our performance. We do onboard those skills. So, on the other side of a flow state, we're more complex, we're more adaptable, we're more capable. And for the exact same reason that loving-kindness meditation works on forgiveness. So, flow works on the same part of the brain, the temporal parietal junction. And as a result of being in flow, we become more empathetic and we become wiser. Flow is an engine of how we grow up. It is also incredibly, incredibly, incredibly neuroprotective against cognitive decline and physically protective against general decline. Let me go into greater detail here. So changes in the brain happen as we move into flow. First thing that happens is stress hormones get pushed out of our system. There are 9 known causes of aging. All of them linked to stress and inflammation. That's the commonality among all of them. So anytime you can push stress hormones out of your system, that's essentially an anti-aging technology.

Mm-hmm.

Additionally, when you experience incredibly powerful positive emotions, and at the top of the list, our favorite thing, flow is always at the top. But if you look inside that, like, why is flow always at the top? It's two elements in flow that really drive that. One, we get a sense of control in flow. Oh, I can control things I can't normally control. My sentences are doing great things, or that basketball is just falling through the hoop again and again and again. And we get the sense of mastery, right? We're growing, we're stretching. When we encounter really positive emotions, besides the, like, broaden, build, Barbara Fredrickson, like, we get more resilient, we get all that, all those benefits. But on top of it, at a neuroimmunological level, those feelings produce, amplify the production of T cells, which are to fight disease, and natural killer cells, which target sick cells and tumors and other diseases of aging. So flow at sort of every level is an anti-aging medicine. And finally, the neurochemicals that show up and underpin the flow experience are huge immune system boosters. So you're resetting the nervous system, you're boosting the immune system, and you're boosting very specific properties in the immune system that have anti-aging benefits. And you're becoming more complex, more adaptable. And finally, most importantly perhaps, Flow gives us both expertise, learning, and wisdom. So the difference— think of expertise as, you know, this is the intellectual side of learning or the skill side of learning, and wisdom is emotional intelligence. But the point is this: you said at the beginning of the program that there are ways to fight off Alzheimer's. One of the most important is lifelong learning. And the reason this matters so much is Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline— they target the prefrontal cortex. So if you want to protect the prefrontal cortex, what you need is neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, and synaptic plasticity, the creation of new neural networks. And to really back up the prefrontal cortex, you want redundancy in those neural networks. That's exactly what you get from expertise and wisdom. They create these huge diffuse networks in the prefrontal cortex, which is why lifelong learning is the most important way to stave off cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's. In fact, you know, it's interesting, a lot of this work came out of studies where they would find— they were autopsying brains of people who had no signs of dementia or Alzheimer's, and they'd get— they'd find— they'd autopsy the brains, they'd find tangles and plaques, and the brains were a mess. They had dementia, they had Alzheimer's, yet they showed none of the symptoms. So what the hell was going on? And the commonality was wisdom and expertise. And here's another place that performance starts young. The more of these neural networks you build up, the more things you learn, the more skills you learn, more abilities you have over time, the more times you cement these things into place with flow, the better off you're going to be. Now, the final thing I have to add in that's not flow-related, but I need to say this, is there's a bunch of cool ways to train the parts of your brain that you don't can't protect at this point. Adam Ghazali's done really cool work at Neuroscape.

I know Adam, right?

And all the different video games that sort of can target different aspects of cognitive decline that maybe didn't get cemented by expertise and wisdom. So we're getting very good at sort of like the whole picture, which is really cool. Flow's a big part of it, but there's other things going on, and it's worth pointing that out too.

We know, as you're speaking, I'm reflecting And I'm reflecting on resistance and resilience. You know, the more you let go because of this optimal state, whether you get it through attaining flow or meditation, which is an optimal way to get to these states, you reduce resistance to what comes at you and you build resilience. And I'm just curious, because it was kind of like, it was just like those two words are floating in my brain as you were talking. And I'm going like, hey, to me, that's it. And you know, you're, you speak with the, the listeners, if you would, about what, you know, I've kind of been working with lately is this peripheral vision activities, the parasympathetic nervous system, and the importance it is in overcoming fear. Because fear, as you know, that's going to release cortisol. Cortisol is bad. Fear is what you kind of want to stay away from, I'm going to say. I want to hear what you say. I know in certain cases fear protects us, but especially when it came to park skiing, snowboarding, etc. Speak with us about the peripheral vision, the connection, overcoming fear, and how this worked for you and all the other participants in Park Scheme.

So at the heart of— so the background is not only do we have all these use-it-or-lose-it skills, right, that we keep trying to get to hang on to them. There's this old— there's this traditional idea, old dogs can't learn new tricks, right? And we know, yet we know the importance of lifelong learning to be performance aging. We've just talked about it, right?

Yeah.

And I was looking at a bunch of stuff in flow science, in network neuroscience, neurodynamics, embodied cognition, a couple other places. And I was saying, if these things are true on paper, I should be able to onboard really difficult new motor skills even in my 50s, right? That was the theory. That was what I decided to test. But part of what I was doing was I was going one inch at a time. It was start with an established something you could do 100% of the time with zero fear and no conscious interference and build on it one inch at a time in a creative, playful manner. Right. That was the whole— there's— we could talk about all the reasons why, but that was at the heart of it. But fear creates tremendous amounts of problems with performance, right? It, it, it, first of all, it doesn't let you know where that one inch at a time is, right? It obscures it. It's harder to figure out what's where you're going. It hampers performance. Too much fear can block, it blocks power, our ability to access 100% of our strength. It blocks fast twitch muscle response. It makes us less creative, more conservative, more blocks learning. There's a big detriment. So you always have to be monitoring any kind of sort of difficult challenge. Fear levels matter, right? You want daily practices to manage, to monitor your nervous system. Gratitude practice, mindfulness practice, exercise being the 3 best. But then what do you do in situations where you're redlined, right? How do you— so you need some tools for that. Most of us know enough to do deep breathing, and they know if you want to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, uh, it's very useful to make your exhales double what your inhales are. And if your exhales are longer than 7 seconds, bonus, because at about 7 seconds your brain goes, oh shit, look, long exhales, you must be calm, we don't have to produce so many stress hormones and fear hormones and fear chemicals, etc.

Can I ask you a question in, in the middle of this? Sorry to interrupt, but I mean, I know a lot of people out there are And this is a big field now, heart rate variability, right? It's like, okay, I want peak performance. I wanna look at my heart rate variability. Is this a push day? Is this a maintain day? Is this— so I get that, you know, this science may not be perfect, but it's been around for a long time.

And there's good stuff with, there's good stuff with HRV. And I think HRV is very useful For example, for overtraining and for recovery, I believe that an overreliance on measurements and metrics ends up hindering as much as it helps. And I think it's better to be able to sort of get internal signals of overtraining, those things. But if you're trying to learn how to steer your sleep, your training, I think HRV is a really good tool. There's all kinds of really interesting work on HRV and longevity. So there's direct correlations to high heart rate variability and longevity and health. So there's a lot of benefit there. Not what we're talking about here at all. No, heart rate variability is not an in-the-moment thing. In fact, every single heart rate variability app out there, any way you can track it, with the exception of FirstBeat, and they have proprietary software, so you have to actually be working with them and it's a big machine that you're wearing. Nobody can track heart rate variability in acute situations. So I always use the technique we're talking about with peripheral vision is how do you, you know, ski something that's scary, right? Do something that scares your heart rate variability. It'll tell you whether or not you want to put yourself in that situation in the first place, but it's not going to help you in the moment. Breathing can help you in the moment. The other way to get that same parasympathetic response even quicker, um, and this is work that comes out of Andrew Huberman's lab at Stanford. He was the one who first figured this out. If you look at the world through your corners of your eyes, your brain goes, oh shit, all is chill. I can relax. I don't have to produce those stress hormones. When we're super focused, laser focused on what's directly in front of us, it's like fight or flight. That's very acute, focused vision. So the opposite—

I got it—

parasympathetic reaction. Focus triggers a sympathetic reaction. So I— this was the experiment. Uh, in the middle of my ski season, I had a ski partner, Ryan Wicks, and we were running a lot of different experiments. But throughout, Ryan's a slightly faster skier than I am, and we're similar size, similar levels of aggression. We skis like— I couldn't figure it out, what's going on? Why is he always a little faster than me. And I asked him about it and he said, you know, so I don't know why, but I try to keep my vision really far down the hill. And I know there's a very tight link in the body between we go where we look. So I already knew that in performance literature. So, but when I was listening to him talk about where he was keeping his focus, it sounded like what I had heard Andrew Huberman talk about, about this peripheral vision ideas. And I put it together and I said, okay, let's see if this is the same thing. And if it's true, when I started applying it on a ski hill, but keeping my vision farther down the hill and trying to widen it out, keep it as wide as possible, I found that I calmed way down. It slowed everything down. And it actually was a really good in the moment. 'Cause part of my adventure, you know, trying to learn to park ski, it means doing stuff that scares you on a daily basis. And you, you don't— in my experience, courage always, like, having to take that step through fear always feels bad. Doesn't matter how many times you do it, it always feels bad. That maybe there are people out there who get over that bad feeling. Um, I've learned to like train it. Like, I can, I can now look at it and sort of write in situations and be like, okay, I know what that is. I don't even have feel it. But in athletic situations, I still feel it every time.

What actually happens to you when you say you feel bad? I know certain people biologically, their systems produce chemicals and they end up getting a headache, they get a stomachache, they get, you know, there's a lot of things that can happen. I'm just curious what happens to you.

Well, I feel bad. There's your— I get stomachaches, I can get headaches, I get all that, right? But in the actual— if I'm— if it's physical danger or, you know, big— so I get butterflies. Yeah. And when the danger signals for me, what I look for is spiraling thoughts, because once my thoughts start to spiral—

there you go—

fear is going to impact muscle performance. Yes. That's the thing that really— like, if my thoughts are spiraling, if I'm spinning, um, if I can't get new thoughts in, then I, you know, there's a bunch of tools I want to reach for. Peripheral vision is one, breathing is another, curiosity is fantastic.

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 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.

Curiosity may be the very single best way to fight fear in the moment because your brain has a very hard time being anxious and curious at the same time. They're opposites.

You're distracted.

It's not even that you're distracted. They have the same— they're the same neurochemical.

Those. Oh, interesting.

They're underpinned by the same neurochemicals. So this is, uh, this is not my work originally. This is work that came out of work with animals. When you have herd animals and they're scared, um, you can get them curious. You can put things into like their environment that they're curious about, and curiosity will totally block anxiety. So this is like something— yeah, something that comes out of animal welfare. I think the very first time I heard about it was Temple Grandin's work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How she worked with the cats.

Took a version of it, used it with— we use it with dogs all the time in hospice care work and the dog sanctuary also. I just started applying it more and more. I talk a lot about it in our country as well about, you know, these tactics. But you want to— fear's going to block performance.

I do like the idea though that you put your vision, or he did, all the way down the ski slope, right? I even remember personally getting to the top of Spooner over in Tahoe. It's called Spooner. And I had to come down the other side of the mountain on the bicycle. And you know how steep the downgrade is. And then there's those, those grates And when I took my vision and put it out in front of me, because you get moving very fast and you realize that if you wipe out on your bicycle, you're pretty— it's going to be pretty bad, right? So that did calm me because those hills would always scare me and I'd throw the brakes on, right? It's like, okay, I'm going to pull the brakes back and pull the brakes back and pull the brakes back. And I actually let go of the brakes the time when you said put the vision down. It's absolutely right because I wasn't looking at the asphalt. I wasn't looking at the—

This is the inverse of the other side of this. So, this is a truism in action sports. You go where you look. So, in mountain biking, right? You're trained to look 30 to 60 yards down the trail.

Yes.

Right? In surfing, you cannot physically surf a tube. If you try to pull into a tube and do everything you need to do to surf a tube, your body can't move that fast. We steer our muscles with our eyes. We go where we look, and that's how we steer them. So with tube riding, the secret to riding a tube is you have to put your eyes on the end of it too. Yeah. In park skiing, when you're sliding a rail, you have to keep your eyes at the very end of the rail, otherwise you come off.

Yeah, no, and, and I love that because even if my listeners just take this away and say, hey, look, I had some fears associated with this and now I can overcome the fear by changing where my line of sight is, right?

I mean, Greg, we do the same thing in human development. We just call them goals, right? We write like, it's, you know, and we know humans have— we're performed best with 3 tiers of goals and like, but like literally the brain doesn't really differentiate it between I'm looking at a point and I have a goal, because that's the brain works. It's the same parts of the brain that every— everything's working together. So this is sort of why these, these systems work so well in performance. Goals work as well. There's a goal, and that's why they tell you to be able to visualize your goal and see all aspects of it. And we go where we look.

Yeah, it is really, really powerful what you're saying. Now, you know, let me ask you a question. You know, you wrote in the book, you know, you were a skinny little kid, you were klutz. Kids made fun of you, they picked on you, you lost a lot of fights. You knew you needed to overcome the stigma from childhood. So what did you do to transmute the psychological barriers that were holding you from being the peak performance person that you wanted to become? Because there's thousands of listeners who were in your shoes listening to this show today. And this is a really important point because many of them are retarded— become— pardon me, I'm going to use the word retarded, but they are from becoming peak performers because they're allowing that bullying, that psychological element that got in their way. And I know we talked a little bit about it before, But this is you personally.

So, I mean, you gotta— so first of all, there— it's a 3-part effort, right? 4-part effort maybe. But yeah, I, I— yeah, I did not, uh, a lot— like a lot of people. I don't think there was anything, you know, unique about my experience. I think it's way too common. And the other thing I should say up front is the very best thing that ever happened to me was it was scary at school and it was scary at home, and having to deal with that and learn from that was the best thing ever. Like, that— like, because that's how you— everything I am, in a sense, was a reaction against that. So I don't— right? And it was a reaction against I once heard Tom Bilyeu say, like, when I discovered, like, who I was and I realized I wasn't a very courageous person, I couldn't live with that. So, I had to change it, right? And that was sort of my experience. I wasn't a very courageous person. I was, you know, bullied for a long time and scared for a long time, but it forced me to, you know, change and help me become who I am. So, there's first, like, I wouldn't change anything because I like where I am now and I don't get to be here without starting there. So, like, thank you. You know, first and foremost, that's a reframing technique. But I think—

I always think when we thank our parents, a lot of people think, oh, I grew up in this horrible environment, whatever. And look at what you learned from being in there.

You got to— because you— and first of all, you have to take back that locus of control. If you're a victim, this happened to me, I've— how— right, you've given— peak performance is completely impossible because how the burn— you've just totally destroyed your ability to tap into anything. So that's A. B, loving-kindness meditation, right? Like, there's your— here's your tool, right? So, but C, what do you do with the shit that loving-kindness meditation can't touch? That was the question I brought into NAR country. And I had some lingering anger over, over sort of— I had unfinished business inside of athletics. So I created a NAR-style quest. For me, it was park skiing because I had unfinished business in skiing, and I love skiing. But we all have that unfinished business somewhere. And I designed a quest that literally would— it was a jock quest. Like, I got in fights with the jocks. Like, I turned myself into a jock. I created an incredibly difficult physical quest. And, you know, miles— I had— I literally went out and created a quest that would force me to walk a mile in their moccasins kind of thing. So I didn't know if it was going to work, Craig. I just knew that adult development told me that forgiveness matters. You got to set down the shame, the embarrassment. And also that shame, that embarrassment, that self-consciousness was going to block learning, was going to block the creativity, the intelligence, all the stuff that I needed. So designed a quest for a lot of different reasons— Peak Performance Aging Experiment— but also because it closed a loop. It helped me try to transmute some unfinished business. And, um, you know, I had milestones for progress, and I had ways to get feedback and see if I was actually reaching these goals. It working and whatnot. But like, don't think there was like, in the beginning, there was no method to my madness, right? There was just like, these are the facts. Yeah, I'm screwed. So let's create a crazy-ass experiment that tries to fix this and see if it works. And then if it works a little bit, let's study the neurobiology of it and like, make it more rigorous. And like, that was a lot of that stuff. And But, you know, a lot of it wasn't hard to piece it together. Also, back to Richard Davidson's work, a lot of that compassion meditation science went in these directions, right? And the emotional intelligence stuff too. Like, we had to learn why this is, how it holds us back, and all that stuff. Um, and so, yeah, but it did work for you.

It worked.

The funny, you know, it's— you sort of see that by the end of the book, um, and the proof that it really worked is I— so I, my entire life, had been blocked from group flow when I was skiing with other people. I'd get into it alone or maybe with one other person, but I was so self-conscious when there were a group of people around. And the, the proof is that now I can like regularly drop into group flow with a big group. Like, that was, that was the signal that, oh, you've really actually gotten over this, and you can now— you, now you're our participant, not on the outside feeling bad or any of those other, uh, insecure, self-conscious, all that other stuff.

So any of that resentment and anger that you may have had pinned up inside of you about these other athletes, uh, you basically came to peace with that during this experiment?

Well, the other thing— so the book is, you know, the book opens literally with the definition of punk rock, right? And, and what people have asked about that, why is that, what is that? Because one of the things that punk was, it was a cultural reaction to trauma, to powerlessness, right? Yeah. And one of the things that, that the punk movement really taught us was turn anger, resentment, hostility, whatever you got, take that and turn it into creativity, that is the— that's the path forward. So do something with that. Anger's great as an energy. It's just bad if you hang on to it, right? It's good. It's better than depression because there's energy there, right? But you got to do something with it. And I, um, over the years— has been— anger's a very powerful emotion as a peak performance emotion, but you have to know how to work with it. So even in in Rise, or in our country, I used it. So you can— when you shout, right, when you yell, that produces testosterone. This is why in martial art traditions, certain ones, especially the Japanese ones, they kiai, right? They shout before attacking, and it releases testosterone. So I, uh, I'm prone to vertigo. I'm afraid of heights, and I have inner ear problems because of Lyme disease, and you lose muscle control and things start spinning. And that's a bad quality in a skier because I'm in wildly exposed terrain all the time. And I would fight vertigo by shouting. I could roar and it would bring testosterone into my system and bring muscle control online and stop the spinning. And I could get myself out of the dangerous situation. So there's lots of different ways to work with anger. One was these big, gnarly, dark ways, but even in, like, in moments when you need courage, there's some neurochemistry underneath courage, and there's a way that you can, you can use a little bit of that to your benefit.

Yeah, it's— that is fascinating, the fact that you could yell and release testosterone and it would affect this, uh, problem you were having in your inner ear, because that's just like— that's— I, I had no idea there was a connection between that, but that's cool. And I remember a statement— I'm— hopefully I'm going to get this right, it's not going to be exact But as you were speaking, again, this little thing pops in about something Mother Teresa said. They said, well, will you march against something? They wanted her to march in some march, and she says, no, the only kind of marches I ever want to do are for something. And, you know, that's the whole concept of compassion, being for something. And you talking about this meditation about how we can bring something positive into our life from this versus when these bullies bullied you way back when and you carrying all this psychological garbage with you and using this experiment to overcome it. I think it's awesome. Now, look, you're 53. My listeners know I'm going to be 69. How can we do the impossible at 50 or above? I've actually thought this. I know just myself, Stephen, that My fears and apprehensions about going down big declines on my bicycle at 40 miles an hour are kind of like, whoa, maybe I don't want to do that that much anymore. You know, I want to, like I just said, maybe I want to put the brakes on. And sometimes I don't, a lot of times I don't let it fly anymore. But there are times where I do want to. But the fear keeps me from doing it. How could I conquer that?

So, peak performance aging in a sentence, and we can unpack it afterwards, but in a single sentence, if you want to rock till you drop, right, to go back to the metaphor you started with, right? Yeah. You want to engage in challenging challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Okay, challenging social and creative activities. Creativity is another one of these moderators. So if you want the superpowers of aging, creative thinking is, is what actually starts to unlock all the new things that we get in our 50s. So you, uh, it's really important. Challenging for the, all the reasons about pushing on our skills. That's a flow trigger, right? So that's why that's there. Social activities. We could spend the next hour talking about the benefits of social connection, especially as we age, but we all know what that is. Dynamic is the word that literally means the 5 categories of functional fitness. So we need to train strength, stamina, balance, agility, and dexterity over time. So that's what dynamic stands for. Deliberate play. We've heard about deliberate practice, repetition with incremental advancement. It's good for learning, but it's not the best. Deliberate play, which is repetition without repetition, or repetition with like little improvisation, much better for learning, much better for lifelong learning. So dynamic deliberate play is just a system of incorporating a bunch of physical stuff with a robust learning platform in the novel outdoor environments, outdoor environments lower stress levels, and they also— novel outdoor environments amplify access to flow. They also improve neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons and new neural networks. So that's it in a sentence.

That's, that's what people need to hear. Hey, I was listening to Huberman last night on a podcast on the way home from Anaheim, and, um, I want to get your opinion on this. And, you know, here's— I'm like I said, a little older. But he said, look, upper body stuff, great. Lower body stuff, legs, thighs, calves, muscles, doing leg, doing lifts with—

Andrew must have read my book.

Okay, so he's— and I'm, I'm asking you this question. This is a question, you know, I've cycled all my life. My calves, my thighs, all that stuff is like like it's kind of rock hard in comparison to my upper body, which is not. But he's saying that part isn't as important as you age, because to keep your agility, to keep your balance, to keep it, you know, you want to be working as much as you can on your lower body. And I'm sitting here going, well, I've just been told I need to work on my upper body, so I'm, I'm just curious.

Yeah, so, uh, he's right. Leg strength is the single most important correlate.

Okay.

For health and longevity. But he's— there's, there's a bunch of reasons. One, because social connection is so important for peak performance aging that if we lose our mobility, that goes away. Falls are a big killer of older, of older adults, right? They, they lose their balance. Um, right. So also really important is bone density. So There's a lot of bone-brain connection. Most people don't realize that your bones store minerals, which the brain runs on. So without a lot of bone density, some of the decline we see in the brain is actually a bone-related decline. So you have to work on bone density. One of the reasons leg strength is emphasized, big bones, but that's also upper body strength still matters, right? It's use it or lose it across the boards. And now, do you want to prioritize legs and lower body? Absolutely. You do. You really do. But you want to prioritize the entire kinetic chain, right?

Well, you used weighted vests, and I know he was talking last night on the podcast with Tim Ferriss about how he goes out on a Sunday weights in a pack and literally will just do 5 hours, you know, like 5 hours on a Sunday of hiking with like water in the backpack or whatever the hell he puts in there, or weighted vests. Um, what problems does that overcome? How did that help you with the fast twitch muscles, the response, the fine motor performance, the stamina?

It's all of it. Yeah. So it's again hiking with a weight vest you, you have to— the WHO is clear, the World Health Organization. If you want peak performance aging, you need 150 to 300 minutes of stamina training a week, 2 strength training days, 3 balance, agility, and flexibility days. Like, that's what you need for peak performance aging. So you, unless you want to train a couple hours a day, 5 days a week, you've got to find multi-tool solutions, a single tool that solves multiple at once. Skiing hits all of those, right? But, uh, I had to train for the skiing that I was doing, so I started with hiking with a weight vest because it hits all the categories. And as you pointed out, you get fine motor performance, you get fast twitch muscle response. Fast twitch muscle response I got because I would go up with the weighted vest and then I would come down fast. Wasn't full-out running, but I was moving faster than a normal— so, 100% Um, and what about rowing? Um, rowing's great too. Uh, better outdoors than on a machine. Yeah, because the outdoor, you know, novel outdoor environments— it's better to— exercising in nature is really important. The other thing is you want— so dynamic motion. Rowing is not— it's powerful, it's a lot of stuff, it's a little bit dynamic, but it doesn't have you're not— there's not a ton of coordination. Once you get the patterns in, it's the same thing with cycling, uh, road cycling versus mountain biking. So dynamic movements, when there's balance, coordination, strength all at once, it actually improves— not only does it all the physical stuff, it amplifies neurogenesis, angiogenesis, birth of new neurons and the birth of new vasculature. So there's new neurons get blood and oxygen, food. So all that there's these compounding effects. That's what you're aiming for. Where— and the final thing about weight vests is, uh, there's data that it's slow, um, but you can improve bone density with weight vests. There are better ways to do it. We do some work with the company OsteoStrong that is phenomenal. You want— like, if bone density problems, or you're, you're getting on, um, in, in years and you haven't addressed bone density, OsteoStrong's fricking amazing what they figured out. They've just got a way to load the bones very evenly and massively amplify bone, basically astrocytes, astroblasts, astrocytes build up bone and it's pretty good place to start on that, you know what I mean? If you're looking— if you're like, ah God, I don't necessarily know if I'm in the shape, like, with a weight vest yet, start with a movement professional. Can start like working out what's like sort of like— can watch you walk and say, oh, you broke your ankle when you were 12 and you, you overcompensate here and undercompensate here. And you know, one of the things that we have to be really careful of as we age is even with guys like you, really strong legs, But do you favor your, your prime mover muscles over your stabilizer muscles? Over time, the body will learn how to do that, right? And you want to train all of that stuff so we don't get injured as we age.

If there were 3 or 4 things— I know we've, we've talked about so much, you know, the psychology of it, the community element of it, the fear associated with it, the release of chemicals. In the last hour, we've talked about a ton. But if there were 3 things that I could go apply to my life today, what would that be?

So, I'm going to give you 1 thing and 3 ways to apply it.

Okay.

Invert it because peak performance aging starts with mindset. And so, the mindset of old, which is that voice in your head, the one that says, don't go down the hill at full speed, right? Like the mindset of old.

Put the brakes on.

Right? That now that shows up early. There's a bunch of like, it's something start to show up in our 20s. It is the place you need to change it. And so that when the voice says you're too old for that shit, you got to fight it back.

Why?

Because a positive mindset towards aging— I am thrilled with the days that are in front of me, the second half of my life, and think that with the days in front of me are filled with exciting possibility. You know, those kinds of thoughts it translates literally to an extra 7.5 years of healthy longevity. We talked at the beginning about the mind-body connection. Here's another example. And there's so much data on this. And so people hear that and they go, okay, I got to shift my mindset around aging. How the hell do I do that? Here's my 3 things to do. So the first 2, I'm actually going to give you 4. The first 2 come out of Ellen Langer's work. She was, she helped pioneer, she's at Harvard, she's a psychologist. Um, she's often talked about as the godmother of positive psychology, the godmother of mindfulness movement. Um, she was definitely there first, and she worked a lot on kind of the mindset of aging and how do you fix it. Place to start is, uh, with mindfulness of the present. Get curious about the present moment. And her advice is notice, because the brain likes to sort of pretend everything's the same. I'm the same person I was 10 years ago. It's, it likes stability, but the truth of the world is change. Everything is constantly changing. Every time you breathe, you're changing the internal chemistry. Like everything's always changing. Her advice, you want to change your mindset around aging, start by noticing that change is foundational to life. And that's the constant. Um, one, two, watch your language, limiting language, how you talk to yourself, how you talk to others. Don't sleep on how you talk to others. Ageism. It's the most socially acceptable stereotype in the world, and it's deadly. People who grow up around a negative— around negative stereotypes around aging, by the time they reach 60, they show a 30% greater decline in memory than people who grew up with positive ideas about aging. It's huge. And we are making— we are inflicting penalties on people for, you know, these negative mindsets around aging. So, 3. Create an art style.

Would that be distilled down in what you think about, you become?

In a sense.

In a sense.

I don't think— I think it's important to create an art style quest because there's going to be stuff that you hang on to. There's going to be residuals, right? And an art style quest is like, find something that's impossible for you, something that you sort of want to get done, and there's unfinished business there. So you want a lot of motivation to go in. And but it's something that if you were to prove it to yourself, if it were to— if you were to be possible, whatever you believed about the second half of your life has to go away. My Narcontry class, that was exactly what I did. That was what the biggest lesson— and this is the biggest lesson of running this experiment with hundreds of other people at this point— is when you create an experiment and you go up against your own personal impossible, um, it just destroys these traditional mindsets. And 4, put down your goddamn smartphone. Put it away. Smartphones create—

they make you dumb.

Well, they create a mobile mindset, which is like they emphasize solipsistic narcissistic behavior, and it actually will block the very mindset you need, right? And the other thing is peak performance aging. Um, there's a lot to do. There's a lot— you got to get busy. Most Americans spend 4 to 6 hours a day on frickin' phone, on their phones. So, you know, where do you get the time? Put down the phone. It's bad for your brain. It's bad for your mindset. Bad for— and I mean, we could go on. I could literally talk for the next hour basically about all the detriments that smartphones have on the brain and especially the aging brain. Smartphones train down exactly the skills that we need to be training up over time.

Totally. I agree with you. I mean, I, I, I mentioned to my wife the other day as we walk the dogs, you know, all— we walk the dogs probably 20 hours a week or more. The people with Down syndrome, you know, they'll walk right into you. They're, they're so busy looking at the damn phone, they're not out enjoying the fresh air and the, and whatever. They're like, literally, we never take our phones with us anytime we walk the dogs, right? And but the reality is, is this This is what you get. You get a lot of it. I mean, and it's a lot. It's not just a little.

Yeah, it's also— yeah, yeah, it's a— I could go on.

I know, I know. We're all—

I gotta go, I'm running out of time.

Hey, well, I appreciate you. Thank you. For all my listeners, we're gonna put a link to it, gnarcountry.com. G-N-A-R country dot com. Uh, you can also go to the Flow Research Collective. We're gonna put a there. Thank you so much. Namaste to you. Thanks for spending time with me today. It's always a pleasure having you on, Stephen.

Greg, lovely to see you as always. Thanks so much again for your interest.

I hope you get— I hope you get snow.

Me too.

All right, bye-bye.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Question for you: when was the last time you were in the zone? When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done? Done, even though very little time had passed. Now you've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time. And you know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before, but it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket. In some studies, as high as 500% above baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you could reliably increase your productivity by 5x. And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com, unblock your flow, and unlock peak performance.

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