WHAT IS THE FLOW STATE & WHY IS IT YOUR NEXT LIFE ALTERING REALITY?
This week the club met once again in another bohemian coffee shop and ruminated over what it would be to live a multifold life where you peaked in everything you did — What if we all live in Flow?
As we went over Kotler’s talks and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s take on this altered state, things started getting even more intriguing.
What Is Flow & Why Do You Need To Get Into It ASAP
There are times in life when you hear of a concept you have never encountered thus far and that then happens to change your entire life as you know it, therefore. Flow is one of those.
It's often described as the possibility of possibilities —the feeling of ‘feeling alive’, an out of body & altered state experience — the next level of life —ecstasy- a thoroughly mystical experience. That which rewards you the highest of life — the most optimized state of total happiness, creativity, and success.
In addition to all of the aforementioned, FLOW is also the one thing common between top performers, the most successful companies, the noteworthy innovators, the best of sportsmen, and the happiest people of the world.
And that’s exactly why you need to hear about FLOW ASAP!
So what does it take to get into ‘the zone’?
DECONSTRUCTING FLOW — The 8 components Of Flow State
- Clarity of goal — Knowing the exact task hand
- Intense focus — Clearing both internal and external distractions is vital. Right here, right now!
- A merging of action and awareness — “being and doing become one”
- A loss of sense of self
- Effortlessness & ease
- Presence of mastery and challenge
- Timelessness
- Autotelic experience or the fact that the process itself is intrinsically rewarding
Flow State Triggers
Why Do You Need To Understand & Adopt The State Of Flow?
This, in turn, boils down to two simple questions -
- Do you want to be happy?
- Do you want to be successful?
And if you happened to answer a resounding ‘yes’ to both, well the world of flow awaits you with its infinite wisdom.
Flow is fundamental to the wellbeing and overall life satisfaction. In fact, the happiest & most successful people, the universal problem solvers and the most creative entrepreneurs are the people with the most flow in their lives.
The ‘deep now’ is also known to completely reset your nervous system, solving the most complex of neurobiological issues like depression & anxiety.
What Happens When You Enter A State Of Flow?
We feel our best & we perform our best when we are in flow. We experience rapt attention & total absorption — the state of deep now — where everything else just disappears —with zero sense of self— a world where action & awareness merge.
This is a magical ‘altered state of consciousness’ with a radical impact on performance. Seamless, perfectly & effortless— we are in a state of near-perfect high-speed creative decision making here.
The psychological state:
This happens somewhere in the emerging point of mastery and complexity, where an individual is highly skilled and highly challenged, while the task still seems doable, the next state to arousal and control.
Flow happens where ‘mastery’ meets ‘challenge’ & ‘complexity’.
The Neuroscience State: Flow Is The Most Addictive State To Be Experienced
When an individual enters flow, a state called hypofrontality occurs where the sense of judgement, morality, time, logic, fears, anxieties vanish. All of this shuts down. And stress floods out.
‘Sense of self’, which is essentially a neural network, that's also the sense of here & now, shuts down too. And thus, we experience true liberation.
The shutting down of non- critical parts — being plunged into the ‘deep now’ happens as the prefrontal cortex gets shut down — due to which the sense of time also disappears. Meanwhile, risk & creativity significantly go up.
Interestingly, the state of flow has five of the most potent neurochemicals —norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin, and endorphins, present. These are also performance-enhancing & pleasure chemicals —(making you make you faster, stronger, quicker)making it the most addictive state & the only state which has all the five of them present.
No wonder, this is the only state where both mental & physical performance go through the roof!
History Of Flow
While the state was first notices in 1871, it came to light when Mihaly chanced upon it sometime in 1975.
Mihai chanced upon ‘Flow’ when he redirected his attention to psychology while looking for a cure to the post-world war trauma. He realized, that even though the material wealth amassed increased multifold over time, after a certain threshold, the level of human happiness stopped multiplying, which made delve deeper into what constituted human happiness & success.
He took a look at successful and creative people — what made their life meaningful and happy?
A pianist described music as though it was something almost external flowing through him. Life in a more concentrated form — they create an altered reality that didn’t exist before. His state of identity almost disappeared. Existence is suspended & he felt that his hand almost moves by itself.
FLOW As A Performance Catalyst
The performance pyramid, as we know it, rests on motivation, creativity & learning — all the three of which are at their most heightened states during Flow.
Creativity is when the brain takes in all the info, connects & creates new ideas, and thus starts mind and life-shifting realities. Flow & the neurochemicals released during surround this. It's not just in the moment, flow trains your brain to think more creatively in the long haul.
Flow can amplify creativity between 400–700%
Learning
In reality, you’re tuned to process 110 bits of info per second but in flow you’re using all of it and surpassing the threshold — hence your learning and performance go up 1000% and you set yourself free.
Learning rate increases by 470% as the learning time is nearly halved.
More attention and consumption of info leads to faster connections and out of the box thinking. Finally, when we realize all of this, risk-taking goes up.
McKinsey Study shows that people are 500% more productive in FLOW.
Flow In The Corporate Culture
The most optimal work has flowed at its heart — all top organizations of the world are in need of a Flow DNA.
In fact, every life-altering success & paradigm-shifting reality has a flow state at heart.
Essentially, if we increase flow by 15%, the overall workplace productivity doubles. Just let that sink in!
The Flow Revolution
We live in the best of times when it comes to the flow revolution. The state of flow is now at what is possibly its most accessible form, thanks to revolutionary leaps in the following:
- Psychology — We have expressed and we have unlimited possibilities for who we want to be. We have the freedom to be.
- Neurobiology — We map & measure experiences & understand them
- Pharmacology — On-demand states of consciousness through pharma is a possibility
- Technology — Scaling these states is possible through tech. ‘Communitas’ — or humongous group flow like the ones we observe in huge rock concerts is a result of amplified technology
Everyone Can Access The Flow State
Not just creators and artists, the vast majority of people using their brains to do knowledge-based work like — coding, writing, engineering — can avail this & change their lives.
Would you like to get into the flow?
What kind of impossible challenges would you solve with the flow state?
Beyond Flow: Finding Feracity
“If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away.”
― Steven Kotler
Ferocity is the other side of FLOW — The best of the best in the world all have this ‘extra gear’ -this ’magic trick’. They line up their intrinsic motivation to FLOW. In doing so, the greatest of world leaders automatically and instantaneously rise to the challenge — solving all problems without thinking or realizing — on an almost autopilot mode.
Due to the human tendencies’ of hinking and anxiety — most of us don’t live up to full potential — hardwired for mediocrity & survival. This is not when insane awesomeness — ‘Holy shit! This is amazing!’ happens! A flow state aligned with grit and purpose can take us there.
