Purpose and Flow, with Steven Kotler

 

In this episode:

 

Steven

It would be unbelievable if somebody was listening to this had never been into flow. Everybody is hard wired for flow. It’s built in to human beings and it’s how we perform at our best.

 

Intro

Fred

Viktor Frankl once wrote that “what man needs is not a tensionless state but rather to strive and struggle for some goal worthy of him.”

 

Recent studies in positive psychology have confirmed this insight: as good as it feels to be on vacation for a few days, or weeks or even months, ultimately humans need more than that – we need to channel our energy toward something we enjoy, we need to build and create things that we believe make some kind of positive contribution somewhere.

 

So how do we best bring bigger, more deeply meaningful goals into our daily lives?

 

This is a relatively new, and fascinating area of study psychologists call engagement, and which many folks interested in peak performance also know as flow

 

My guest in this special episode of the podcast, 12-time bestselling author Steven Kotler, has probably done more to popularize flow states and explain how everyone can access them than anyone in the world

 

Steven defines flow as a state where we “feel our best and perform our best” – when we’re completely immersed in a meaningful goal and playing toward it at the edge of our ability – studies show a lot of things happen when we access flow – time seems to stand still, our sense of ego dissolves, and we become capable of things we previously thought were impossible

 

In addition to his books, Steven also founded the Flow Research Collective, where he’s partnered with leading research organizations to study the neuroscience and practical psychology of flow states – breaking down what exactly happens during flow states in simple, science-backed steps anyone can follow.

 

I took most of their courses, and they’ve quietly revamped my life and career – I actually got to meet Steven in person just a couple of months ago, at a Flow for Writers workshop in LA, and I really can’t recommend their work enough for anyone seeking more enjoyment, better performance, and also fewer burnouts, as proper rest and recuperation is a big emphasis for them

 

It was a great experience getting to pick Steven’s brain after years of learning from him as an author, researcher and coach – we discussed how he recovered from a debilitating 3-year bout with Lyme disease with the help of flow (and surfing more specifically), what the 26 known flow triggers have in common, why every human being, not just peak performers, is “wired for flow”, how we can bring this amazing tool into our lives in very simple ways, and a lot more

 

I hope you all enjoy it, this is my conversation with Steven Kotler

 

 

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS FLOW?

 

Fred

So, we just got started. This is just, you know, the purpose of this is just to share, again, a lot of your insights and your ideas about flow states. Again, which I’ve been, I’ve been a student of for many, many years. So obviously a big part of your life’s work has been spreading this knowledge and the tools to help people, gain better access to flow states, which can be used, obviously, for peak performance, but also leads to more well-being, more life satisfaction. I got introduced to your work, by Aubrey Marcus and Kyle Kingsbury at On It. And for these guys out there, The Rise of Superman was more than a cult book; it was like a religious book. And so I definitely want to get into some of the mechanics around flow states with you.

 

Before that, I’m really interested and curious and hearing you talk a little bit about how you got started in this journey. So you started your career as an extreme sports reporter, and you lived this very, very active lifestyle: surfing, travelling, and writing for major magazines. And then one day at 30 years old, you contract Lyme disease, which you described as the worst flu you’ve ever had crossed with paranoid schizophrenia. And it’s the whole gamut of symptoms, hallucinations, hearing voices. I mean, just horrific. And you’re afflicted with this condition for three years, which I can only imagine how devastating that must have been for someone as active physically and mentally as you. And then a friend of yours shows up to your door and forces you to go surfing, and you initially push back at this because you can’t even imagine, walking around. But she keeps pushing and you finally accept to go surfing. And then when you get on the board in the water, muscle memory takes over and you just snap into a different state, a different dimension, that you would later discover is a flow experience. And ultimately you go back and you keep having these experiences and you eventually recover from Lyme disease. Now, flow states are usually associated to peak performance or to optimal experiences, but it seems that flow also has therapeutic qualities to it. I mean, do you feel that you were healed by flow in some measure, and how does that work?

 

Steven

It’s a great question. And it’s actually… so I had sort of seen the other half of the equation, how flow, covering action sports in my 20s, all these athletes were using flow to take themselves all the way up to Superman. I didn’t know you could go from like, seriously subpar, you know, sick for three years kind of thing… back to normal. And that was where, like, it sort of started with me, like, what the hell is going on? And the short version, which was true then and still true today, is two things are important here. First, Lyme is an autoimmune condition, and an autoimmune conditions are essentially a nervous system gone haywire. So as we transition into flow, there is a global release of nitric oxide it’s a gas, it’s signaling molecules everywhere in the body. And it pushes stress hormones out of our system.

 

So this is a really big deal for Lyme for a couple of reasons. One, with a nervous system gone haywire, when you push the stress hormones back to out of your system, the system can reset to normal. And if you’ve been sick with an autoimmune condition for a really long time, your body doesn’t know where normal is. So it can’t do homeostasis because it’s been bounced, it’s ping-ponged around for so long. So just by like flushing out the stress hormones, getting rid of the inflammation, your body can reset and all the neurochemicals that underpin flow sort of the big five reward chemicals – endorphins, dopamine and serotonin, etc. – they’ve all – they significantly boost the immune system. So that was known back when I had my experience, and it was mostly work done by Herbert Benson at Harvard, who sort of- he did some of the foundational work on. Well, that’s the relaxation response. When the stress hormones get flushed out of your system. It happens in meditation, happens in flow, it happens, in a number of other altered states of consciousness. He did the foundational work as a cardiologist at Harvard. He figured that out. He sort of mapped it out, and worked on the chemistry and all this was known, 2000 or so when I wrote that book.

 

What is more recent and equally cool, for example, is- we now- flow increases our sense of control over our lives. We start to, you know, we start to feel more powerful, more self confident, self-esteem, all that stuff tends to go up. And we also get a sense mastery in flow, pushing our skills. We use our skills to the utmost to get into the state. So we grow, and you know, our skills expand and increases mastery. Those are two of the most positive emotions that we can get and what we now know in the field that is neuroimmunology, which is essentially the fancy way of saying the mind-body connection, but it’s the field that studies it. Those two feelings, master and control, significantly increase the number of T cells and killer T cells in our body. So these are major infection fighters, you know, anti-aging things. And so all that stuff, also, on top of everything I’ve been telling you about this is these are more recent discoveries. And then there’s also everything that we now know comes off just like the, well, you mentioned that flow amplifies well-being and happiness, and there’s a whole bunch of sort of neuroimmunological effects that just spin-off of that as well. So, our knowledge of the mechanism has greatly expanded. It’s interesting. Herb Benson, years ago, and I think in his book The Breakout Principle, which is his name for flow, said, hey, I think this process is biology is what underpins all cases of spontaneous healing or a lot of them. And I don’t know if I would go that far, but it is very interesting in the, in the literature, if you start sort of following those cases and looking for mechanism, you tend to see things like flow showing up much more frequently.

 

Fred

It’s so interesting how phenomena that would have been considered like new-agey and woowoo back in the day today when we sort of study them neurochemically. And you talk about a neurochemical cascade that flow creates. Right? You see these performance benefits, but you also see these healing benefits sort of come in. It’s kind of very fascinating how neuroscience and neurochemistry is bringing all those insights to bear.

 

Steven

Let me put it in slightly different context, because this is really interesting. So we, myself, Doctor Michael Mannino, who’s a neuroscientist at the Flow Research Collective, like Scott Kelso, who’s the godfather of coordination dynamics. And Richard Huskey, who’s is one of the world’s leading experts on the neural dynamics of flow – we’ve got a new paper coming out, hopefully, knock on wood, we have one reviewer to go, but I think it’s coming out in the next couple of weeks – on, what happens in the brain during the first two seconds of flow – so the neural dynamics and neurobiology of flow state onset – and one of the things that we do in the paper is look at a hypothetical thought experiment that compares flow and trauma. And there are interestingly flip sides to this – so it – one experience goes into flow and the other experience goes in traumatic stress, that could cause PTSD – and it doesn’t like, that seems a little weird to say it, but I could walk you through some of the thinking around you, you would get it. My point is that the new work on flow, where it’s getting really interesting is things like PTSD and that… So when we start talking about like therapeutic benefits, it’s starting to get really interesting in that realm as well because we’re starting to really understand, hey, I just had a high risk experience. Sometimes that experience becomes flow, right? Like and sometimes it becomes trauma. And it’s very this line. Right? It can go either way. And so the question was, well why does it go one way this time and the other way this time? And so what the insights give us is both like predictive markers for the onset of flow, which is cool because we’ve never had them before. But it also gives us a way to say, hey, if this is flow and it’s sort of the opposite of post-traumatic stress disorder, you know, how do we use one to take care of the other?

 

Fred

Interesting. Because risk is one of the flow triggers that you talk about. So okay, let’s take a little step back because flow experiences are obviously, super remarkable for anybody who sort of studies them even a little bit and getting into flow for a lot of people is… they don’t know where to start. It’s like, what is it? So okay, so they’ve got these common elements, right? Like you have to have clear goals, full concentration on the task at hand, immediate feedback, a little bit of risk, pushing yourself past your comfort zone. So these there’s these sort of classic flow triggers. But again for a lot of people it just sounds very mystical and distant like they don’t know where to start. So how would you go about…?

 

Steven

Yeah. Let’s simplify it. We add in a little science and right we’ll start there. So flow states, as you pointed out, have triggers preconditions that lead to more flow. 22 have been discovered. There’s probably way more, but that’s, that’s what, actually is probably I think it’s like 24 now. Because in the new group flow triggers just got added. But there’s about 24 that we’ve discovered, there’s way more, as I said, they all have one thing in common. So, flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our attention’s on right here, right now on the task at hand. Right? That’s critical for flow. And that’s what all the triggers do. That’s what they have in common. They all drive attention into the now into the current moment.

 

So how do they do this? They do it one of three ways. If you want to increase tense your ability to pay attention in the brain, you’re either talking about producing the neurochemical dopamine, or the neurochemical called norepinephrine are usually both together dopamine or norepinephrine. So dopamine underpins for and norepinephrine underpins curiosity, for example. What do you get when you’re a little curious? You’re paying attention to the thing that’s in front of you. You’re not, so you’re not fighting it, right? You actually turn up the crank on dopamine and norepinephrine give somebody a lot of that. That’s actually the cocktail known as romantic love. Think about when you’re falling in love. You can’t stop paying attention to the person you fall in love with. You can’t stop thinking about them. That’s essentially what all the triggers do. So yes, there’s risk and novelty and complexity and unpredictability and pattern recognition. And what are they like… Okay, that’s a bunch of big words… and they all produce dopamine and norepinephrine. A couple of the other triggers… So you mentioned clear goals for example, or immediate feedback.

 

So those triggers lower cognitive load or perceived cognitive load – which are actually two different things – but either way, cognitive load’s all the crap you’re trying to pay attention to at any one time. And if I lighten your cognitive load, what happens is it liberates energy. And the brain, immediately repurposes that energy for paying attention to the present moment. So when you have clear goals, for example, I know what I’m doing right now. I know what I’m supposed to be doing, I know what a win looks like, I know what I’m doing next, I know where to put my attention, I don’t have to think about it, I don’t have to… I can totally focus on the now. That helps us maintain focus. It also lowers like we know what we’re doing. So we calm down a little bit, right? And the brain can repurpose that energy. So that’s sort of what all the triggers have in common.

 

And the truth of the matter is different people are more susceptible to different triggers in different environments, different times of their life, you know, etc., etc., etc.. So there’s no one toolkit. There’s just sort of get familiar with all 24 of them and how they work and then apply them. And if you can stack multiple triggers in a row, great. And like there’s some some things that are sort of a little more common-sensical but are a little harder to figure out, and let me give you an action sport example. So when athletes are younger, they love using risk as a flow trigger. So I’m just going to jump off that cliff on my snowboard, and I’m going to be in flow. And you know, and sooner or later, you discover that that’s like a fast trip to the hospital. You don’t do something dumb and dangerous until you’re in a state of optimal performance and performing your best, that’s when you want to try the risky, right? So don’t use risk to flow trigger at the front end trying to get into flow. You want to use risk when you’re in flow to lengthen the state because you’re already performing at your best at the front end of flow. So risk is this big burst of dopamine, right? Because you get courage in and amplifies fast twitch muscle, muscle response, all these things that you need to deal with to take risk. But creativity, so when the brain links ideas together right? That’s creativity. And we get rewarded with a little squirt of dopamine, from that pattern recognition. Right?

 

And so think about that same snowboarder can go down to the mountain and start creatively interpreting terrain features. Maybe they’re not hitting the big jump for that bit, but oh, there’s a little side one over there. And I bet I could throw 180. Oh, I can throw a snow grind over there each time you do that creative interpretation. “Oh, my body could do this with the terrain,” that’s pattern recognition. So you just 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 of those things in a row, suddenly you find yourself in a flow state without having to use all the risk and I’ll give you that same thing I just gave… I’m not allowed to talk about which program does this because they’re secretive, but, I worked with a college a bit, of a fairly decent-sized college football program, and they had this question of, hey, can I get our players into flow in warmups? Because the idea was they’re going to get hurt less in practice if they’re in flow. That was the whole idea is would it work? We didn’t know. So like… and they always like, this particular program started their practice with like a two lap run, run a couple like, it was a mile for like or two miles for the faster players. And it was like two laps for the like centers and whatever. And I said, okay, that’s fine, but let’s just get it off the track and into the woods and have them run through the woods and creatively interpret the landscape, right? If there’s a little hill, they run off the side of the hill and they just banked turns, and maybe they can throw like jump and throw 180s, 360s, is literally like mimicking the stupid shit you would do on their run. And it seemed really dumb. There was a little, like there was resistance.

 

Fred

Was it the novelty factor?

 

Steven

In the beginning it was just, we’re going to take it off road and go into the woods. And that was so novel. It worked. And then as the novelty started wearing off, we layered in more stuff and it… and it worked, like the players, got into flow more what the coaches noticed, the injury rate went down. It wasn’t as big as we thought, but what really went up was learning rates. This flow amplifies learning significantly. And so players in flow at the start of practice, like suddenly the window was open far longer for learning. And that was really great. So this can also… you could do the same thing. I do it cognitively when I start writing. I don’t like facing a blank page. So I edit what I wrote the day before, because editing is about finding little patterns, and I edit a couple sentences in around. Now I got a little bit of dopamine, so when I get to the blank page, I’m already closer to flow. I’ve got a lot of focus. I’m excited. I don’t have to, you know, muscle so much to pay attention. It’s a better experience, a higher chance of getting into flow. So those are, you know, just a handful of ideas. I hope that clarified it.

 

Fred

Yeah, I mean absolutely it’s unbelievable that the levels that there are in this flow game. And let’s take somebody that listens to this topic and feels like I’ve never felt that. I’ve never felt a  flow state. Is it fair to say that it would be maybe more productive for them to start with something that they’re very curious about, or something that they’re already interested in?

 

Steven

So let me and maybe not so let me stop you there. Cause this is what you have. So there’s two things we need to talk about. One, what is it? What is flow? Like, I mean, how do you know if you’re in flow or not? And two, it’s not a singular experience. And that’s the problem I would it would be unbelievable if somebody was listening to this had never been into flow. Everybody is hard wired for flow. It’s built in to human beings and it’s how we perform at our best. So if anybody has been in a situation where they’ve consistently performed the best over time, they’ve probably been in flow, but they might not have recognized it because what most people, when they talk about flow, they’re actually talking about an experience known as macro flow.

 

And so let me back in. When we define flow as some scientists and psychologists and neuroscientists and whatever, from a psychological perspective, we know there are six phenomenological characteristics of flow. Big fancy word that means this is how the state makes you feel. Complete concentration on the task. There’s a merger of action and awareness. There’s the- a vanishing of your sense of self. Your sense of self gets quiet, right? Time passes strangely. Sometimes it’ll slow down you to freeze frame. In fact, when you’re in a car crash much more frequently, it speeds up, and a couple hours go by in a couple of minutes, and we don’t experience peak performance on the inside. Instead, we feel two things. One, we have this incredible sense of control. “Oh my God, I can control things I can’t normally control.” This could be a basketball player right in the zone, and suddenly the hoop looks as big as a hula hoop, right? And they cannot miss. This could be me. Five in the morning on a Monday. Suddenly like I’m in flow and the words are doing things the words don’t normally do. At five in the morning on Monday, right? Like, or it could be business man or businesswoman leading a meeting. Right? And the meeting’s going really well, and the questions are sort of like one is following the next, following the next, the ideas are bouncing off the wall… It’s sort of a great brainstorming session. That’s group flow and action too. And you feel this sense of, oh my God, I’m steering this meeting so well. So that’s the sense of control. And finally flow is autotelic. A fancy way of saying this state is unbelievably euphoric. It’s joyous, it’s addictive, it’s so pleasurable. Once we experience flow, we can’t wait to do more (of) the thing that drops us in the flow because it’s that pleasurable. And as you mentioned earlier, like people, rate flow is the most pleasurable experience on Earth, and consistently. It’s… and it’s because nobody ever has a bad time in a flow state. So even all those other like hedonic pleasures – sex, drugs, whatever – anybody who’s played around in those worlds knows that goes bad stuff. It is. It goes good, right? Oh, yeah. Nobody has a bad time in a flow state. It doesn’t go bad.

 

Fred

That hedonic adaptation to which you don’t seem like with flow, you just want more of the experience and it kind of builds up. There’s that well-being build up as opposed to hedonic states, which, yeah, you sort of keep chasing for, for that high and sort of get like a diminishing returns over time.

 

Steven

Csikszentmihalyi once said that like flow is an addiction, and it’s like any, it’s like other addictions except flows and addiction that leads forward into the future, because you’re always pushing your skills to the utmost and you’re learning and growing. Is it unlike other addictions, drugs, sex, gambling, whatever that tend to lead backwards? Right? Same mechanisms. One leads forwards, the other tends to lead backwards. Or at least sideways.

 

Fred

Yeah, right. Very interesting.

 

Steven

So there’s some people who are just absolutely phenomenal managing that addictions and it works for them. And, you know, it sort of leads them sideways and you got to like, there’s a lot in the modern world that is essentially addiction management flow too, like flow is an addictive state. You have to be careful with it in certain ways. In the same way, like it’s, you know, it requires some adult responsibility ethic.

 

Fred

You’re right. And I think Csikszentmihalyi also talks about, an experience that makes the self more complex. So it makes you more differentiated over time.

 

Steven

Oh, you’ve done your homework.

 

Fred

A little bit, a little bit.

 

Steven

Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of people don’t know this. Csikszentmihalyi did a lot of work on adult development and a lot of work on sort of evolution, adaptation and things like that. And he has argued essentially that flow is the mechanism for adult development. How we grow up, we grow up through flow. To put it differently, there’s an evolutionary theory of flow. There’s a bunch of ideas about how flow first emerged, but what kept it going and why is it everywhere? It’s not just humans, mammals could get into- most mammals get into flow. So like, what did it-? One of the things that we talk about or that’s been talked about, is- comes off of what you just said- is flow, they think is a signal for mastery. So at an internal level, if you’re trying to like steer an organism safely through hostile environment, it’s a good idea to like know when you’ve mastered certain skills. Like, do I know how to fight? Because if you don’t know how to fight, you don’t want to put your body in certain environments, especially, you know, before the advent of modern medicine, right? Like for sure. So having a signal of, oh, I’ve really mastered this is actually, adaptively beneficial. So, well, there’s a whole bunch of thinking that says one of the reasons flow is stuck around for so long and becomes so powerful is that it’s the signal for mastery. Oh, you’ve learned this thing. You can trust that you’ve got it. And it may not even be… so like it may be a conscious signal, but it’s probably a much more powerful signal to the adaptive unconscious. Right. So at an unconscious level, 95% of the brain that’s writing stuff behind the scenes, it knows you got this, which is, which is sort of a really big deal.

 

 

CHAPTER 2: CALIBRATING CHALLENGES

 

Fred

And it’s another connection between what you say about how flow is, you know, we’re sort of wired for flow. It’s connected to our adaptive capabilities. It’s evolutionarily obviously very useful. I want to talk to you about a concept, that, that you write a lot about very, very interestingly, the challenge to scale ratio. So I grew up in the 80s and 90s and our ultimate hero growing up was Michael Jordan. And I think we superficially understood Jordan’s mentality at the time as this sort of very hard driving mentality. Always push yourself. I mean, today people talk about hustle culture. You have a lot of this mentality in the corporate world, that 80 hour weeks, work-till-you-drop, basically push as hard as you can for as long as you can. I think, again, I think this is an oversimplification of what masters do, but it’s the way that it’s understood by a lot of people, and the challenge of skill, balancing the challenge of skill ratio. And another concept you talk about sort of seem to point towards a much trickier balance. So, in flow, it turns out that we sometimes use a lot less of the brain and not more. There’s also a relaxation or a release phase leading to peak performance, this lowering of brain activity. So it’s not so simple as just pushing yourself to the brink and just always doing more. Can you talk a little bit about why that is? Why we actually need a trickier balance between pushing ourselves super hard and also relaxing to kind of create that optimal experience.

 

Steven

So inadvertently, there’s like four questions sort of mashed together. So we’re going to- and I’m going to say this out loud so you could remind me because in five minutes when I go, “where the hell was I? And what did I need to say?” Okay, let’s start with the challenge-skills balance, and then let’s go to the flow cycle. Because there’s two parts to this. But I want to start actually with something funny because people don’t realize this about Jordan. So. Play versus comp like the image of Jordan is like fierce competition called like the Kobe, the Mamba, you know? Right. All that stuff. And by the way, I’m wired that way, on a lot of levels, and I totally get it. It’s really funny because I’ll listen to, like, Kobe’s speeches, and I will think to myself, two things. I will think, oh, he sounds a little bit like you. And two, he sounds fucking crazy, right? Like you hear it out loud. You’re like…

 

Fred

Yeah.

 

Steven

Well, that just sounds crazy, right? But on the inside it doesn’t feel crazy. And the reason is the challenge skills-balance with- even before we get there. So, play is universal in mammals. And there are biological, physiological, telltale signs of play in animals. We always see the play bow, right? You put your chest to the ground. Dogs do this all the time. All- it goes across species. Humans sort of… We just lower our posture a little. But one of the signs that you are playing in play is really flowy, is that you have your tongue hanging out of your mouth. That’s always a sign that you’re playing.

 

Fred

Wow.

 

Steven

Right?

 

Fred

Okay.

 

Steven

It’s universal in mammals. And the thing about Jordan, like whatever you want to say about like, the Mamba mentality, I’m bringing out whatever, uh-uh. Your facial expression says you’re playing. And so however hard you’re going, you’re playing, you’re out there playing. And that’s flowy as hell. And it’s worth pointing that out because nobody ever talks about it. But like there’s no- think about- why would you play basketball with your tongue sticking out of your mouth. There’s no reason to do it unless it was actually… So that is worth pointing out. Besides the point or beside challenge-skills balance… Flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand. When that challenge of the task slightly sees their skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap, right? And so the easiest way to talk about this is to put some numbers on it. And these are not real numbers.

 

So a bunch of years ago before he passed, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Godfather of flow psychology sat down with a Google mathematician and they said, can we put a number on the difference between challenge and skills? The back of the envelope calculation? This was not real. The number they came up with was 4%. We took that 4% and tried to play with it and tried to test it and ran a couple years’ worth of like… You can’t call them research yet because it was really hard to like, how do you map 4% exact? Like it was weird and hard and tricky and… But we found that it was deadly accurate, like as a metaphor at least. And what we found was 4% is like for if you’re shy or if you’re meek, if you’re timid, if you’re a little cautious, or if you’re any of those areas where that comes up in your personality, right? Like, you may not be a shy, timid person, but you may not like public speaking and suddenly you’re like… we could go to speak in public and suddenly you’re shy and timid. Whatever the case. Flow demands that you get comfortable being uncomfortable. You got to push slightly outside your safe spot. Hard charge and Type-A types will take on challenges that are 10, 20, 30, 40% bigger than their skill level just for like the thrill of it. And because it helps them pay attention. Right. I’m not saying don’t go after the big challenges. Those are actually great for motivation, but you gotta chunk it down to what’s right in front of you is slightly above your skill set, right? So you’re looking to steer back in that 4% sweet spot.

 

And here’s something that’s interesting. Most of my work in the past couple years has been on peak performance aging. And as we age, as unconscious fears sort of build up, you get injured, things go wrong, you start to build up some… that sweet spot may shrink even further. So what may be like 4% at 30 can get down to like 2% in your 50s. And especially like if you’re an athlete in your 50s, you’re used to pushing like 4 or 5% and pushing 2% doesn’t feel right because you’ve learned it one way, and now you have to shift it and you find yourself locked out of flow, and it’s because you’re actually pushing hard and if you back off more, you’ll get in. And the way I like to talk about it in flow, it’s often you got to go slow, to go fast. The next step out, and then I’ll shut up. So you question is, flow’s not a light switch, it’s not a binary. You’re not in the zone or out of the zone. It’s actually a four-stage process. And you got to move through each stage to get back into flow. And the first stage is a struggle phase. You’re loading the brain with information and it’s very, un-flow. Right. You talked about how the prefrontal cortex gets quiet and flow, in struggle, it’s super active. It’s trying to puzzle solve, it’s trying to learn stuff, acquiring skills and acquiring knowledge and preparing. Right. And you sort of want to bring yourself to the brink of total frustration.

 

Then you want to pause. You mentioned you like you want to relax. You want to chill, right? You want to take your mind off the problem. Flow requires you to, like, learn this stuff consciously and then pass it over to the subconscious, which is way more powerful and can do a lot of problem-solving, puzzle-solving, and learning for you. So you- to do that, you gotta take your mind off the problem. And so like low-grade physical activity is great here. This is why you hear so many people talking about long walks, right? I love walking my dogs for like this activity. Gardening works really, really well. You can work out, but you don’t want to exhaust the brain because what comes next is flow. So you just want to relax. This is, by the way, people have great ideas in the shower. Why? It’s because you struggle all day with the thing, and you come home and you jump into the shower. And it’s not exactly a flowy experience, but it’s got some of the flow triggers baked in, and it’s just enough to distract you that the-.

 

Suddenly the good ideas start popping and suddenly you find yourself in the front of like a cognitive flow state in the shower all of the sudden. Here’s the answer. Right? So that’s an experience a lot of us have. And then, on the back end, there’s a recovery phase. So you got to like flow’s neuro-biologically expensive to produce, it’s a heavy state. We use a lot of energy. So you got to chill out. There’s… And really if you want to really use flow to your advantage, you need deep delta wave sleep. Because a lot of learning takes place in flow. But until you get into deep delta wave sleep, have a good night’s sleep, you can’t turn it from short term memory into long-term storage. It won’t make that jump. You need sleep on the back end of a flow state, so you need an active recovery protocol and a lot of sleep.

 

I want to go back to something. We did a loop we left open earlier. Flow’s got these six conditions. You can be in microflow, which is when they show up, but they’re dialed down to like 1 or 2. So you said most of these people don’t even believe they’ve been in flow. They’ve all had the experience. They sit down to write like a quick emailed to the boss and like, you get so sucked into what you’re doing that an hour goes by and you look up, you’re like, oh my God, I wrote an essay. Maybe like, your sense of self and self-consciousness didn’t totally go away, but bodily awareness sure did. Because you pop back in to consciousness, you have to run to the bathroom because you hadn’t been aware of the fact that your bladder had been screaming at you for like 20 minutes. Right? And happens to all of us, all the time. The other end of the spectrum, macro-flow where it’s turned up to 11. You know, for a long time people thought these were mystical experiences or they didn’t know it was flow. They didn’t know what it was. And weird things happen in macro-flow. Time can slow down. You can have a sense of being one with everything you have out-of-body experiences. We understand all the neurobiology under where that comes from now, but it doesn’t change the fact that when you have those experiences, they’re wild, you know what I mean? I’m one of the leaders in the world on this stuff, but I have a deep flow experience… It still feels like a mystical experience.

 

Fred

Yeah.

 

Steven

Right? That doesn’t go away. That’s what makes it so wonderful.

 

 

CHAPTER 3: PURPOSE AND FLOW

 

Fred

It’s unbelievable how there’s all these, what I love in your work, there’s all these counterintuitive ideas like, you know, the release, the slowing down phase before you get. And I’ve started doing this in the sauna, for instance, like, I’m working on a problem, and then I go in the sauna, I just go into that meditative state, and then I’ll get ideas pop out that I can’t produce consciously when I’m just pushing myself. Right. So I’ve started having some of these experiences through your work. And another counterintuitive, concept in flow is that when people think about flow, they think about a me experience. They think about, I’m going to get into a flow state. And it’s clear that flow states are multi-dimensional, right? There’s a performance aspect. There’s a healing aspect, there’s engagement, but there’s also purpose. And in your fantastic book, The Art of Impossible, which is, really I couldn’t recommend highly enough. It’s just an unbelievably practical book. It’s in many senses, a new kind of book, because I feel like it’s a guide, but it’s just so well put together in narrative form as well, that that it just kind of works really, really nicely as a guide to sort of get people educated on how to access flow states. And one of things you write about in The Art of Impossible is that passion is selfish, right? And that to gain flow, it helps to connect our experience to a broader purpose beyond ourselves. Right? We need to go beyond just ego driven focus to achieve more flow. Why is that? From your perspective? Why is purpose so important to achieving flow?

 

Steven

So kinda back up one step, which is for peak performance, it’s hard, right? Peak performance is hard. So you need all the motivation you can get. And we humans come with five big giant motivators. And they’re – we’re engineer biologically, evolutionarily one builds into the next, builds in the next, builds in the next. So at the front end of the stack is curiosity. We talked about it like, little bit of focus for free. Curiosity is biologically designed to be built into passion. I talked about how that happens in The Art of Impossible. Once you have passion, passion is great. Big fire, right? But as you pointed out, it’s a fairly selfish experience. And, neuro-biologically, it’s norepinephrine and dopamine sort of turned up to the max. You can’t get anymore of those neurochemicals that give you more dopamine. At that point, I’ve got schizophrenia. And if I give you more norepinephrine, I’ve got mania or OCD or stuff like that. So you can’t- I can’t crank it up anymore. But what I have to do is I want to add in more reward chemicals. And the other reward chemicals that are available are all the social bonding chemicals. Oxytocin, serotonin and anandamide and up, excuse me? Oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. To do that, we are built to turn passion into purpose. So this is the thing that fires me up. How can I use the thing that fires me up to help the world? That move automatically gives you, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. These are all the social bonding chemicals.

 

And, you know, there’s, there’s a bunch of downstream benefits from that as well. We can talk about wisdom and empathy and things like that that come out of this. But from a motivation standpoint, oh my God. Like endorphins are pleasure drugs. There’s like 20 in the brain but like they’re opiates right? They’re internal version of external opiates like oxycodone and heroin and morphine and the most common endorphin in the brain, is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. So these are big highs, like, you’re talking about really big motivational drugs that, like, we know how addictive oxycodone is – there’s a plague of heroin or of oxycodone addiction in, you know, in the country right now – that we get internal versions, right, that are, that are really beneficial. And, you know, that’s the same chemical that underpins mother-child bonding. So it’s endorphins. In fact, you can treat separation distress in animals with non-addic- or in humans, by the way. And you can treat depression in humans, with non-addictive opiates for the same reason. And it takes care of a lot of it.

 

So, purpose. Well, it sounds really lofty from a neurobiological motivation. Oh my God, you get way more drugs, right? Like, if you way more fun drugs and pleasure drugs. A lot more motivation. And you also pay way more attention to it, right? If you’ve got curiosity turning into passion turning into purpose. Oh my God, are you paying attention to it? And what does that give you? That gives you a shitload of flow. So and those are the first three of the big five motivators. Then there’s autonomy, which is just the freedom to pursue your purpose, and mastery the skills to pursue it well. So those are you get all five of those going and, there’s a lot of drive and a ton of flow, which, as you know, boosts motivation even further. And what you’ve done is this is sort of this virtual feedback loop. There’s a little bit of goal-setting that needs to be layered in to take it the full step of the way, but, I’ll let people read The Art of Impossible for that one.

 

Fred

No, but I find it really interesting. Steven, I’d like to know what you think about this point. It’s almost like we’re evolutionarily designed or hardwired for us to take our performance to the ultimate level. It’s like we have to access that final door. We have to do things that will also help others in some way. Would you say that’s accurate?

 

Steven

What’s interesting is it goes a little farther than that in a really cool, weird ass way. And you mentioned this earlier and I don’t know if you’ve seen this, so in Optimal Experience, I think which is the book flow book that nobody reads. It’s a Csikszentmihalyi book that looked at the first ten years of flow research. So like 70 to 80, I think is what it was or 75 to 85. And obviously nobody goes back. You know, you have to be a total flow geek historian to go back. But Csikszentmihalyi wrote the opening, the closing essay, in it and if you put them two together, it’s sort of like the clearest look at like all the stuff he also felt about flow but didn’t put into all the other books. And he talks about how flow. It underpins wisdom, it expands empathy automatically, and wisdom is this actual psycho-physiological trait. And one of the cool things about wisdom, and this is what’s really neat, is it’s neuroprotective against cognitive decline. If you want to, like, make sure you’re not going to get dementia or Alzheimer’s as you age; you want three things to matter. You want to be an optimist as early as possible, like in your 20s you want to be optimistic. Also, what sort of regular access to expertise. You want to develop expertise. Because the way expertise forms in the brain and the neural networks that form, they’re impervious to cognitive decline and wisdom. So wisdom is all the like the social rules that like, it’s the unspoken processes and stuff that’s in between everything else. And, flow makes the learning of wisdom auto-telling itself. So flow becomes this sort of like engine of adult development that drives us forward and interestingly, protects us against cognitive decline in our later years, which is really neat. So like the more flow you get along the way, the more proof of expertise and wisdom you’re gaining along the way. The longer you’re going to be able to hold onto those skills, the longer you know to perform at your best into your later years, which is really cool. So very like closed biological system.

 

 

CHAPTER 4: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF WISDOM

 

Fred

It’s so cool. My brain would literally explode with questions and with wanting to go deeper, but I know our time is limited. I have one topic I really want to get to and you’ve touched on it, and that’s empathy. And first of all, that’s… I don’t want to minimize what you’ve just, laid down as knowledge from that, going back to like the original, book on Optimal Experience. It’s just so wow, the fact that, again, these concepts that we talked about in philosophy, like wisdom, can actually be, protective of our brains as we age. I mean, I find that just me just.

 

Steven

It’s even cooler, like this concept of wisdom. So Dilip Jeste, is at UC Santa Barbara. You can look it up if you want. J-E-S-T-E. He has broken down the neurobiology of wisdom. We know the exact brain areas that are active, that produce-

 

Fred

Wow

 

Steven

Produce the traits that we call wisdom. It’s really a cool field of study, but, and it’s very related to empathy. So, we know in flow empathy automatically increases and it happens because – so there’s a part of your brain, the temporoparietal junction. And this part of your brain does perspective. So when you see things from another person’s perspective, this part of your brain gets really active. When you have an out-of-body experience, by the way? Same part of the brain. Why? What is an out-of-body experience? It’s a radical shift in perspective. Essentially, like the first time I went skydiving, I had an out-of-body experience, jumped right out of the plane and jumped right out of my body and watched the whole thing take place. Why would that happen? Because the brain goes “Holy shit, you’ve just jumped out of an airplane. You could be dying. We have to solve this problem. Let’s radically shift your perspective because we’re out of ideas over here. Maybe you could see stuff that trip up here that saves your life right now.” That’s sort of what one of the things that happens in out-of-body.

 

Fred

It expanded consciousness, you describe it as a form of consciousness expansion.

 

Steven

Yeah. I mean, in a sense from a neurobiology perspective. And we sort of do it all the time. We see things from another perspective. Right? Like, we do all the other stuff. We just don’t realize the brain can do it physically as well. Right? But it can, and it does. That’s the same or portion of the brain that like does body position in space, which is also like what direction am I looking? Is what perspective am I taking? Right? So the body does all that stuff at the same place. When we are empathetic, when we like walk a mile in somebody’s moccasins or to use the cliche, that’s about the temporoparietal junction and as it gets more active and flow, we take on other people’s perspectives. And this is the same engine of adult development. This is one of the things that happens as adult development takes place, is we gain and it really starts to come alive in our 50s, 60s, because the brain starts to change in such a way to really support this.

 

But to bring it back, to flow, we’ve had the privilege, over the past couple of years, we the Flow Research Collective, with working with a bunch of different law enforcement organizations in America. And it’s interesting. And the reason that the folks at the top know because of what, you know, George Floyd, the social justice movement, empathy. If you can’t get more empathy into the police force, we’re going to have real problems. The cops themselves are dying for peak performance. They just want to be able to perform at the best and do their job. And some of them are really interested in empathy, and some of them, you know, have other feelings. But it doesn’t matter. We’re training them in flow and everybody sort of gets what they want. So I think that’s really neat.

 

And what I like about flow, you know, I’m a lifelong environmentalist and animal rights advocate and things like that. And flow doesn’t just increase empathy. It also increases empolot? ecological awareness, which is our ability to see, perceive and care about, feel empathy for the natural world. So you get like empathy for all people, but it’s also extends beyond the line of species into plants and animals and ecosystems. And from an environmental perspective, that’s phenomenal, like facing the, you know, the environmental challenges we now face. We need that. So, I, in a sense, those are the reasons I really, like, I intellectually – flow is a puzzle that I want to solve, and I like writing about it because I like making art. So like in a sense, those things are very, very selfish, the training stuff and I’m less interested. I would say that my altruism is usually about animals, like I want to help animals. I’m willing to help people and run the collective and do all that because what I get in the bargain is more empathy and more environmental awareness in the world. And that like that solves problems I’m trying to solve. So I think it’s a fair trade, right? The same trade that’s happening a lot for us. But I, you know, that’s sort of one of the reasons I started the Flow Research Collective. I wanted to do the training where I, you know, and I wanted to do it to scale. But one of the reasons I want to do it to scale is that I think it’s a better world, more empathy and more, you know, environmental awareness.

 

Fred

It’s unbelievable how these different perspectives merge when you start studying flow. And we think of empathy as like this pro-social thing or like being nice or being kind. And then there’s the peak performers. We like the-

 

Steven

Let me put all this in context for you, because it actually, yeah, there’s one big friend that will help here. Yeah. So, you know, you should as any skeptical, healthy minded human being, here are all the things flow expands. Right. Like you get empathy and ecological awareness and motivation, learning creativity and faster muscle responses and strength and like yeah, anybody should hear this list and be like, what the fuck? Like what  is that right. And so here’s the piece in the puzzle that is really useful. Flow is optimal performance. It’s all of us. See like why is flow ubiquitous and one of the reasons is it’s shaped by evolution. Now what is evolution shaped by? Evolution is the principle driver of evolution is scarcity of resources. When resources are scarce, you have two options. You can fight over the dwindling resources, right? Or you can flee to avoid being somebody else’s resources. Or you can get creative, get cooperative, get innovative, and make new resources. And so why does flow amplify all this stuff? It’s amplifying everything you need to fight or flee and get – right – or to get cooperative, get creative, get innovative, make new resources. That’s what’s being amplified because that’s the original driver.

 

Fred

And that that’s the link between, sort of performance.

 

Steven

I mean, like if you want to make new resources, you need empathy, right? If you don’t care about the people around you and you can’t see things from their perspective, it’s really hard to get cooperative and share resources and, you know, make, like, that approach really requires collaboration, cooperation, all the, you know, social skills that get amplified in flow too.

 

Fred

 

Unbelievable. Look, I want to be careful because my time dimension is becoming dilated and I want to respect yours. And so generally speaking, I don’t do promos or sponsorships at all on this podcast. It’s part of what I believe in, in terms of maintaining independence, avoiding conflicts of interest and so forth. But I just have to say personally that, your program Zero to Dangerous, has absolutely transformed my productive life, especially my burnouts. I used to drive so hard, Steven. I used to burn out 3 or 4 times a year. And so I know that you guys talk about the performance benefits. I’m like, “I’m performing fine. I just don’t want to burnout anymore.” But it also did improve my performance, as crazy as that sounds. I did not even believe in the notion that I’m going to perform as well if I’m not going to burnout. I just wanted to stop burning out, and I wanted to sort of align with my purpose a little bit more. But I ended up also getting the performance benefits, which is something that was really that I did not believe in. I said, “let’s try this out.” As a learner, I was interested in it. But, so, obviously the Art of Impossible, I believe, is an amazing place to start. but I also highly encourage people to look into Zero to Dangerous and your other online programs because they’re just absolutely game-changing when it comes to people’s productive lives and helping them align their productivity to their purpose and to experience more flow. What would you say is the best place for people to find you to get more information about your latest programs, your latest books, and what you’re interested in lately?

 

Steven

Two places, if you’re very flow focused, do you want to go to the FlowResearchCollective.com. Definitely, you know, check out the video page. Check- There’s a lot there’s a lot of free stuff there. All the classes that you just spoke about. Thank you. That was that was really nice of you to say. One of the things that stood up, I like to point out when like, here’s something like that, it’s, that makes me especially happy because peak performance is nothing more than getting your biology to work for you, rather than against you. And that’s the really cool thing. Like if you just do the things, right? Like the way the program works, you’re optimizing your biology, you’re going to get like, you get crazy benefits. I’ll give you, here’s a random one. We don’t do this. We don’t talk about it. I don’t think, this is the first time I probably ever mentioned anywhere. People lose substantial amounts of weight in Zero to Dangerous.

 

Now we do almost no- there’s very little nutrition stuff around flow. We know it’s a high-energy state. You to eat right. You need hydration. But like we sort of talk a little about this is what macronutrients are. And like, I just, it’s like a very general here’s how you eat healthy for high energy. But we make no dietary nothing. And yet people consistently lose 20, 30 pounds along the way. It’s not what they came for either. It’s just happening and it keeps showing up in our data. We like, we laugh about it. We’re like, you know, there’s probably a weight loss version of this. But like, we’re so science driven that, like, doing the science to get it there is going to take a couple of years. We haven’t even started. But it’s really funny.

 

But what I like about all of it is, like, we you know, I know we can get a 70-80% boost in flow in almost anybody because we consistently get it for clients. But it’s not like- we’re good at teaching it and we’re good at training it, but it’s actually just the biology that’s doing the heavy lifting. Right? You do the work, the biology does the heavy lifting, and you don’t- you can be as skeptical as you want, which is great. Like that’s the- that’s like, that’s the best part about it is like bring that healthy level of skepticism in, you know what I mean? And don’t take my word for it. Run the freakin’ experiment. And just like, see what your own biology can do for you. That was a long winded way of saying, I don’t know what about our website, but the other thing is, StevenKotler.com. So that’s where you can find me and stuff about the books. And if the new book Gnar Country is about peak performance aging, drops in February and that’s, that’s the peak performance aging stuff that we talked about that was sort of woven in the wisdom and all that shit. That’s where it-.

 

Fred

Yeah, and I’ve signed up to that as well because I’m starting to hit my mid 40s and definitely interested in the connection.

 

Steven

Are you in the beta class. Have I just not seen you? Yeah.

 

Fred

Yeah I am because the time shifted.

 

Steven

Oh my god. I’m so sorry- it’s the reason is you’re all looking me at- when I scroll through the faces, you all see me scrolling through the faces and it’s embarrassing.

 

Fred

The thing is, Stephen, I haven’t called into the lives because I like the time-shifted aspect of it. My schedule is so insane. So that’s probably why you haven’t seen me in it. But I’ve definitely signed up and I can’t wait to get into that journey because as I said, you know, really, like, you’ve mentioned adult development… it’s also a lot of this is really just like the science of aging also, how to age more gracefully, how to achieve more and more of your goals. The aging component is a really big part of this.

 

Steven

It’s interesting too. You wouldn’t know it, like flow, because flow plays a big role in adult development, and maybe because of where, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, his core interests, it ended up this way. But it’s you’re not wrong. Like there’s a very clean line between sort of flow and how it sort of moves through our lives in terms of driving us forward. It’s interesting. It’s bigger than I actually thought it was in terms of like, its scope biologically. Which I found really interesting was sort of one of the things that was really fun about doing research class and in the book and all that stuff. But it really does, all the research really does say that, like, you know, the old idea was the long, slow rot theory of aging. And the new idea is like, hey, all those skills we used to think decline with age, they certainly decline with age. And if you don’t pay attention to them, they’re going to slide away. But they’re all used it or lose it skills, it turns out. That’s what we’ve learned. And so you keep learning using them and you know what they are and how to train them, you’re going to hang on to a lot of stuff until very, very late in life. It’s pretty spectacular.

 

Fred

It is spectacular. And it reminds me of something Csikszentmihalyi wrote about when he talks about turning your whole life into a flow experience, sort of linking up all the different elements of your life into a flow experience- And that aging component! I’m so excited that you’re working on that, and I can’t wait to dive in. So thank you so much. I mean, this has been, unbelievably, I just couldn’t put my pen down. I was just, like, taking notes, like, wildly as you were talking, because I’m actually going to look into a lot of this stuff we talked about. But thanks a lot. This has been fantastic. And, keep it up. Honestly, all of us who are learning from you are just, it’s unbelievable the benefits we’re getting in our lives, in our productive lives, in our working, in our purpose, experiencing more flow. As we feel better, we start sort of bringing in more and more of the different elements. Like you talked about, the nutrition. It’s all sort of interconnected in the end, to creating optimal experience. And I find that your work is just so instrumental in helping all of us achieve, higher levels of well-being and also higher levels of performance. So thank you so much, and please keep it up.

 

Steven

It’s very nice of you to say. Thank you.