The Art & Science Of Staying In Flow

The quality of the second half of our lives really depends on our ability to get into flow. And yet our ability to get into flow, for a number of reasons, diminishes over time. This is the engine that drives us forward. This is literally how we grow as humans. New levels of wisdom. All of this comes online in our 40s and our 50s. The reason I mentioned all this is I want people to understand how trainable flow is. When we're younger, we'll use risk as a flow trigger, right? It's dumb. It's dangerous. A really easy way to go to the hospital. If you're trying to learn something really risky, especially when there's physical consequences involved. This is actually one of the very first kind of lessons about flow and peak performance I ever learned is if you really want to maximize neurogenesis and stave off cognitive decline, and this is the last thing I'll say that I think is shocking, is 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 And together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Welcome back to another very special episode of the Soul Talk podcast, folks. I'm very excited about my, my guest today. I've had him on the Soul Talk podcast before. If you have not or don't know of him, we're going to put a link to his first interview in the show notes. So check that out. He's written, co-written, uh, one of my favorite books, Bold and Abundance, which are amazing. If you haven't checked those out, definitely take a read. But he has a new book. He's a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, and one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He has a new book which I'm very excited to explore and delve into. Uh, let me see if I get the pronunciation right. Na Country. That's an unusual title. Uh, the amazing Stephen Kotler, welcome to Soul Talk.

It is good to be back with you. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. So listen, since you've been on before, I just want to just jump right in with you, man, and, uh, and just explore and just pick your brain and your mind and Uh, what inspired the book? What inspired Gnar Country?

Gnar Country.

And, and what the hell does it mean for people that are wondering?

Right, so, uh, the— let me answer them in backwards order. I think, um, the book's about peak performance aging. Okay. Um, Gnar, uh, Gnar Country, the title— so Gnar is action sports slang. It's short for gnarly, and it's, it's a very specific meaning, which is it's any environment that is high in perceived risk and high in actual risk. So as it turns out, and country is any, you know, landscape or terrain, fictitious or real, in our country, you put them together, uh, it's a fairly good description of our later years. High in perceived risk, high in actual risk. And it turns out, well, after you dig under the hood of Peak Performance Aging, it's also a really good sort of description of the gritty mindset it takes to thrive in the second half of our life. So that's where the title comes from. The book about performance aging and what inspired it. So as you know from our last podcast, uh, the center of my, my world is the optimal state of consciousness and performance known as flow. And that's what we, we study the neurobiology of at the Flow Research Collective and train people, uh, in peak performance this way. And as it turns out, uh, not surprising anybody who's done flow research, but probably maybe a little surprising on the outside, uh, flow goes right through not only peak performance Peak Performance Aging. A short version would be that the quality of the second half of our lives really depends on, you know, on our ability to get into flow. Uh, and yet our ability to get into flow, for a number of reasons, diminishes over time. So that was one of the reasons, um, in a weird way, flow appears. And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, um, who coined the term flow, he did— this is where he spent the bulk of his career, is looking looking at flow as an engine, as a driver of adult development. Flow— on the other side of flow states, learning increases in flow. The state shows up when we're using our sort of skills to the max. So, so we're growing in flow. And, uh, on the other side of flow states, we're more complex, we're more adaptable. Wisdom increases, expertise increases. Flow is talked about as, as underpinning the path to mastery. Um, and all these things, uh, become really, really important for peak performance aging. But more importantly, Csikszentmihalyi argued this is, this is the engine that drives us forward. This is literally how we grow as humans. So flow is intimately sort of woven through the topic of peak performance aging. And so it was sort of a, just a natural extension of, of the work I was doing.

Can you just, like, for those listening, like, when you say flow, I think it might bring up different things for different people.

Yeah, let me— I'm sorry, I should define it.

What does it mean?

So Scientifically, it's how I defined it earlier. It's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, because that doesn't get us very far, the term refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, everything else just starts to fade away and disappear. Sense of self, self-consciousness, the voice in your head— those will diminish. Time is going to pass strangely. Occasionally you'll get that freeze-frame effect, maybe in a car crash. Much more frequently, just gets so sucked into what you're doing that 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 that's, that's what flow is. And flow is available to all of us, right? It's a built-in feature of being human. It's how we do peak performance. When you need to perform at your best, flow is sort of the state that's available to all of us. It becomes particularly important over time, um, for a bunch of different reasons that we can go into. But that, that's sort of flow in a nutshell.

Beautiful. Um, you know, you talked about, uh, sort of increasing one's peak performance capacity, uh, optimizing it as one ages. Um, I think so many of us, we have— there's a sort of built-in belief that as you get older, your peak performance goes down. But you seem to be challenging that.

And so, yeah, yeah, it's not just— it's not just me. So, um, let me give you the back— let me give you the backstory. Let me talk a little bit where the book came from and things like this. So, um, the place you have to start is with the traditional idea about aging, which is exactly what you just referenced. It's what I like to call the long, slow rot theory. This is the idea that all of our mental skills and all of our physical skills, they decline over time. There's nothing we can do to stop the slide. That was the dominant thinking on aging for the past 100 years. Over the past 20 years, almost all of that has been overturned. Wow. And not many people are aware of it. The new thinking, it's not that these skills don't decline over time. That's absolutely true. They do. It's that all of the skills we used to think decline over time, there's nothing we can do about it. We now know they're all use it or lose it skills. So if you never stop training these skills, you can hang on to them, you can advance them. Far later in life than anybody thought possible. In addition, in addition, in our 50s, late 40s, early 50s, there are substantial changes in how the brain processes information. There's some epigenetic changes, and as a result, we gain access to an actual legitimate suite of cognitive superpowers. Whole new levels of intelligence open up, whole new levels of creativity open up, empathy and wisdom. And wisdom is a definable neurobiological trait. It basically— shorthand for wisdom empathy, emotional intelligence, compassion, social intelligence. All those things get filed under wisdom, whereas expertise, which is the other side of that coin, is thought of as facts and tactics and strategies. And that's— so that's sort of the difference, um, in a sense. But wisdom, uh, new levels of wisdom, all this comes online in our 40s and our 50s. So, um, take that classic old paradigm with this, all which is like an old dog can't learn new tricks, right? Yeah. Turns out that according to all this research, no, no, no, old dogs should be better at learning than young dogs in certain situations. All of this work, including the work on flow, uh, all have been done in the lab. What I did is I said, okay, this is all true in the lab, and I've done some of this work, you know what I mean? Like, my lab has helped produce a little bit of this work as well. But if these things are true, I should be able in my 50s— I was 53 when I started the book— to be able to undertake and onboard really difficult, so-called impossible physical challenges late in my life. So what I did is I took all these ideas from a bunch of these whiz-bang fields about peak performance aging and about learning in the second half of our lives, and I put them together. I said, if these things are true, I should be able to learn how to park ski.

Wow.

In my 50s. Park skiing, as you know, right? It's the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps and on rails and wall rides and boxes. It's very intense, it's dangerous, it's very acrobatic. And for about 11 different biological reasons, it was considered totally impossible. Like, you try to learn it over— it's very difficult over 35, supposedly. Or by the time you get to 45, it's impossible. By the time you get to 50, 53, when I started my quest, you're just considered downright crazy. Like, there's no— like, nobody even thinks it's possible. And, um, using all these new ideas and these new learning theories, um, I I learned— I taught myself how to park ski, um, very, very, very quickly. Like, ridiculously quickly. Faster than I'd almost learned any— how to do anything. And I started it at zero, and I'm not a particularly good athlete, and I'm in my 50s, you know. And there was a lot of stuff working against me.

And—

but we took all this science and created a learning protocol, and the results were astounding. More astounding was I had a ski partner who's younger than me. He was actually a former sponsored athlete, a park skier, and but he had retired, family, 3 kids, job, career, and he came back to it. He was using the same protocol I was using and he went farther faster in a single season than he's gone. Like, it caught my attention because I've skied that, he's been a good friend of mine for a long time. I've skied with him for about 6 years and I've never seen him make this much progress. Like, it was, it was nuts. And then we said, okay, this is cool, but it's maybe the most radical experiment in peak performance aging run, but it's not yet data, right? We've like put 2 people through a study. So we came back the following season and took 17 older adults, wow, ages 29 to 68, and used the same protocol. And most of them, by the way, were like intermediate-level skiers or snowboarders when we put them in. And in 4 days on the mountain using the same protocol, all of them how to park ski and how to park snowboard, which is when we started to realize we were looking at something very, very real. That's the story that's— that was documented in our country, right, is the story of these kind of experiments. And it's, uh, you know, the The book is like, I say it's like one-third action adventure story, one-third peak performance aging primer, one-third radical science experiment.

Wow. I'm curious, you mentioned like protocol a few times. Like, what, what, what, what was your protocol?

Like, yeah, what did you do?

It was exercise, you know, brain training, supplements, you know, like Okay, give us some secrets.

All right, so this is, this is thick, but let's, um, for this to make sense, I have to tell you a little bit more about flow. Okay, a couple things you— we need to know about flow. The first thing to need when we talk about flow is underpinning peak performance. One of the things that gets massively amplified in flow is learning, and the re— there's— the reason is twofold. The first reason is Underneath flow, neurobiologically, which is right— the work I do on flow is where does it come from, the brain or the body— one of the things that happens as we move into the state is 5 of the most potent feel-good reward neurochemicals get released into our system. This flow is the only time all 5 show up at once. Quick shorthand: how does learning work in the brain? How does memory work in the brain? The more neurochemicals that show up during experience, better chance we have of moving that experience from short-term holding into long-term storage. Neurochemicals are multi-tools. They do lots of different things in the brain, one of the things they do is tag experiences. Very important, save for later. Which is why in studies run by neuroscientist Chris Berka at Advanced Brain Monitoring and the U.S. Department of Defense, soldiers in flow learn 240 to 500% faster than normal. So in flow, you get this huge spike in learning. Okay, that's backstory. Now let me tell you something else about flow that you need to know. Flow states have what we call triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow, right? If you're interested in more flow in your life, these triggers are your toolkit. There are about 26 or 27 that have been discovered. There's probably way more, but that's just what we've found. And they sound on the outside very, very different, but under the hood, what they all have in common is the following: flow follows focus. The state only arises when all of our attention's the right here, right now on the task at hand. That's what the triggers do. They drive attention into the present. They turn it up, they amplify attention. So two triggers that we have to talk about. One is what's known as the golden rule of flow. The most important of flow triggers, the challenge-skill balance. Flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand, to what we're doing, when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. You wanna stretch but not snap.

Right.

Now, if I were to put a number on the difference, for most of us it's about 5% difference. We're in this sweet spot when the challenge of what we're trying to do is about 5% greater than our skills. Here's the first thing we need to know about peak performance aging and flow over time. When I said one of our— one of the reasons our ability to access flow— flow is important for peak performance aging for a bunch of reasons that we haven't even talked about yet, um, learning being a big one, go more into it. One of the reasons our ability to get into flow over time diminishes is that because of allostatic load, which is a big fancy term that basically means the impact of stress over time on our psychology and our physiology, it shrinks this challenge-skill sweet spot. So what's like 5% when we're in our 20s and our 30s can shrink down to like 1% in our 40s and our 50s and our 60s. So if you're trying to get into flow the way you traditionally went into flow, you're going to push too hard, produce too much anxiety in your system, and end up blocking flow. So at the heart of the protocol that we used on the mountain First thing was go slow to go fast. Go 1 inch at a time. Start with something you can do, a physical thing you can do automatically with zero conscious interference and no fear almost 100% of the time. And then build on it with 1 little new motion at a time. And this isn't like deliberate practice. We're not trying to like, oh, I'm gonna just onboard this next thing. It's deliberate play. You wanna be playful about it. There are a bunch of reasons why, but I'm just sort of going through a little bit of the protocol. So that's part one is we were going very slow. We were starting with an established motor protocol. So in skiing and snowboarding this week, the second thing we did is we said, hey, we can break this, this very complicated skill set down into really basic movements. There's actually 8 basic movements involved in park, park skiing and riding. There's a slash, a grind, a 180, a 360, a shifty, skiing backwards or snowboarding backwards, jumping, a couple other things like that. We didn't— for myself, for other people, we didn't try to learn tricks. We tried to onboard these new movement patterns as safely as possible. When, for example, we were working with, uh, the, uh, the outside, the, the test, we knew everybody knew how to hockey stop. Hockey stop is when you throw skis or snowboards sideways to stop. If you're a beginner, you learn how to hockey stop. But if I raise your hockey stop by 10 degrees and you do it on a slight raised snow berm, that's actually a grind, or depending on how you put your hips, where you put your hips, a slash. So we knew everybody had a hockey stop, and here was that 1 inch at a time, that first thing we could start them on. Now the next thing you need to know is that creativity, when we link ideas together cognitively, or when we link new motor patterns together physically, this is pattern pattern recognition. The brain loves pattern recognition, pays a ton of attention to it, drives focus. Whenever patterns connect in the brain, it releases dopamine. Dopamine is a pleasure drug, one of the drugs that shows up in flow, but it's also a focusing chemical. It's like when it's in our system, we're focused and excited in the thing in front of us. So here's the other thing we did. The goal wasn't let's teach these people how to learn tricks. For me, let's learn tricks. It was let's learn these new movement patterns because they allow me to creatively interpret the terrain. If I stack like 1 or 2 or 3 creative terrain interpretations, repetitions on a row, that is probably enough to drop me into flow. Once I'm in flow, performance goes through the roof, strength increases, stamina increases, fast twitch muscle response increases, pattern recognition, all this stuff I need for athletic performance. Once I'm in flow, that's when you start playing around with the tricks and it does the work for you. So that was sort of, it was a go slow to go fast. We did a couple other things. Differently. But at the core was these simple ideas, but they totally take advantage of our neurobiology, and they sort of make room for older adults in new ways. And the results are really spectacular. So that's part of the protocol. There was a lot. Obviously, you don't go— let me— the other thing I just want to say is—

can I just ask one piece of clarification before you go on? Because it's fascinating. So you're stacking going slow to go fast, breaking things up. So just to clarify, like flow, it's not like— I'm not hearing that it's some state, magical state you go into in the very beginning. Like before you even start, you kind of access this flow state, then you go and perform. You know, because flow can seem so mystical and, and it is so.

Yeah. So here's, here's the thing that's worth understanding. At the Flow Research Collective, we work with neuro— we, we use neurobiology, right? And the reason neurobiology matters so much is that psychology is very individual, right? It's, it, it's shaped by personality, nature, nurture. So like the psychological triggers for flow are very different for each of us. But at a neurobiological level, right? Dopamine, right? We just talked about it. Same things create dopamine, right? Once you get down to the neurobiology, that's shared by everyone. We train people at The Collective in 130 countries, right? We're the largest neuroscience-based peak performance training company in the world. Train people in 130 countries, tens of thousands of people a month. We work with everybody from kind of ordinary, you know, everyday citizens to pro athletes, members of the U.S. Special Forces. We work with companies, Facebook, Accenture, Audi, the U.S. Air Force, the San Francisco Police Department, on and on and on. Um, the reason I mentioned all this is I want people to understand how trainable flow is. Between all these people, we measure everything, right? Pre and post. On average, after like an 8-week training— and our trainings are intense, you go through it with a PhD psychologist or neuroscientist as a coach, there's a lot of work— this is It's not easy, but we see on average a 70 to 80% boost in flow on the other side of our trainings. This is a very trainable skill is my point. That's really worth sort of hammering home is we see this again and again and again. It's a very trainable skill once you sort of understand what you're doing. So that's really key, right? Where all humans are hardwired for peak performance and it's a very trainable skill. Critical, critical things. And yes, so what I always say is if you're trying to onboard something risky, right, if you're trying to learn something really risky, especially when there's physical consequences involved— I learned this, this is actually one of the very first kind of lessons about flow and peak performance I ever learned— is you don't try— so risk is a flow trigger. When we take risks, the brain produces dopamine. This is physical risks, emotional risks, social risks, intellectual risks, um, all risk is a flow trigger. When, especially with action sport athletes, or in general, when we're younger, we'll use risk as a flow trigger, right? It's dumb, it's dangerous, a really easy way to go to the hospital, right? Go— why would you— this was so that— why would you, like, you know, you do something dumb and dangerous if you're not performing at your best? So people who are better at this learn that things like, uh, novelty, complexity, unpredictability, and pattern recognition are all flow triggers as well. So for example, I'm on the ski mountain and I know I wanna go into the terrain park and learn some tricks. I'll start out early on by, take me to a novel part of the mountain. Let me go see something I've not seen before. 'Cause novelty starts producing a little bit of dopamine. And then, oh look, there are little side hits, right? Side hits are the, you know, the sides of the hill. And usually there's little ramps there. So start using those ramps, not to throw big tricks, but just to creatively interpret terrain features. Oh, look, that ramp looks like it's perfectly set up a 180, right? That's pattern recognition. That I do a handful of that stuff and then, okay, now I'm starting to move into flow. Now I go into the terrain park and try to learn that cork 540 or what, or whatever the much harder trick. We have a much better chance of success in when we're in flow. Um, in general anyways. Uh, and, uh, so that's part of the protocol. You know, when you asked about a part of the protocol, that's another thing we would do. There's a thing with—

you—

we used to see a lot of athletes do this, especially action sport athletes. They'll start off really— especially when you're younger, you start off with like the, take me to the double black diamond, let me— let's hit the cliff right out of the gate. Um, it's Usually that they're, they're trying to drop themselves into flow. It tends to backfire as a general rule, right? It doesn't make sense. We had a very specific— me and my ski partner— 4-run warm-up that we used, but that before we'd ever consider like doing anything dangerous. So there's a— we've already been on 4 runs about an hour, so we're like on the mountain for at least an hour. Before things are really ramping up or anything else like that for this very reason.

Wow. So you're saying if everyone follows those flow triggers, the novelty and these things that you're saying, like in their nervous system, like physiologically, they will start to move into flow.

So you have to know a couple— one other thing. Okay, here's the other— here's the other half. Flow triggers. You also have to know about the flow cycle, which is a map of the process, right? The triggers are your toolkit, but you have to know flow is not a binary. You're not in the zone or out of your— out of the zone. Flow's a 4-stage cycle. Struggle is the first phase. This is a loading phase. You're loading the brain with information. This is a very conscious phase. Flow is very unconscious. This is very conscious. You're thinking about what you're doing, and it feels frustrating. And actually, the more frustrated you get, Actually, the better. Second is a release phase. We can talk about why, but second is a release phase where you take your mind off the problem. Struggle, you're really thinking about it. Release, you want to take your mind out of the problem. This is low-grade physical activity tends to work best. This could be gardening. This could be going for a long walk in nature. This could be building model airplanes or something that just engages your body a little bit. I, I, when we were on the ski mountain, in and we wanted a release phase. Like, let's say I've been struggling in the terrain park, we would— there's again, we would use novel, we just go explore. Okay, let's go ski something not very radical, but it's in a new part of the mountain that we've not seen before. So like, that would be release. Third stage is flow. Flow is an energetically state— energetically expensive state to produce. So on the back end of that, there's a recovery phase. Wow. So you have to know where you are in the cycle. This is really the work that we do at the Flow Research Collective, right? Where are you in the cycle and what triggers are your best friend depending on where you are? Or if you're on the back end of a flow state, what's the best way to recover and prepare for the next struggle phase, right? So there's a lot there. I'll just pause and sort of unpack it.

Yeah, there's a lot there and there's a whole bunch, a whole tree of questions that have arisen. What I do want to ask is Before I ask about something about this, this cycle, for someone listening, and they might be going, but Stephen, I have no interest in skiing. I don't want to learn to ski. It's not an interest. So how can they— and they might just say, I just want to be in flow in my life, just in life.

So, okay, so I—

how can they—

we have— yeah, we've been talking about— we've been talking about skiing, which is why I've been giving you skiing I'll give you examples because it's from our country. Let's be really clear. Um, flow is available to anyone anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. We don't train up companies like Facebook and Accenture and Audi and Bain Capital because they want flow while skiing. Right. We train them because they want flow at work.

Yes.

And you want flow at work. So McKinsey, the business consultancy, did a 10-year study of top executives. They found on average top executives are 500% more productive in flow than out of flow. That's a step function worth a change in productivity. So flow at work is a, is a huge topic. And that's the bulk of the work we do at the Flow Research Collective is we train companies or we train CEOs or C-suite executives in flow. So that's at the heart of the work we do. That's where most people want flow. Action sports are packed with flow triggers. Yeah. So that's useful, but it doesn't— so let's just talk about, we've been talking about 3 different flow triggers or 4 different flow triggers. Let's put 'em in a work context. Let's take 'em outta skiing. So we talked about the challenge skills balance, we talked about novelty, we talked about risk. Yeah. And we talked about creativity. So let me, let me just give you a triple example, a couple of those. So I, My job, you know, as you can see from behind me, requires me to read a lot of neuroscience textbooks. And as you can imagine, they're thrilling, they're page-turners. I just can't put them down. So, and obviously retention really matters. So I want to read them in flow because learning gets jacked up 240 to 500%, right? So you want to learn and you want to do that in flow. So when, what I do is I wait till I have like 2 or 3 of those textbooks that I really need to read. And I will then usually, I like to rent a, get a hotel room with a balcony overlooking a really beautiful natural scene. And I will go there. And so reading is actually a very flowy activity. And one of the reasons is, especially if you're reading something that where you have a little bit of knowledge, you get pattern recognition, you connect ideas together. Oh, this new thing I learned connects to this old things. So that's going to happen automatically if I'm reading a neuroscience textbook, provided I'm interested enough, I can pay enough attention. So the novel environment— I go and I sit on the porch. Complete concentration is a flow trigger as well. So I'll sit on this porch. No, I'm in a foreign city, so nobody— like, nobody I know is around, right? I can't be interrupted. Turn my phone off. Um, so I've got complete concentration. I've manicured the environment. Now I've got the novelty of what I'm looking at. And usually, like, if you're looking at mountains or stars or that sort of stuff, you'll get some complexity as well. So I've got these things are, are priming my system for flow, and then I start reading and get a little bit of pattern recognition, and the combination drops me into flow. And I can usually get a tremendous amount done in like in, in 24 hours, 48 hours kind of thing. Um, so I find that's a really simple example of, of something work-wise. Uh, we talked a lot about the challenge-skills balance, right? Now this applies to anything. This applies to how you approach your work tasks, how you approach anything, right? You wanna push on your skills. You wanna stretch but not snap. Now let me put a little more information around this. For underachievers, shy, meek, people who have, you know, or older adults, right? Well, you gotta think about it. If you wanna think about the challenge-skill sweet spot emotionally, it's like in between boredom and anxiety. Boredom is there's not enough stimulation here. I'm not paying any attention. And anxiety, whoa, way too much, right? In between is the flow channel, the sweet spot. So, um, for people who are shy or makers, I said, or, you know, or older, you want to go slow, right? You want to, because, uh, 5% is a little tricky, or 1%, wherever it is, either A, you're just outside out of your comfort zone. So you got to let it get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I remember when I said in our country, kind of describes the gritty mindset needed to thrive in our later years.

Pardon the interruption, and thanks for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is, even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing at about half of your capacity, maybe even 10%. Now, even I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news when you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot. You've got a skill stack that people envy. It's why you earn what you earn. And yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day, reliably, consistently? What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, here's what we've found: you're evolutionary hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature.

All the best.

One of the reasons is this: you got to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Now, here's the flip side, and this is especially important as we age. Top performers, hard chargers, Type A types, they will take on tasks that are so much bigger, so much outside the challenge-skill sweet spot, because that's just how they're wired. And I said that the difference is about 5%, right? We pay the most attention to the task when the challenge is about 5% greater than our skill set. But a lot of Type A types, they'll take on challenges that are 30, 40, 50% greater just 'cause it keeps 'em awake. Now, couple things to know here. Those big challenges are really important. They're actually for, for motivation. Just by setting a high hard goal, we get about a 20, 25% boost in motivation. It's actually 11 to 25%. Mm-hmm. So you need that, but what you wanna do is chunk it down. So the thing that's in front of you, and this could be I'm learning a new ski trick, or this could be I'm writing you know, a report for work, it doesn't matter. You want to chunk it down so the challenge in front of you is just outside, right, 4 or 5%. So let me, I'll give you another example of this from my own life as a writer. So I, when I start a book, I try to write 500 words a day. 450 is about what I can write in my sleep, pretty much. But to get to 500 in the way I write, you usually have to transition between ideas. When you transition from one idea to the next as a writer, that's just about the hardest thing you have to do as a writer. So 500 words, uh, at the start of a book is challenging. I'm stretching but not snapping, right? Middle of the book, I know a little bit more of where I'm going, what I'm doing, is about 700, 800 words. End of a book, it's about 1,000. The two points here I want to make is this is a moving target. It's gonna change depending on like where you are. It's also gonna change if I, you know, you wake up tired or sick or you got in a fight with your spouse or your brother or any of those things, right? It's gonna shrink that sweet spot. So this changes day to day, moment to moment, but you just have to know that like over time because of allostatic load, it can shrink even further. So, It's a whole bunch of information, a whole bunch. I'll shut up now and see where you want to go.

Wow, it's a lot. I mean, really, it's a lot. I'm curious about— you talked about being in the flow state taking energy. Yeah, I, you know, my understanding was being in the flow state took less energy, but you're saying it takes more energy. And can you explain why and a bit about that? Is it possible to be in flow and like be effortless.

So, so you are right and wrong in a sense. So here's, here's— so when we are in flow, flow is often described as effortless energy. So where does the term flow come from? Because when Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow psychology, went around the world doing some of the initial research on this, who talked to people and be like, tell me about the times in your life when you felt your best and performed your best. That was the original research, and everybody said the same thing. Oh, when I'm at my best, I'm in this altered state of consciousness where everything, every decision, every action flows seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last. Flow is actually a phenomenal description of the state. It describes how the state makes us feel, and it talks about effortless effort. It's a Taoist term originally, effortless effort, but it has very much been absorbed by the flow world because that's how it it feels. Now, it is also important to point out that, like, one of the reasons it feels this way is, uh, pattern recognition. Our ability to link ideas together is turned way up in flow. The second thing is, on a physical discomfort thing, in flow, some of the neurochemicals that show up— we get anandamide and we get endorphins. Both those are very potent painkillers, usually potent painkillers. Endorphins— there are about 20 different endorphins, uh, in the body. The most potent, uh, the most common, not the most potent, most common, is 100 times more potent than medical morphine. Endorphins are internal opiates, by the way. They're in turn, they bond the same thing. So these are really potent painkillers. Um, uh, in fact, one of the things that you have to do as an athlete, um, it is in flow is you have to learn— it's always dangerous to try to perform when exhausted, especially in action sports, right? But if you're getting into flow regularly, you've got to need— so when I ski, I know if I'm underjumping my jumps, or if my turns are sliding a little bit, it's a sign that I'm exhausted. I might not actually know I'm exhausted because I'm in flow and I've got all this painkiller, right, flowing through my system. So I'm not as aware of it. And if I don't want to get hurt, right, that really sort of matters here. But energetically, flow is very high energy. The other thing is that some of the neurochemicals, so for example, dopamine and norepinephrine, two of the chemicals that show up in flow, we get dopamine at peak concentrations. We don't get norepinephrine, but either way, they have a shelf life in the brain, a maximum capacity of about 20 minutes. So why are TED Talks 20 minutes long? It's because dopamine and norepinephrine, which are your two principal focusing— I'm focused and excited and listening to you and really into what you're— they peak for 20 minutes.

Wow.

And right, and then they start to diminish, and serotonin shows up and flows also. And to rebuild some of these things, for example, serotonin, it's not just You need sleep, you need rest, but you also need for serotonin, sunlight, certain B vitamins, tryptophans. So see, so there's stuff we need to build back our neurochemical supply of some of these stuff. So on the back end of a flow state, there's a recovery phase. Yes. As I said, and most important about this recovery phase, flow, we talked about huge impact on learning. That's not entirely true. To really close— for that to happen, you also have to sleep 7-8 hours of deep delta wave sleep. If you don't get deep delta wave sleep at a full night's sleep after you learn something, the brain can't transfer it from short-term holding into long-term storage. So you'll learn it and then you'll forget it. So part of a high-flow lifestyle, uh, demands getting 7, 8 hours of sleep at night. That's sort of for peak performance, we call it one— it's one of the non-negotiables for peak performance. And this becomes, um, more important over time, right? For prioritizing sleep, uh, becomes more important, uh, in the second half of our life as well. Really, really sort of foundational peak performance and peak performance aging.

Are there any other things in this recovery, uh, phase? This is—

this recovery thing is something I think I I get to work on a bit because I, I'm often like very intensely focused, and then sometimes I take time to recovery, but sometimes I have to tell you, it's funny at the Flow Research Collective, um, this is one of the things we learned, uh, though we learned the, the hard way over time, uh, when we used to start training people at the collective, we would just start them off with flow training right off the bat. And, um, we started to figure out that people are so burned out, so exhausted from life in the modern world, that we can't— we actually have to start with sort of getting your nervous system in check and teaching you how to recover. So, um, there's two sides to this. One, there's, um, really, there's— the problem is this: there's passive recovery, which is what most of us do, right? We work a hard day, we come home, and we have some version of like TV and a beer or Netflix and a cocktail or that sort of stuff, and that's our chill out. That's, that's globally, right? That's the standard. That's where we're We're in a Muslim country. That's the standard chill out at the end of work methodology. And two problems here. One, it just doesn't work. So TV and a beer really doesn't work for two reasons. To recover, your brain has to be, it has to be in alpha state or deeper. So TV puts us in like a, so alpha is a brainwave. It's like daydreaming mode. It's rest, it's relaxed. When we're awake, when we're alert, the brain is in beta. It's a faster moving wave. When we're anxious, we're in high beta. It's a very fast moving wave. So here's something people don't know about TV. TV produces this feeling of, oh, I'm just chilling. But every time there's a quick cut, every time in all of modern television, all of movies, it's all these quick cuts from thing to thing to thing. So your brain, we evolved on the savanna, right? Whenever we see a quick cut or fast motion, your brain goes, oh shit, is that a predator? You don't notice consciously. You don't notice unconsciously. Your brain is going— it's chilling out, chilling out, chilling out, and jumping up to high beta every time there's this quick cut. It doesn't relax you at an internal recovery way. It's fake recovery. And alcohol, once you have more than 2 drinks— and if you're skinny, it could be under this, but for most of us it's about 2 drinks— it blocks REM sleep. It screws up REM sleep. It screws up delta wave sleep. So again, it screws up your sleep. So alcohol— and I'm not, by the way, I am not a teetotaler. I'm a fan of alcohol. I like bourbon. I like tequila. I like mezcal. I'm just telling you from a peak performance perspective, it's a bad recovery tool. And it's not— instead, what's a— what are good recovery tools? Active recovery tools. Epsom salt baths, saunas, Meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, a long walk in nature is a really good recovery tool. You want to take the next step up, you know, restorative yoga, foam rolling, massage. These are all active recovery tools and really, really critical to sort of reboot the flow cycle. Think about it just this way. So I said earlier that flow sits on this sweet spot between anxiety and boredom, right? Too much anxiety, too much cortisol, too much norepinephrine blocks flow and really rough on your system, right? Really, like, bad for you over time. So what we're trying to do in recovery is also, like, reset the nervous system as well.

Are there any, like, specific things— you talked about alcohol. Is there anything else that might be specific that people can sort of like literally immediately implement things that they should, you would say avoid these things if you really want to access flow, live in flow, or optimize peak performance, like avoid alcohol, avoid, you know, TV late. Are there any specific, obviously it's life, we're human beings, but is there anything you would say stay away from?

For peak performance in general, peak performance in general, peak performance aging, this is, this is even more important. I don't, so I'm not a big fan of dos and don'ts.

Yeah.

Okay. But what I will say is this, um, your, your phone is a flow blocker. It is. And from a peak performance aging perspective, it's a disaster. Like, it's bad when we're young, or as we get older, it's a freaking disaster. Social media as well. And so what I try to tell people with social media is The only good use of social media is either like staying in contact with long-lost friends and relatives, right? The communication aspect of it. And as a way to be creative. Creativity, um, especially for peak performance aging, creativity is built in. It's really required. And, uh, for flow, another flow trigger is immediate feedback. Right? This is another reason action sports are so great. You get immediate feedback, right? You either set the ski edge on top of the couloir or you're on like a face-first death slide to the bottom, right? In tennis, you hit the ball, it either goes in or goes out. That's immediate feedback. So immediate feedback is great for flow. Just by the way, to put this in a work context, this is— so anybody works in software, the agile movement in software is about the same thing. The agile movement in software is um, was a movement. It was a product development idea which was— so that it used to be email, right? Old email program. You go back to the '90s, you buy a new email program, it was like 200 features. It was super clunky and thick and there was— did everything. And then Gmail comes along and they're like, no, no, we've got an agile process. We're going to introduce it with 4 features and then we're going to do these fast development loops. We're going to put it out with 4 features, we're going to talk to our customers, figure out exactly what they like, didn't like, what else they want, and then we're going Build 2.0 and 3.0, and right? So that's fast feedback. It gets— Agile was introduced on the consumer side because it gives you faster development cycles. On the developer side, it gives you immediate feedback, and flow follows focus. And when feedback is immediate, you don't have to wonder how you're doing. You know, you've got the answer right there. Somebody gave it to you, right? So what I say with social media, the only time social media is useful is for feedback from creativity. So it's a great place to sort of like do that and stay in touch. Doing it for any other reason is sort of a disaster. So there aren't really dos and don'ts. Everybody's really individual. You know, alcohol for blocking recovery for like, I think it's got its place at like everything else. Abusing it can be problematic for flow over time. Abusing is a bad word. yeah, you know, different, difficult word. I don't know why, but I don't even know if I could put it. What does that mean?

I don't know. Were there any, um, like, in your peak performance, uh, for aging research and your own experimentation, was there anything that you did or you came across that surprised you?

Oh yeah.

Oh, I didn't expect this was anything to do with—

yeah. So let me, let me give you peak performance aging in a single sentence. Now, a lot of the things in the sentence do double duty as flow triggers. So we've been talking about flow is critical for peak performance aging. I can really talk about why if you want, but peak performance aging, if you want to rock till you drop, you want to regularly engage in challenging social and creative activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. That is literally the secret to peak performance aging. You asked about something surprising. Did you see any supplements or biohacking or any of the things you thought that peak performance aging would come down to in that sentence? Peak performance aging has these huge psychological interventions. That's what we know. That's what shocked me. What shocked me is I'm not new to the idea of a mind-body connection. This is at the heart of my field. I've been there for 30 years. But when you actually start peeling back the hood on peak performance aging and looking at the mind-body connection here, it's shockingly potent. Let me just give you a couple of examples. So one, aging is sort of a fact of life. Old, it's a mindset. And that mindset can show up as early as like age 20, 25, depending on how we live our lives. The minute the voice in your head starts saying things like, you're too old for this shit, chances are you've started to develop the mindset old. There's a bunch of biology and why it happens and where it comes from, but it's dangerous. And what do I mean by that? So We know, 50 years of data tells us this, it's one of the most well-established facts, that a positive mindset towards aging, meaning I think the days ahead of me, and mind you, the day you could be 22 and saying, I think the days ahead of me, right? Like, this is, there's no age bracket here. This is just, right? I think the days ahead of me. I think the second half of my life is filled with thrilling possibilities. I think my best days are ahead of me. It's a positive mindset towards aging. Yeah, people often want to say peak performance aging, where do I start? Start by fixing your damn mindset. Why? It translates to an extra 7.5 years of healthy longevity.

Wow.

7.5 years. So you could be morbidly obese and have a shitty mindset towards aging. If you want to live longer, better to change your mindset than it is to lose weight. Another one of those is the power of social contact. So maintaining strong social relationships, it's critical for peak performance at any age for a lot of different reasons. It keeps our nervous system very healthy, basically. But as we age, it really matters. Um, and this is another one of those things— you, 7 to 8 years of healthy life extension if we have complex and robust, uh, interpersonal social relationships. So like, the first thing that was shocking to me was how tight was the mind-body connection. The second thing, um, I think that was so— well, the second thing that was so shocking to me is the use it or lose it stuff that we talked about at the top of the hour. So, you know, we all— strength declines over time, stamina declines, all these things we grew up— the world I grew up in, all these things declined over time. So like, you know, let's take a really— let's take a physical example and then take a cognitive example. It's wild. So on the physical side, let's take VO2 max, which is upper aerobic threshold, right? And this was one of these things that like, this was a hammer. Hammer that the, uh, cynics used to beat the longevity, uh, science and the peak performance aging people with. Because everybody knows VO2 max starts declining when we're 25, and it really starts to fall off a cliff at 50, and you're screwed by the end of your life. This was standard thinking. We knew it, blah blah. And then this weird thing started happening where in ultra-marathoning and in like these really long races, they started to see 70 and 80-year-olds 50 and 60-year-olds, and this didn't make any sense to anybody. And they were doing it consistently. So then this researcher came along and said, okay, well, let's look at the VO2 max of like triathletes in their 80s, octogenarian triathletes, right? Nobody had ever looked before. People who had been like running, and these weren't lifetime runners, but they had been running for usually since their 50s, running, swimming, biking since their 50s. So they had about 3 decades of it. And they realized they had the health, the VO2 max of a healthy 35-year-old. Year old.

Wow.

So the old idea, it falls off a cliff. It does fall off a cliff starting at 25. It diminishes by 50. It does fall off a cliff. But if you keep training it, right, by using regular bursts of high-intensity training— that's how you train VO2 max— um, you can basically, into your late 80s, have the health of VO2 max of a healthy 35-year-old. So the, uh, we do the same thing with cognitive decline and This is another reason flow matters so much for cognitive decline. It's interesting. So in studies they'll find they can like, you know, they'll test cognitive function, a lot of people who have, you know, they'll be scoring off the charts in their 80s and 90s and their hundreds in cognitive function. And they show no cognitive decline, no dementia, no Alzheimer's, and they'll die and they'll autopsy their brain and they'll realize their brain is filled with Alzheimer's dementia. They've got all these tangles and plaques, yet they had none of the symptoms. And even when tested on batteries of tests, test, right? So what is going on? And it turns out, um, this whole sentence I gave you is, is the best way to do this, but expertise and wisdom are neuroprotective against cognitive decline. And so you— exactly, you asked like, what's shocking? So turns out most cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer's, it's the prefrontal cortex, part of your brain that's right behind your forehead. This is the part of the brain, it's the newest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective, it's the most susceptible to damage. And so if you want to offset that damage, you have to build up what's known as a cognitive reserve. This is expertise and wisdom. And why is this? When we learn either hard skills or soft skills, right? Expertise is facts and skills and tactics and strategies, and wisdom is the emotional intelligence and the empathy and all that stuff. Both of them form incredibly diffuse, robust, and redundant networks across the prefrontal cortex. Its redundancy is built in. So the more skills we add, right? And the interesting thing, and this is the last thing I'll say that I think is shocking, is, uh, peak performance aging starts young. So when it comes to, like, when you talk to all the experts, interventions at any age matter. But when you talk to the experts who kind of made these discoveries about expertise and wisdom, they all say the same thing: start early. Like, you know what I mean? Start embodying skills and wisdom this early on in your life. In fact, there's this crazy study, Yaakov Stern, who's at Columbia. Leisure activities impact cognitive reserve, right? And it's cumulative. So he did this crazy study where he found that older adults, for every additional— and he was talking about like socializing with friends, doing some kind of intellectual puzzle solving. There were like 3 or 4 categories like that. Nothing really fancy. You gain an additional 8% of cognitive reserve. So every reading, 8%, doing crossword puzzles another 8%, learning to ski, learning to sing, learning to dance. And so it's cumulative, builds on each other. And so obviously how you start, you know, onboarding stuff in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s and 50s really matters to how, how deep and robust these are. This is why flow— one of the reasons flow is so important to peak performance aging— flow automatically advances wisdom and expertise and mastery. So when we're in flow, learning is, all these things are happening. So in a sense, one of the ways you sort of know you've done enough to sort of preserve your brain over time, you can sort of, it's hard to measure expertise and wisdom, but you can track how many flow states you're getting into. So that's, we've sort of come full circle.

Full circle. Um, can you just, uh, repeat the sentence about peak performance?

Yeah, just, I just want you to just like define that because it was— yeah, let me break it down for you. Okay, so, and it's— there's 3 parts of this sentence and I'll just take them apart. To rock till we drop, you want to regularly engage in challenging, creative, and social activities. So we talked about challenging, this is the challenge skill sweet spot, right? Like, this is about getting into flow. Creative, um, is also a flow trigger. But it turns out that when we think creatively, um, as I mentioned earlier, when we're in our 50s, we get these new cognitive superpowers. Creative thinking is what unlocks them. So we don't get— this access isn't guaranteed. We have to use creativity to sort of gain access to them. And then social, we talked about the importance of that, right? And so that's challenging, creative, social. Dynamic deliberate play is the second part. Dynamic Dynamic is— I talked about all the physical skills, the use-it-or-lose-it skills. Well, there's actually 5 categories: strength, stamina, flexibility, agility, and balance. Dynamic is any activity that's all 5 at once. Bonus: when we engage in dynamic activities, besides we're training up all the lose-it-or-lose-it skills, dynamic activities, when we have to combine like strength and coordination in the same skill, it boosts, uh, the birth of new neurons in the brain. So if you want to protect against Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline, you want new neurons. Coordination activities are particularly good at forcing the brain to birth new neurons. So dynamic, deliberate play is— deliberate practice is the, you know, repetition with incremental advancement. Deliberate play is repetition without repetition. And it turns out deliberate play is great for developing expertise, but in limited sort of skills. Like if you're trying to become a great concert violinist, deliberate— there's some deliberate play that matters. Or mathematician— there's areas of all skill acquisition where deliberate play matters. But really, deliberate play outperforms deliberate practice. I inverted that. Deliberate practice is better for like learning how to play the violin. But for most of us in most circumstances, we just get farther faster with deliberate play. There's less shame, there's less self-consciousness, there's more space, and there's a whole bunch of reasons. So dynamic deliberate play and then novel outdoor environments. We talked about novelty, it's a flow trigger. Outdoor environments are important for a couple of reasons. Um, one, uh, when we are in nature, it lowers stress levels, and their stress and inflammation is one of the major causes of aging. So anything that lowers stress levels is really important. Plus, if you want neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, right, most of that in the adult brain takes place in the hippocampus. Hippocampus. Hippocampus is a part of the brain that does long-term memory, but it also does location, place cells, grid cells. These are all in the hippocampus. Why? Because it's really important, right? Whenever something— whenever we get a reward— oh, where they were here, we found a ripe fruit tree, right? For hunter-gatherers, we found a ripe fruit tree. The brain wants to know where are we. This is critical to survival. The hippocampus locks that in. So peak performance is all about use, getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Peak Performance Aging is the same thing, just applied to the challenges of aging. And here's a great example: if you really want to maximize neurogenesis and stave off cognitive decline, have emotionally charged experiences in novel outdoor environments. Um, that is, that is using the brain the way it's been designed to use. So what do you end up with? More new neurons, more new neural networks, much greater protection against cognitive decline. So that's that whole sentence But the one thing I want to end on, because this is— you asked for surprising things and this ties it up in a bundle— don't sleep on the physical stuff. The reason is this: the single most important correlate for peak performance aging, for longevity, it's actually leg strength. Thigh muscle, thigh muscle mass inversely correlates with mortality. There's a bunch of different reasons, uh, actually. And if you want to preserve cognitive function, Leg strength also matters, hugely important. Some of it has to do with bone density. Our bones, we don't, most people don't think about it this way, but our brains run on minerals, calcium, sodium, potassium. Where do you think they're stored? The bones are the mineral storehouse for the body and the brain. And actually when we break bones apart, that's one of the only things that can cross blood-brain barrier for this reason. Where are the largest bones in the human body? The legs. So if you want to preserve cognitive function, one of the things you want to do is preserve bone density in your legs.

I go on and on and on, but, um, wow, Stephen, uh, I feel like you've given us a little mini masterclass code to peak performance aging. Um, I really appreciate— you've packed so much into this conversation in a short period of time, um, and I'm super inspired one thing I'm taking away, I hope everyone is also taking lots of notes. Aging is a fact, but old is a mindset. And I'm hoping that this conversation has inspired everyone listening in to shift your mindset around aging, to see the possibilities for peak performance as you age. What's the best way people can find out about you, your work, obviously your book, Now Country? I'm excited to dive into it myself. So I'll be getting it. I want to encourage everyone, get the book.

Uh, yeah, the book's awesome. So book narcountry.com. So this is how it's spelled. And the cool thing is, um, we were running a presale campaign. The book's out. Um, we've decided to extend it a little while longer. You can get $1,750 worth of free peak performance training tools, uh, if you order. You can get Nar Country anywhere, right? Any bookstore. But if you go to narcountry.com and order through us. There's a bunch of free stuff that, uh, we're still available. Yeah, it's still available. We're gonna keep it. We're gonna keep— people loved it. And, um, they just— and, and we got such positive feedback on it that we've decided to run that for a little bit longer. Um, if you're interested in training with the Flow Research Collective or learning more about our classes and the work we do, um, one-stop shopping is— excuse me for the cheesy URL— getmoreflow.com.

Com.

Um, well, it— people remember it. And like, I was— we tried all the other ones, nobody could remember it because it got complicated. getmoreflow.com, go there, you can sign up for a free hour-long coaching call with a member of my staff. They'll tell you about our trainings, but really they're just going to break down your life and figure out where you are and how you can get more flow. Um, and, and they'll talk about our trainings. And we have, um, we have both our standard flow training and then we have our are forever danger, which is called Zero to Dangerous. And then we have Forever Dangerous with our peak performance aging training because they fold— one folds into the other. Um, that's their Flow Research Collective is the name of the organization. Stephencollar.com is all things me. And, uh, I think that's it.

Awesome, Stephen. Thank you. We're going to put all of the links in the show notes. getmoreflow.com, narcountry.com. And yeah, yesterday, folks, I was checking out the narcountry.com website site. And like, seriously, the value of the bonuses that I saw that were like— Stephen was giving away course upon course upon course upon course. It was really amazing. So check out the book, check out the website, check out Stephen's work. Stephen, once again, thank you so much. Everyone.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now your time is priceless. And in terms of dollars and sense. It's valuable. Whether you're an entrepreneur, executive, or a manager, you're paid well, but when you're short on time, you end up in a tailspin. Now, if you want to get more out of less time, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how. Because you know that when you manage your time well, you can move mountains. But your time is like sand slipping between your fingers. Your to-do list grows, but time doesn't slow. You'd think that with less time, you'd work harder or smarter, but a scarcity of seconds makes you prone to procrastinate, which makes things worse. But you can end this time trouble right now. Here's how: make more out of less through flow. You don't actually need more time, you already have enough. What it takes is switching to a higher gear of performance to get more out of that time. Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. There's a peak state you can tap into with reliability. It's called flow, or being in the zone. It's an optimal state of consciousness where feel your best and perform your best. And in it, time seems to slow down. Now, if you want to access flow consistently and reliably, just go to getmoreflow.com. Our protocols come from research out of Harvard, DARPA, and Stanford and others. Our founder, Stephen Kotler's work has been praised by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, and Vishen Lakhiani. We draw from over 25 years of flow science to train a wide range of peak performers from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives. Because our training is grounded in neurobiology, it works for everyone. So if you're interested, just go to getmoreflow.com for all the details. That's getmoreflow.com.

All the best.

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