Steven Kotler breaks down how to enter flow states: use immediate feedback to shorten the gap between action and results, do intense exercise and recovery, practice box breathing daily to train focus, and read 25-50 pages of nonfiction outside your field to boost pattern recognition.
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One of Flo's triggers is known as immediate feedback. This is one of the reasons action adventure sport athletes had such an advantage. Because right, immediate feedback, you either set your ski edge on that hill or you're on a face first death slide to the bottom of the coir, right? It's immediate feedback. So in writing, what I discovered, for example, is editors don't do a whole hell of a lot of editing. They're really busy. So you get them once, twice, you've written books, you know what it's like, right? They jump in five months in and they give you some notes and they, you see them again in five months and maybe, you know what I mean, it's not what you need. So I have, I have a guy on my staff, Michael, who you've met, who is my editor, and he reads almost everything I've wrote, usually two or three times a week. And he gives me what I call the minimal feedback for flow. So I have discovered for me and my writing. So my watchwords are never boring, never confusing and never arrogant. And I've discovered, by the way, when I make certain kinds of errors, for example, if my writing is really fancy, I'm using lots of fancy language in my writing. Usually what that means is. So that would be an example of my writing is arrogant, right? I'm using. And what that means is I haven't done enough homework, I haven't done enough research. So I'm trying to cover up what is a lack of knowledge with fancy writing. And sometimes I don't even notice, I don't know that I haven't done enough research. I only know it when the fancy writing shows up. But I have to usually have somebody point it out to me. So I figured out that my as a writer, the minimal feedback or flow that I need is, is it boring, is it arrogant or is it confusing? And so every couple of days Michael reads whatever it is that I'm working on and he answers those questions for me. That's the minimal feedback or flow. So what I tell people is in your work situations, obviously you can't get that kind of feedback from bosses very often. People are too busy. Find a feedback buddy. Find somebody to work with in your life who can give you that kind of immediate feedback. Because if it's quarterly reviews or yearly reviews, it's not enough to generate flow. You want us really shrink down those feedback cycles as much as possible. I'm a big believer in exercise. I exercise at least six days a week and usually for a couple of hours minimum. Like I'll go for an hour long hike with my dogs in the morning, then I'll go to the gym in the afternoon or twice a week. For me, I need action sports. I have to hurl myself down mountains at high speeds. I have. So there's a recovery period. Recovery is really important for flow. So I have a infrared sauna in my house that I use and I do box breathing every, every day in the infrared sauna. Explain box breathing. Box breathing is just, it's a kind of mindfulness. It's called box breathing because there's four sides to it. So you inhale, let's say it's five seconds, inhale for five seconds, hold it for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, hold it for five seconds and box breathing, and then you do it for six seconds and seven seconds. And the reason I find box breathing with the Navy seals train, it's the mindfulness technique they use. And the reason is not only is it a good. So any kind of mindfulness training is training focus. So it's all going to help with flow, right? All meditation training is going to help drive flow. In the end. I like box breathing because it's two things. So when you exhale all the air from your lungs and you hold your breath, which is what you do on one side of that of the box, right? You exhale and then you hold your breath. So if you do that for over seven seconds, for most people, it depends how good their lungs are. It automatically induces a fight or flight response, right? Your brain goes, holy crap, there's no air in your lungs. Panic. And what you have to do is you have to learn to focus through the panic, right? And which is one of the secrets, especially in action sports or some of the martial arts, like learning to focus through the panic is how you achieve flow. It's a really good flow skill. And it also. So you're doubly down regulated the nervous system with box breathing. The other thing is it's a complicated enough system system that if you're. Even if you hate meditation and mindfulness, anybody can learn to do it because there's enough going on. There's some challenge there, right? So I'm a big believer in that. And the last thing I do that, the last kind of flow tip I'm going to give you guys. So another of flow's triggers is creativity. Flow not only amplifies creativity, creativity triggers flow. And what really triggers flow is pattern recognition, the linking of ideas together. Okay? So if you want to create pattern recognition, you actually have to feed the brain ideas. And the problem in the modern world is that most of us tend to specialize. And when you specialize right. The ideas you're getting, there's not enough distance between the incoming ideas and older ideas to create pattern recognition. So I tell people who are really interested in this, you should read 25 to 50 pages a day, preferably in a book. And there are reasons I'm not going to go into it here, here, but nonfiction, outside your core area, in something that you're curious about and just interested about. And what you're doing is you're loading the pattern recognition system. You're giving yourself kind of the basic necessities for pattern recognition. And if you don't do that, you can't make those connections. So you're denying yourself some of the flow that you can have SA.
