Neuroscience Nuggets #7: How To Find Your Flow
I’m immersed in what I’m doing. All of my senses are on high-alert. Ideas are bubbling, progress is being made, there's a giddy satisfaction rippling through my body and time is flying by so fast I have to remind myself to come up for air.
It happens when I’m cooking, writing, playing tennis, and hanging out with friends.
But most often it happens when I’m coaching.
This inimitable “in the zone” state is called "flow."
Everyone since the dawn of time has experienced it at some point or another, but it wasn’t officially discovered until Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who sadly passed away last week) coined the term in 1975.
Csikszentmihalyi set out to discover how and why people feel enjoyment in their everyday lives. From artists and chess players to leaders and farmers, for years he studied their daily habits and activities, trying to find that *exact* moment when people feel totally in synch with whatever they’re doing without needing any external motivation to do so.
His research landed on "flow," the moment in time when interest and skill are in perfect harmony, when you feel intrinsic joy and purpose without extreme effort.
Csikszentmihalyi defines "flow" as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
What's amazing about "flow" (and which leads us to our neuroscience nugget today) is what happens in the brain when you’re in it. Or better yet, what doesn’t happening in the brain.
Since "flow" occurs in the sweet spot between arousal (aka challenge) and control (aka skill), your brain is not experiencing the anxiety of trying to accomplish something beyond its reach, nor is it wandering aimlessly looking for some sort of internal or external distraction.
Your brain’s attention is so focused on what it's doing that anything unrelated to the task at hand, including self-consciousness, self-doubt, and negative self-speak, is literally squeezed out of the equation.
When in "flow," “existence is temporarily suspended,” says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his must-watch Ted Talk, so much so that your doubts, hunger, fatigue, and even your kids can’t seem to shake you out of what you’re doing.
This is what I love most about "flow":
Being in "flow" is deeply personal, non-hierarchical and non-discriminatory. You can feel like Beyoncé at Coachella even when you’re setting a table for your dinner guests, creating spreadsheets for your clients or doing a workshop on Zoom.
"Flow" is neither about forcing yourself out of our comfort zone to prove your self-worth, nor about avoiding risks at all costs. It's about the sweet spot in-between stretch and security.
You can find meaning—and "flow"—in all types of professions. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon or the head of NGO to feel a joyful purpose in life.
So what are the take-aways here?
We need both arousal (aka challenge) and control (aka skill) to make "flow" happen. It’s that very special space where our challenges and our skills dance together like Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey .
If you're experiencing too much overwhelm at a given task, think about what practical skills you could hone to rise to the occasion (like those steamy nights of "practice" between Swayze and Grey).
And if your tasks are feeling pretty stale around the edges, find a way to put your skills to a stretchy challenge, like Swayze teaching a rhythmless teenager how to dance like a pro.