Riding the Wave: How to Sustain Flow

Has your research shown that like maybe a male with higher or lower testosterone has an easier or more difficult time getting into flow?

You may need to trigger the fight response to get into flow, and if that is the case, you will get testosterone with it. Flow states have triggers. The reason we know flow is reliable and repeatable now is because we know that flow states have preconditions that lead to flow. They will all basically work by driving attention into the present moment. Flow follows focus, and that's what all the triggers do. But the point is that not everybody is susceptible to the same trigger. Risk is a flow trigger because it produces a massive surge of dopamine in the body. There's a lot of individual differences all the way down to the receptor level that say which triggers you're going to work with. We found that people with regular gratitude practices tend to have higher flow lifestyles. Flow for all humans, right? It's for us to perform at our best. It wouldn't make sense if there was a privileged group. 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 boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris. and together with best-selling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Good morning, gentlemen. Morning.

Great to have you on the show today.

It's good to be with you guys, man.

There's a lot to dive into right here, and I guess first off, we're going to be talking a lot about a flow state, which, uh, after writing 13 books, maybe you would think that you would get tired of it, but it seems like you're still fired up and excited about it. Can you explain to people what a flow state is just so we get that out of the way?

For sure. It's technically scientifically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. That's obviously not very helpful. It refers more specifically to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing that everything else just seems to disappear. Action awareness is going to start start to merge. Your sense of self, self-consciousness, going to get really quiet. Time is going to dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely. Sometimes it'll slow down. You'll get a freeze frame effect, right? I mean, if you've been in a car crash. And more frequently, it speeds up and 5 hours go by in like 5 minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, tend to go through the roof.

[Speaker:BEN] You mentioned a car crash. What are some other natural ways that some of this might be induced without even really thinking about it. What are some examples of somebody that might have experienced something similar to what you're talking about without really ever even trying?

It's actually a really great question because a couple of things, flow is universal. So it shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. Flow is a spectrum of experiences. So it's not a singular experience, it's this spectrum. So you can have microflow, which is really familiar to people. We spend 5% of our work lives in microflow, often without noticing it. Microflow is when you sit down to write that quickie email and you get sucked in, right? And an hour goes by and you look up and you've written an essay and you didn't notice time passing. And maybe your sense of self didn't totally disappear, but bodily awareness was gone. And when you sort of like pop into consciousness, you're like, "Oh crap, I got to pee," right? And you run to the bathroom. That's microflow. Macroflow, the other end of the spectrum, is sort of the full-blown quasi-mystical experience where time time slows down and all that stuff. Flow shows up all over the place, meaning all of our athletic competitions from action adventure sports through traditional sports, shows up in work, shows up in— very common in code, in software coding, in video gaming, music, art, theater, et cetera, et cetera. It really shows up pretty much everywhere. In fact, when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was often called the godfather of flow psychology, was a psychologist then at the University of Chicago, did did his first giant initial study on flow. The reason we know it was universal is he went around the world talking to everybody he could talk to about these experiences. He talked to everybody. He talked to expert neurosurgeons and stock traders and dancers and rock climbers. Then he talked to Detroit assembly line workers and Chicago meatpackers and elderly Korean women and Japanese teenage motorcycle gang members and Navajo sheepherders and on and on. He literally talked to everybody about— So you can get into flow in pretty much any activity. If you can get into flow while working on an assembly line in Detroit, you can get into flow anywhere as far as I can tell.

Ben: There was an awesome movie a couple years back called Limitless. A bunch of us watched it and a bunch of us were like, "How do we get into this state of mind?" And so, a lot of us turned to nootropics and trying different things like that. Later, probably learned a lot about Adderall and that sort of thing. Is there any supplements or anything like that that can help someone better get into the flow state?

It is an open question. This is not the work I do at the Flow Research Collective, first of all. We study kind of the neurobiology of flow and we work on predominantly psychological, physiological interventions. We don't tend to get involved in technologies or substances predominantly because we work on peak performance and our work has to be able to work every time, no matter what, in any conditions, and we don't want to rely on outside stuff. That said, in my book, "Stealing Fire," we looked at a lot of these questions more closely. I would say at a neurotropic level, the experience is pretty much every experience is neurotropics these days, which is most of them don't work. You get placebo effects. Adderall, those things, they spike norepinephrine. They actually block flow. So, you get a fake kind of flow focus feeling, But it doesn't tend to bring the heightened performance, the heightened creativity, the heightened cognition, all the other stuff that tends to come with flow, doesn't because it's predominantly the neurochemical norepinephrine. So the bigger point is, the easier way to explain this is when you look under the hood of flow, what's going on in the brain and the body, you see 5 different predominant reward neurochemicals being cocktailed and you see profound changes in neuroanatomical function on top of a bunch of other stuff. There are no real nootropics. There's nothing out there that can really do much more than provoke one neurochemical at a time. You'll see this in the technology space. Somebody will have a whiz-bang EEG device and they'll say, "Oh, this produces flow. It drops you right into flow." And they're lying because yes, flow has a brainwave signature. It takes place at the alpha, theta borderline, but all this other stuff is going on and just being able to produce one bit of a much more complicated brain reaction isn't the thing. That's been the same problem with nootropics. Plus, individual biology plays such a huge role in kind of which nootropics you're going to respond to, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's a promising avenue in the near term. I think there's a lot of other ways we can— Flow has gone from elusive to reliable and repeatable using psychological interventions and based on kind of neurobiological mechanism. And that's where we are and we're solid with that and we're good with making this reliable and repeatable, if any of that made any sense.

Yeah, no, it did. And I was curious about one thing, um, from in, in your book, I think it was The Rise of Superman, you had this phrase transient hyperfrontality. And when you mentioned that, it kind of like— the explanation kind of seemed like turning your brain off, right? Or turning thinking off. Yes. For, for like, for me, whenever I do anything athletic or when I do things like jiu-jitsu, I, I like— I feel like when I don't think and when I don't think about the next moves, I just let my body do what it's been trained to do, I, I get super creative and I'm able to do things I've never done before. And that's by turning things off, right? Is that, is that one of the ways that people are able to achieve that, by just like just doing and not thinking?

So what you're talking— flow is transient hypofrontality, the deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, right? And when that happens, as you're right, a lot of automatic processing, a lot of bottom-up stuff takes over. It's predominantly an efficiency exchange. The brain wants more energy for focus in the present moment, and it's got a fixed energy budget, so it shuts down non-critical structures and repurposes that extra energy for attention in the present moment and the task at hand. That's sort of what's happening. You're experiencing in the gym specifically, that's what's known as exercise-induced transient hypofrontality. It's the front edge of a flow state. There's other things going on in Oh, now once you started talking about the second half of your statement, which is I can do all the standard stuff and then I can improv on top of it, right? Now that's flow. Now you're seeing other— because that, that improv on top of it, for that to be taking place, you need brainwaves involved. That, that brainwaves have to sort of be on the alpha theta borderline for you to be able to come up with a lot of those creative ideas that quickly. And you also need increases in, for example, Dopamine and norepinephrine, two of the neurochemicals that show up in flow, they do a lot of different things in the brain. One of the things they do is they tune signal-to-noise ratios, which is a fancy way of saying they amplify pattern recognition. So you're fighting jiu-jitsu and you're in some kind of hold, you can't see a goddamn thing, and suddenly you see a little bit of light under your opponent's body and your brain goes, "Oh wait, if I leg sweep from here and roll, blah, blah, blah," right? All that creativity on top of that, that's pattern recognition. Your brain is going, "Oh, that little crack of light underneath the hip." hip is an opening and I could slide my foot in and blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing. If I spoke better jiu-jitsu, this would have been a better example, by the way.

It makes sense.

Steven, how in the world do you study this? It seems elusive. It seems like it's not easy to even find examples of it sometimes. So how did you come to studying this?

I want to say that at this point, it's a huge field. It's not elusive. Just the European Association of Flow Researchers, just going into Europe, forgets what happens. There's over 100, 150 people involved now. There are a bunch of dedicated labs, including my own. I don't think it's— we're not cancer research yet, but we're not as obscure as we were. I came in through two pathways, but the more interesting one is I was a reporter, a journalist in the early 1990s. Reporting is this cool game where you get to exploit your curiosities, right? Anything you're super into, you can get paid to learn about and that's amazing. I was super interested in neurobiology, how humans work, and neuroscience had just advanced to the point, like in the late '90s, we started to really understand emotions, and we started being able to behavioral neuroscience, what was actually driving people was starting to line up, and that was very firm and crisp because psychology, as most people know, you get into it thinking it's going to provide all the answers, and what you quickly discover is that it's mostly metaphor. And that the neurobiology is the mechanism. So I wanted to understand the neurobiology. I was also interested in action sports, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding, and whatever. The '90s in action sports was this great— it's called the great era of impossible, where more so-called impossible feats, things that had never been done and were believed to be never going to be done, were just not just being done, they were being iterated upon over and over and over again. This is what I wrote about in Rise of Superman. It caught my attention, one, because impossible things were going on. It was like seeing a magic show up close and in person with mortal consequences all the time. That was amazing. But the more interesting thing is, and I knew this from reading neuroscience and psychology and working in those fields, the group of people I was hanging out with and who were sort of reinventing the limits of human possibility, these action sport athletes in the '90s, this is like deep subculture. Punk rock, irreverent, rowdy. Most of the people I knew came from broken homes. They had very little education. They didn't have a lot of money. There was a lot of drugs, drinking, high-risk behavior in these communities. Normally, you put all those things together in a group of people and you get jail and death and things like that. You don't get reinventing what's possible for the human species. I was fascinated by this question of what was going on. I interviewed these athletes over and over and over. They kept talking about the same state of consciousness that when they're performing at their best, they're in this altered state and people would call it the zone or runner's high or they had all kinds of names for it. Depending on the action sport, there was different names in different sports, but it was everywhere. I started taking this question of what does it take to accomplish the impossible out of action sports and into other domains? I took it into business, into science, technology. For 25 years, my beat as a journalist was with magazines like Wired and New New York Times and Discover, and I would track those moments that sci-fi ideas became science fact technology. When bionics first started showing up or when the world's first artificial vision implant was turned on, the first blind man could see again, first private spaceship, all that stuff. In getting to know the inventors behind it, you heard the same stories. You heard stories about flow. When I'm doing my best work, I'm in this altered state of consciousness. The ideas are just kind of flying around. Very similar to the description Zima gave a second ago. The descriptions The questions are really the same no matter what people are doing. That was what really caught my attention and got me into the puzzle. And I got lucky in that I came in, all the other work had been going on in psychology, I just came into the neuroscience because I was geeked on that and I knew neuroscientists. I was writing about that and I got lucky. One of the first people I called had done some of the very first brain imaging work on deep altered states of consciousness. He was Dr. Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania and he was working on meditating monks and why do they feel one one with everything. And if you talk to people in flow, you hear painters, "I'm one with the canvas," or surfers, "I'm one with the wave," or skiers, "I'm one with the mountain." It's also sort of everywhere. And we start, I called when I was like, "Hey, could the same thing that's allowing Buddhists to become one with the universe and Franciscan nuns to become one with Jesus's love, could that be what's causing surfers to become one with the ocean?" And after a bunch of work, we sort of figured it out, yes, and tracked it back to flow states. And that's where I came in. And slowly, from basically that point forward, the neuroscience has been accumulating. In fact, you mentioned transient hypofrontality a second ago. That came out of drug addiction. They noticed in the '90s that people who had really bad coke addictions or speed addictions had decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex because that's right where impulse control lives. And so it was this bad thing. And then when this guy named Aron Dietrich proposed it as this possibility for flow, everybody leaped on him. Hey, flow is this good thing and drug addiction is bad. And no, it turns out it's the same kind of mechanism, slightly different places in the prefrontal cortex are being deactivated. But impulse control, by the way, is also turned way down in flow. At the Flow Research Collective, flat out tell people don't go shopping in a flow state, right? It's a bad idea. You'll buy everything in sight. Pattern recognition is all jacked up and everything just looks good to you.

I find it interesting. We see this in powerlifting as well where some of these men and women are able to tap into— like some people are just really well-trained. They train really well and they end up getting the results. It's like quite obvious. You know, they lift 600, they lift 650, 675, 700. There's a natural progression. But we sometimes see these athletes that can tap into They're not lifting like 20 more pounds than the best guy. They're sometimes lifting like 100 pounds more than the next guy. And they're so unbelievably explosive. And we're kind of— we're looking at each other like, this guy's from another planet. Like, what are— what are maybe some of these people able to tap into?

So this is not our research. It's research— I'm going to forget the name of the scientist's name. He's at the University of Pennsylvania. He was looking at physical strength. He was looking specifically at this question. And as you probably know, there's a governor on most of your behavior that says you don't want to hurt yourself, right? So in any physical exertion situation, most people are only able to give 60-65% of total strength. You can train yourself up, as you know, to about 85%, and that's where most people tend to tap out, but there's an extra 15% of reserves. We override these in flow states. Mechanisms I'll talk about, and during adrenaline experiences where the woman lifts the car off the baby. That's one of the things that's happening. Flow does it— there may be a mechanism for increasing strength that we are not completely aware of. Right now, the current thinking is— and there does appear to be a boost of testosterone right at the front end of a flow state. That does seem to be fairly consistent, but you get both anandamine and endorphins, really powerful painkillers. And so, a lot of that extra force is massive amounts of painkillers. And people don't realize this, endorphins are opiates, right? So they're OxyContin or heroin or whatever. About 20 different endorphins in the brain, but the most common one, it's 100 times more potent than medical morphine. So you're talking about really powerful painkillers, really powerful drugs. And normally, worth pointing out, if I were to give you that much morphine, heroin, OxyContin, whatever, you're not lifting shit, right? You can't tap into that. It'd be a disaster trying to go to the gym gym on those substances, flow allows you to get the kind of the pleasure and the pain relief without kind of the loss of everything else that normally comes along with those substances.

Yeah, you mentioned that little boost in testosterone right at the beginning of flow state. Has your research shown that like maybe a male with higher or lower testosterone has an easier or more difficult time getting into Yeah, it's a tricky, interesting question, and I should caveat on the testosterone.

Our work is showing, and it's just in conjunction with Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford a little bit, that you may need to trigger the fight response to get into flow. And if that is the case, you will get testosterone with it. So that's what we're looking at. You also get surges in cortisol and things like that right at the front end of a flow state. Are there male-female differences? We've been looking at that question. There appear to be some slight male-female differences, which could signal differences in testosterone levels. Certainly. So here's the best way I think about it when we talk about individual differences or personality differences even. Flow states have triggers. The reason we know flow is reliable and repeatable now is because we know that flow states have preconditions that lead to flow. There are 22 of them. They're all known. They all basically work by driving attention into the present moment because flow follows focus, and that's what all the triggers do. They do it different ways neurobiologically, but the point is that not everybody is susceptible to the same triggers. Risk is a flow trigger because it produces a massive surge of dopamine in the body. Now, we know people have all kinds of different receptivity in their D2 dopamine receptors, which got— if they're really active, you have sensation seekers, or that can also be the product of low dopamine production that requires you to do more extreme things to get more dopamine. So there's a lot of individual differences all the way down to the receptor level. At, say, which triggers you're going to work with. We haven't seen anything that says this type of person will get into flow more. The closest we've come is certainly we've linked— there are known high gratitude. For example, we did a study with Glenn Fox at USC, who's kind of one of the better researchers on the neuroscience of gratitude, and we found that people with regular gratitude practices tend to have higher flow lifestyles. There's things like that. And there, Csikszentmihalyi, godfather of psychology, talked about some of— a lot of his early papers. I think it's in Flow. It's definitely in Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology, one of his textbooks, where he talks about the autotelic personality, high flow personality type, and certain traits that are associated with that. And of course, those traits are going to be underpinned by things like testosterone levels and hormonal production, things like that are going to sit underneath that. The answer is probably yes, but we have no idea what it is yet. Ultimately, I don't think it's going to matter, meaning evolution shaped flow for all humans. It's for us to perform at our best. It wouldn't make sense if there was a privileged group. There'd be privileged ways in that would make sense depending on personality types, but I don't see it working that way from an evolutionary perspective. Of course, that's really hard research to do. The evolution of flow is one of the least researched of the topics. But that's just, you know, I'm a little outside my lane here, so I'm a little sort of talking out of my butt, but I'm trying.

I'm really curious about this because I can imagine that there are some people that are listening, whether it's a college student or somebody who's in a job currently, and let's say that they just don't really enjoy what they do, but it pays the bills, it does well, and they're just doing it, right? Um, I'm assuming that one of the precursors to being able to achieve peak performance or flow is is actual enjoyment and interest, pure interest in what you're doing, or can someone achieve that even if they don't really like what they're doing?

So that is a phenomenal question. There's a complicated— it's a— there's a complicated series of answers. So the answer is, through reframing, if you can align— let's say you have a job you hate. We know you'll get more flow if the thing you're doing is aligned with curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery, the big 5 intrinsic motivators. But let's say your job, it doesn't have any of those things. If you can reframe the job, one portion of what you're doing as an opportunity for mastery, so the whole thing sucks, but here's this thing that I want to take into this thing that I really want to do in later life and I'm going to use this, even if it's nothing more than this job affords me the opportunity to be patient or think, right, kind of attribute development, that sort of stuff. That kind of reframing can start to recruit more intrinsic motivators. And as a general rule, once you start recruiting more intrinsic motivators, other opportunities inside the job itself, things you used to hate and now start to see in a new way, are going to start showing up. That's one thing. The second thing is certainly flow works better if all your intrinsic motivators and all those motivators, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, they're all flow triggers. They all drive focus into the present moment. A lot of it do it by driving neurochemicals like dopamine and norepinephrine, which are focus enhancers, into our system and things like that. So, if you want to be a peak performer over time, because it's hard, the work is hard, right, in general, so you want all the fuel sources you could get. That's sort of like saying, "Can I be a peak performer if I don't eat breakfast and get enough sleep at night?" It's sort of a nonsensical question. There are conditions under which, yes, of course you can, right? If you have to, but over time, no. And here's the more interesting point on that one. Easier when you're younger. There seems to be in adult development for happiness and fulfillment and contentment later on in life, there appear to be, and this is not my work, this is work that comes out of the Harvard Adult Development Project, a couple of thresholds for things you sort of have to like, if you don't check these things off, you're sort of screwed for overall life satisfaction after that. Afterwards, and there's two big ones. One is that roughly by 40, you got to figure out how to get paid for what you love, or at least what you like, right? Otherwise, it gets really hard. And interestingly, by 50, you got to forgive those who have done you wrong. If you don't, it limits empathy and creativity and enjoyment afterwards. And why those things exist are peculiar, in much of the same way that, like, we don't quite know why emotional set points get set up early in life, but there seem to be these developmental things with emotions at different timeframes for reasons nobody can figure out that I know of yet. But so when it comes to doing work that isn't totally aligned with everything you do, right? Now, it's also worth pointing out, by the way, that there's something called the primary flow activity. This is that thing that you've done most of your life that just drops you into the zone. For me, it's skiing. For some people, you know, It's jiu-jitsu or walking their dogs or riding horses or painting or boxing or dancing hip-hop, whatever it is, it's known as your primary flow activity. And it's often not a great idea to work in your primary flow activity. I remember I once tried to teach a flow and skiing workshop. I love skiing. And when I got out there, there were other people in my ski day, I was like, "The fuck are you talking to me for? I want to be skiing. I don't want to be talking." I was so resentful, it was awful. It's like the river guide who loves river rafting, and so they become a guide, and then they realize that their job is suddenly taking care of tourists and, "Oh, the bathroom is over there. Let me cook you dinner." That's the job, and the thing you love sort of gets crushed by that. You see that a lot, not quite as much in martial arts, but I've seen it with a bunch of friends who have sort of opened studios or dojos along the way, and they're like, "Oh my God. Is a management task and I got to run software and accounting programs and what the hell, right? So, you see that sometimes along the way when you try to work in your primary flow activity because you tend to resent all the other things that get in between you and it's often better to work in what's known as a secondary flow activity. For me, that's writing, right? 70% of the time I start writing, I'm going to drop into at least like a microflow state. 90% of the time I go skiing, I'm going to drop into flow. That's how I think about it. About it.

Yeah, it's interesting when you have your mind preoccupied on something else, how it can trigger some of this flow state that you're talking about. Because for me personally, it's always felt best if I'm not thinking about business to come up with great ideas for business. If my mind is somewhere else, even just something as simple as listening to old music, watching an old movie that's like my favorite movie, I'll watch it and then I'll be like, oh man, I got this crazy idea for this new, whatever the heck it might be.

So a lot of it is, Especially with music, but same thing with movies. So I talked a second ago about dopamine, norepinephrine heightening pattern recognition, right? So the ability to link ideas together. There's also a dope insight trigger for flow. So when you link ideas together, right, you're watching an old movie, you see something familiar and it links to another thought in your head, right, in your brain. And especially if it's a movie you've seen a lot, your brain, which is always trying to predict what's going to happen next, you already know what's going to happen next. So if there's got a little space on the aside so it can look for those kind of more remote connections. We also know— this is why favorite pieces of music and old movies tend to do this. So, if you look in creativity, one of the things about creativity is anxiety blocks creativity. One of the great secrets to creativity is a good mood promotes it. The reason is anxiety is predominantly norepinephrine and cortisol, but the more norepinephrine in your system, the more logical and linear your brain wants to be. You're in a big problem, crisis situation, you don't want choice paralysis, a million options. You want fight, freeze, or flee, right? That sort of thing. And we all know this, that in the, like, if you learn this the hard way in any of the martial arts, right? Like what Mike Tyson meant when everybody's got a plan until you get punched in the mouth, right? Like, you know that in a crisis situation, your brain stops being able to kind of tap dance. They just reacts. That happens. It's not just extreme anxiety, it's all levels of anxiety. So, it's because the anterior cingulate cortex, which is part of the brain that can find far-flung connections between ideas, the more norepinephrine in that circuit, the less far-flung connections it will find. So, a good mood, it will go, "Oh, everything's cool in the world. I can look for far-flung connections from this idea that may help you find new resources or innovate or whatever." It's not a crisis situation, we have time. We have the luxury of time to solve this problem. When you watch an old movie, one, you don't have to predict what's happening next because you know, and two, it puts you in a good mood, gets a little dopamine flowing, and as a result, you're starting to notice patterns. Same thing with music. Music is all about pattern recognition. One of the reasons music is so— our brain wants to predict what's going to happen next, and because music follows predictable patterns, we often can. We get little hits of dopamine every time we connect those patterns. It's why music can kind of drop us into flow that way.

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.

Com.

If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

Yeah.

Do you have any, um, like pre-writing rituals that may or may not help you get into that flow state? I just know, um, I love writing and sometimes I will blink and then time will pass by and I'll have, you know, a couple pages down. Um, but I know listeners who are writers are kind of like, hey, this guy has, you know, 12 points.

Yeah. So I, I, we actually, I do a whole course called Flow for Writers. There's a whole, we have a whole digital course that I put together on this because I really like training writers. So there's a lot of rituals. I'll talk about the most important ones as they pertain to writing, but these are all flow triggers that apply to everybody. It's not just writing. So this is obvious, but flow follows focus. So the most important flow trigger is complete concentration. And what that actually means is I start my day with about a 4-hour block of uninterrupted concentration. What the research shows in the In the beginning, 90 minutes is great. You want to sort of start your day or start your work session with 90 minutes uninterrupted space for complete concentration. 90 minutes, just in the way that we sleep for 90-minute cycles, well, there's a waking focus cycle that lasts about 90 minutes, or REM sleep is 90 minutes and waking focus is 90 minutes. It's a built-in biological block. We're sort of built to pay attention for that long. I always like to start my day with that and start my day with my writing because it's my hardest task. We know that willpower is highest first thing in the morning. Willpower tends to decline over time for a variety of reasons. Warren Baumeister's work on some of this, other people have added to it since then. I also always, always, always start my writing day by editing what I wrote the day before. So I Writing flow, one of the things that triggers flow are clear goals. So that's a daily to-do list. So I always write, start a book, I'll write 500 words a day. In the middle of a book, it's 750. Towards the end, it's 1,000 as I get to know where I'm going. And I start by editing what I wrote the day before. And the reason is editing is predominantly about pattern recognition. As we know from the conversation, pattern recognition, when you notice, "Oh, this sentence gets so much better if I change this word out for this word," and there's more rhythm here if I connect this right. That's pattern recognition. So you're getting little bits of dopamine, little bits of— and what it is doing is it's driving concentration, driving you closer to flow. So by the time I get to the dreaded blank page, I'm already a little bit in flow. My focus is at least up, and I've got a little bit of that stuff in my system. And now when I face the blank page, I'm not exactly neurobiologically starting from zero. So those things are important. But I also— one of the most important things for writers is your brain has a— right, it does build, it does pattern recognition automatically, but it can't do it if it doesn't have starts and endings. So always know where you're starting from and always know where you're going. Your brain will automatically be able to fill in the middle. But a lot of writer's block is, I don't know where I'm starting from and I don't know where I'm going. So when I say I have clear Goals. I'm going to write 500 words today. And I always know where I'm starting from and where I'm ending because it tends to prevent writer's block.

Yeah.

And that 90 minutes that you spoke of, what are you trying to achieve there? And is it like a meditation thing or are you just literally—

No, I mean, in those 90 minutes for uninterrupted concentration, I'm writing. That's when I'm writing.

Oh, okay.

Got it. Yeah. That's my writing time, but it's 90— you want to maximize flow. It doesn't really— if you're giving yourself 15 It usually takes about 15 minutes to drop into flow kind of thing, even if you're really good at your craft kind of thing, and if not longer. So, you want that long block to give yourself time to shift into the state.

Ben: I'm also wondering what kind of people have you run into that have gotten into flow states, like they're masterful at it, they're amazing at it, and it's before they even ever met you. You mentioned rock climbing and you mentioned some of these these guys being kind of grungy and just—

There is no way to achieve expert performance in pretty much any discipline without flow because flow is how we get to expertise and it's what underpins expertise. It was particularly common in action sports in the 1990s. Why I saw that giant revolution is for a variety of different reasons. They had started to sort of build communities of innovation around flow triggers. Now, we will do this automatically and consciously. In my new book, The Art of Impossible, I talk about how peak performance is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. The whole book covers a bunch of motivation skills, a bunch of learning skills, a bunch of creativity skills, and a bunch of flow skills because that's the full biological toolkit for peak performance. Every peak performer is going to gravitate towards these skills because this is how we do it. What we've learned now is that there's an order to the process and there's a sequence, there's a way to get it to work for us. Much better for us, but you see all this stuff anywhere you see kind of expert performance. You have to. It's how expertise gets done.

One thing I'm kind of wondering though on that is these rock climbers, they sound like unconventional. They didn't sound like they're like necessarily, and maybe they were professional rock climbers, but the way that you kind of painted the picture, it sounds like they were doing drugs and doing stuff.

Rock climbers and surfers and skiers. I was predominantly the B group that I think— I was living in Squaw Valley. So it was, you know, skiers, snowboarders in the winter, and we were all rock climbers in the summer or surfers, right? And so it wasn't limited to one sport, though I will say Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, when he started doing a lot of this early research, he was looking at rock climbers. He himself is a mountaineer and a little bit of a rock climber. So that was one of the groups of people he was looking at early. Early on.

My curiosity is in, like, some of these people don't seem to care about much else except for this. They have a singular focus. You kind of mentioned, uh, painted a picture, like, sometimes from what I've seen is like sometimes a guy can't figure out how to scrape change together to get to a certain spot because they don't have money for gas, but when they get there, they kick everybody's ass. You know, you kind of see these unconventional people. Is that allotting for the freedom in their brain, like you mentioned earlier, for them to be creative and for them to draw upon flow, maybe easier?

It's, it's, I mean, that's a complicated question because that, you know, all kinds of individuality stuff there. You also, you know, when you see that kind of OCD kind of devotion and right there, there could be other mental challenges going on around that. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that can produce that particular thing. But with the rock climbers, I mean, certainly I mean, you also got to remember, I mean, this was when I was coming up as a journalist, right? When I wasn't being a journalist, I was certainly driving around to different rock climbing areas or surf breaks or whatever and living out of the back of my car. This was being in my 20s, I think, for a lot of people, right? So one is the question, right? Because if you see the guy who's 20, 25, it's one thing. If you see it in somebody who's 50, 55, that's a different thing, right? And that you're looking at different things. Some of that has to do with flow. Here's what's weird about this. We know that flow transfers because flow is essentially a focusing skill. So, one of the first things we do when we're training people to get more flow in their life, they want more flow at work, for example, at the office, is double down on your primary flow activity. So, the reason is if you go skiing on Monday or play jiu-jitsu on Monday and drop into You go to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Well, the more flow you get, the more flow you get. It's a focusing skill, and like any other skill, you train it, you get better at it over time. And there's additional boosts to doing that in that as we move into flow, there's a global release of nitric oxide. It's a gas, a signaling molecule, flushes stress hormones out of our system. So you sort of reset the nervous system. It really calms you down, and anxiety blocks peak performance. So that's great. Great longer term, and flow is a massive heightening in creative problem solving, 400% to 700% depending on whose studies you're looking at. Teresa Mobley at Harvard figured out that that heightened creativity will outlast the flow state by a day, maybe two, and you see the same thing happening to mood and emotion in flow. Flow is incredibly euphoric, and the euphoria outlasts the flow state. Just going surfing on Monday, getting into flow, that those benefits tend to carry later into the week, which would lead you to believe these people who show up at the studio and kick everybody's ass and are great, that it would carry into daily life. And we don't see that. And there are other things like, for example, we know that flow over time will increase empathy and environmental awareness, your perception, but that doesn't Surfers, surfing is packed with flow triggers, but this doesn't mean surfing automatically seems to turn you into this empathetic Buddha type because that clearly doesn't happen. My point is there's still big gaping holes in the research that we can drive a bus through in terms of these kinds of questions.

Chase Jarvis: One thing that I was really wondering as you were talking about this is because you mentioned in your book, The Art of Impossible, it's the biology of flow, right? And I don't know if like, do you put a difference between biology and the psychology of things? Because when a lot of people think about this, they think about changing their mindset, changing the way they think about things, but you're talking about the physical mechanisms to be able to achieve this.

Well, I'm talking about the neurobiological mechanisms. We access them through psychology, but the point— so when we were trying to train people, we go back to the '90s or the '80s or '90s, there's a great book called "Flow in Sport" written by Susan Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Me High. And Susan is a great flow researcher and she was a really high-level Olympic coach, worked with a lot of different people and tried to use the psychology of flow to train people into flow. And the results were really mixed. People just weren't good at it because how the hell are you going to— okay, we have to worry about the merger of action and awareness and they didn't know what they were doing. Once we figured out, hey, wait a minute, flow triggers do one of three things. They create dopamine, they create norepinephrine, or they lower cognitive load. Now we're like, oh, okay, what do we have to— we have to find things that create norepinephrine, create dopamine, and lower cognitive load. These will drive flow. And suddenly it became much more reliable and repeatable. That's what I mean by it. We just got down to the level of mechanism. I'll give you another example when, uh, because you used it. So when most people use the term mindset, they mean attitude towards life. When psychologists use the term mindset, they actually mean attitude towards learning, right? Growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And when you actually look under the hood of what the hell is Carol Dweck talking about, she's saying, look, if you have a growth mindset, when you're faced with a challenge, your brain will get active and rise to the challenge. If you have a fixed mindset, when faced with a challenge, your brain won't do work. And it's that mechanism that you're— right? You're not interested in attitudes or growth or fixed. You're interested in, I want to fucking learn. So how do we know? How do How do we make the brain learn? Right? So that's what I mean by going to that level. It's less about— if the problem is training from the psychology, these words are metaphorical. It's like trying— there's a lot of really interesting research that comes out of the crossovers between people in the sciences and people in spiritual communities. But for it to happen, we always have to teach the folks in the spiritual communities the language of science because the way a Tibetan Buddhist is going to describe one practice versus a Franciscan a Buddhist monk, a Tibetan nun versus a Jew versus a Muslim, and they're all doing the same kind of meditative practice, but the language is totally different. But if you go under the hood, you're like, "Oh, wow, same parts of the brain are being active and inactive when all these people are praying and meditating." Similar technology in a sense. Does that make sense?

Makes total sense.

Good.

How'd you have an opportunity to drive a— to fly, I should say— Yeah, yeah, yeah. What went on there?

So I got to give you a little bit of backstory. As I said when I started this conversation with you, my early mentor was looking at the neuroscience of quasi-mystical experience, oneness with everything, right? Another really common mystical experience that happens in flow is out-of-body experiences. And some of the earliest research into out-of-body and near-death experiences, believe it believe it or not, were done by the Air Force. The MiG fighters or the stealth fighters show up, pilots start flying them into G-LOC, right? Gravity-induced loss of consciousness, because they can bank turns, right? And all the blood rushes out of your head. People are crashing these billion-dollar planes. So this guy, James Winner, he gets hired to solve the problem, and he spins over 1,000 pilots into G-LOC in a centrifuge in Texas and discovers that when the vast majority of them start, right before they start to lose consciousness, they're having out-of-body experiences. And if they keep spinning them, they progress into near-death experiences. And so this is sort of a known thing in the research, in the literature, and I know this. All right, we're going to park this by the side, then I'm going to tell you a different story. I was a journalist and I had friends who were publicists, and a friend of mine was a publicist for Stolichnikov. Chinaya. Cold War ends, the Soviet Union falls, everybody's fricking bankrupt over there, and the Russian government decides they're going to make money by selling off their old MiG fighter jets. They sell Stoli a bunch of MiG-17 fighter jets, and Stoli decides to take them on tour of America and fly them all around. They show up in California, and my friend calls me up and he's like, "Hey dude, you want to go for a ride in a MiG-17?" a MiG, hell, who doesn't, right? Of course I want to go for a ride in a MiG. So I drive out to Livermore where they are, and it's a MiG trainer. So there's a, right, there's a, the front seat is for actually the passenger where they're learning to fly the plane and the pilot sits behind them. But it's a standard MiG, but just with an extra seat in there. And I'm like, they strap me in and the pilot crew walks over and he starts teaching me about the, like, here's the, this is how the rudder works and these are how the pedals work. And I'm looking at him like, dude, you know I can't fly a plane. Plane. I've never flown a plane before. And he's like, no, no, this is just a precaution, just in case, whatever. And, um, he's Russian, of course. And, uh, we get 100 feet off the deck and he's like, okay, you have this stick. And I'm like, what do you mean I have this stick? He's like, you have this stick. You cannot crash us, I do not think. And I'm like, um, okay. And then like I start flying this thing. I'm I'm like, well, what can I do? He's like, you can do anything. And I'm like, I can't crash this thing for real because I've read all this stuff about out-of-body and near-death experiences if I fly into G-LOC. So I want to fly the plane into G-LOC. I want to see if this is true. I want to see if I'm going to have an out-of-body or near-death experience. And he's like, well, okay. So I start barrel rolling and that doesn't work. And then I start looping the plane. Looping a MiG is how I flew myself into G-LOC, totally knocked myself knocked myself out, completely flipped the MiG, knocked myself out. One of the things they don't tell you about G-force is that it makes you sick as a dog afterwards. It messes you up. I was like flu symptoms down for the count for like a month afterwards. I got like halfway home from the airfield and I was like, "I don't feel so good." It was bad. But yeah, I flew a MiG-17 and I flew into G-LOC and I did a test of neuroscience theory. And yes, I did actually experience like I passed down a long dark tunnel into the light right as my consciousness went away. So, that part actually turns out to be true too.

Actually, I'm not on mute. So, one thing I was curious about is because you continue to mention that flow follows focus, that's the thing, flow follows focus. But along with that, you've also mentioned many a time that you need to be able to be in the present moment, right? And when I'm assuming when you mentioned being in the present moment, that means you're not thinking of other things other than the task at hand. Nowadays, people find it very difficult to focus on being in the present moment. They're doing something, they're doing work, they're working out, they're doing a task, but their mind is in all of these other places and they can't figure out how to focus. So are there any practices for being able to achieve that, being able to actually focus on what you're doing at that point if you're an individual that can't, you find it impossible to do that?

So there's a number of answers here. One we talked about earlier. So what's the big deal about intrinsic motivation? Why do we care? Curiosity, autonomy, passion, purpose, right? We hear these things. And what is motivation? The big deal about intrinsic motivation is we get focused for free. That's what it is. When you're curious about something, you automatically pay attention to it. When you're passionate about something, you pay even more attention to it. If it's tied to your purpose, etc., etc. So, when you try to line up the thing you're doing with all of your intrinsic motivators, you're pointing them all in the same direction to solve that problem, is the first answer. The second answer is we use a bunch of different— we train people in mindfulness along the way. We do it for emotional regulation to keep people's nervous systems in check because too much anxiety will block flow, but it also trains up focus. We also train people in distraction management, right? When I say have a period of uninterrupted concentration, 90 minutes, start your day kind of thing, I also mean I end my day and I train people with distraction management. So I know I'm going to come in first thing in the morning and start writing. So I turn off the internet. I shut down email. I turn off messages. I block my notifications. Notifications, all of it ahead of time. So I manicure the space, right? Because I'm just like everybody else and things go blinky blinky, it's going to distract me as well. So I prepare the space ahead of time kind of thing. There's other things to go on, but we're not multitaskers, right? The evidence is over. I mean, yes, you can become better at multitasking, right? But it's You're still terrible at it. I mean, okay, you're slightly better at something that we're terrible at and you're never going to be great at it. That's a lost cause. The brain is a serial processor. It wants to do one task at a time. And so does the nervous system. We really don't love that much scattered focus. In fact, one of the reasons clear goals Setting a daily to-do list works as a flow trigger is because all the shit we have to do at any one time weighs on our cognitive load. So when you make a clear goal to-do list, you are exporting something out of memory into the world and it lowers cognitive load. It frees up more energy that you can repurpose for focus and attention. So I'm not saying Yeah, I guess I am saying it's a stupid way to live. Train yourself out of multitasking. If you're interested in long-term peak performance, solve that problem. Do stuff that lines up with your intrinsic motivators. Create, practice distraction management. And the other thing, practice mindfulness and respiration practices. And the other thing is don't expect it to happen. If you can't focus for 90 minutes, that's not a reason to not do this. Start with 10 minutes. If you can manage it for 10 minutes today and 11 minutes tomorrow, this is a long game. Peak performance is an infinite game. It's played over the course of a lifetime. It's not something you win. How are you going to win peak performance? It's a lifestyle. It's a way of approaching everything that you do.

What have you seen in some of your research with exercise? Has there been walking or running or—

Yeah. Thanks. What's foundationally important for flow is— so one of flow's most important triggers is what's known as the challenge-skills balance. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. This, if I were to say this emotionally, I would say that the challenge of the task sits not on, but pretty clear, clear close to the midpoint between boredom, not enough stimulation here, I'm not paying any attention, and anxiety, whoa, way too much, right? In between is what is known as the flow channel. Or if you speak physiology, this is the Yerkes-Dobson curve, right? It's the same thing. But the point of that is it's a thin line, right? Like between your challenge and skills and the more anxiety in your system, the more challenging things are going to be in general to you. And it's very easy to get overwhelmed and get knocked out of flow. So positive psychology has sort of identified a bunch of great strategies for going after fear and anxiety, and they're either a daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice, or exercise, right? And the way I look at it is 5 minutes of gratitude practice will kind of— will lower anxiety. And we can talk about the neurobiology of why. If you're interested in lowering anxiety using mindfulness and meditation, it's about 11 to 20 minutes of focused meditation a day, or you want to exercise, where this is where we started the conversation, into exercise-induced transient hypofrontality. When it gets quiet upstairs, and by the way, when you get that nitric oxide release, as you probably know, your lungs open up, right? So you feel that expansive breath feeling also as well. That's the signal that you've calmed down your nervous system. So what I tell people is, under normal conditions, do one of those a day, right? It could be gratitude, it could be respiration, it could be mindfulness, or it could be exercise, but one a day. Under crisis conditions, we're dealing with COVID right, where people are more stressed out, a little more hypervigilant, double down, do two a day, is really foundationally important. So for nervous system regulation, alone, super, super important. Also, we know that one of flow's triggers is what's known as deep embodiment. Basically, when we engage multiple senses in one activity, it pulls focus into that activity, right? So physical activity engages multiple senses. So this could be low-grade physical activity, building model airplanes, going for walks in nature or gardening, that kind of stuff. Or it It could be more rigorous exercise. Once you get into a lot of the athletics, because they involve so many other flow triggers and often athletic progression stays in that challenge-skill sweet spot, you tend to get a lot of flow inside athletic activities, especially as you move up in expertise and can start to automatize some of your behaviors.

You know, one thing I was also curious about when you were mentioning that was, um, there was— gosh, what was it? I'm losing it here.

All right, let's see if we get it back. I was gonna ask, actually, uh, let's see where to go. Okay, um, in regards to just your work specifically, where does somebody start?

The Art of Impossible is the new book, is the first time I've turned this into a how-to. This is the work we've been doing at the Flow Research Collective for a while. We're a research and training organization. And on the training side, we work with everybody from kind of the US Special Forces and professional athletes to CEOs of Fortune 100 companies to insurance brokers from Iowa and soccer moms from Indiana. Louisiana. So, it's a huge spectrum. It's about 1,000 people a month we're training, so we have good data sets on this. We're very good at it. And all that, the how-to side of it is in The Art of Impossible. It's the first time I've written an actual peak performance primer. It's a blueprint that anybody can use to level up their game. That's what it was designed for. If you're interested in flow and action sports and what happened in this great era of possible, that's in my book, "The Rise of Superman." If you're more interested in these questions of other altered states of consciousness, that's "Stealing Fire." And then, there's a shit ton of other books, but we'll stop there.

Oh, go ahead.

Oh, one thing I just want to give your listeners is if you want more flow in your life and you just want a place to start, if you go to www.flowblocker.com, so there are 6 the main blockers of flow that people fall prey to. And most people tend that there's a major one that tends to stand between them and more flow. We just built a diagnostic and it's free. Anybody could take it. It's out there at flowblocker.com as well. So wait, wait, one final thing because I just want to come off something before I said it. You asked a question about flow and exercise and things like that. Where this shit is getting really cool and where we don't have answers is, for example, I'm a huge weightlifting fan. I would much rather train aerobically by actually going out and skiing or mountain biking or whatever. You'll never catch me on the StairMaster. You always catch me going up the mountain with my dogs, but I love lifting weights. I think lifting weights is a really good precursor for flow because of how it tends to deactivate the prefrontal frontal cortex, et cetera, et cetera. And just in the way that we're starting to see that aerobic exercise is good for certain kinds of cognition and strength training is good for certain kinds of cognition, we may find that different kinds of training leads to better, worse, or different kinds of flow in that sort of stuff. This is really sort of at the edge of where our knowledge is right now, but I think that's sort of coming. And I think we'll have, like, if you ask me And if you have me back in 3 or 4 years and ask me the question again, I'll probably have a much more interesting, cool answer for you guys.

Yeah.

When you mentioned the title of your book, the question came back to me because, you know, you mentioned that anxiety is a blocker for flow and obviously the art of impossible or the, the impossible is this massive goal that you think is impossible and makes you anxious.

So with that, makes you anxious, man.

Exactly.

So, um, yeah, no, let me Let me talk about what I mean by that. The book is really about lessons learned from people who have gone after capital I impossible, that which has never been done, for sure. It is meant to be applied by anybody who's interested in what I would call small I impossible. Small I impossible is that which you think is impossible for you. This could be, for me, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, blue-collar steel mill town in the '70s. I wanted to be I want to be a writer. It was like I woke up one day. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know how you became a writer. It was like I looked at my parents and I was like, "Mom, Dad, when I grow up, I want to be an elf." I mean, I had no idea how you did this. That's a small I impossible because there's no clear path between where I am and where I want to go. Statistically, not great odds of success, but there's a lot of small I impossibles in our lives: rising out of poverty, overcoming trauma, getting paid for what you love, becoming world class. If anything, it could be stamp collecting, right? Any of that, those are all small I impossibles. There are a lot of those. I always say that I think most of us, the first small I impossible most of us tackle is like back when you're 10, 11, 12 years old and you want that first kiss or first boyfriend, girlfriend or whatever, right? Like, I mean, you remember being that young and you were like, how are you going to solve that particular problem? Um, was a small I impossible. But I'd also like to point out So since there's no difference, there's just getting your biology to work for you rather than against you, if you want to be a little more productive at work on Monday, right, or a little more fulfilled in your life on Tuesday, or you are interested in going after small i impossible, or you are interested in going after capital I impossible, the toolkit is the same. That's what's broken down in The Art of Impossible. My point in calling it The Art of Impossible is in 30 years of studying this stuff, there's one overwhelming conclusion, which is all of us are hardwired for extraordinary. We're built to go after big challenges. We're actually built to rise to our full potential, our full capabilities. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist— this is not a new idea— he put it this way. He said, "Whatever a person can be, they must be." We're designed— and we know this, right? The agony of not living up to our full potential is hard for anybody to live with. We feel that tension inside ourselves. That's a persistent form of cognitive load. One of the reasons why passion, purpose, and all these things are also flow triggers is because when they're not aligned and they're not all pointing in the same direction, we're not living according to our values and our passions and our purposes, it weighs on us. It weighs on our brain and it exerts cognitive load on a moment-by-moment basis, which is why when you start lining those things up, you feel like the energy just levels just go up.

What are you working on at the moment? Is there something that really excites you? Are you working on a new book or new research?

Yeah. So I've been— I am starting to research a book on— my next book is going to be on intuition. And that's very exciting because I think it's the last uncharted wilderness of human performance. And so I'm really curious about that. But we have been working on— we, meaning me and some of the neuroscientists at the Flow Research Collective, are working on a paper on the neural dynamics of flow to the network level, and we're really focused on flow state onset. So earlier we started this conversation, I said, "Hey, there might be the fight response at the front end of a flow state." That's work that comes out of this paper and more. So we've been working on this for about a year. We're getting closer and closer to getting ready to publish it, but hopefully it'll be out this year. Really excited about that. About that work.

Great having you on the show today. Outstanding information. And where can people look up more stuff on you?

You, uh, you could find, uh, theartofimpossible.com is all about the book. Stephencotler.com if you're interested in the work we do at the Flow Research Collective and training with us. It's flowresearchcollective.com. Flowblocker.com will get you that diagnostic. And I think that's all I got.

Awesome.

Congratulations. Oh, thank you, gentlemen.

Looks like we lost Mark. He was just congratulating you. And yeah, just sincerely thank you for all the information today. We really appreciate it. Um, so yeah, thank you so much, man.

Yeah, thanks for the good thoughtful questions. I appreciate it. Likewise.

Thank you so much.

Have a great day. Be well, guys.

You as well.

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, 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 into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. 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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