Imagine being able to lift a car without the help of machines, steroids, or drugs. Imagine that with just your own strength you can lift something that is 20 times your body weight.

As crazy as this fantasy seems to be, it has been done. Keep in mind it wasn’t done by some super strong athlete, this can be done by normal, average people.

Take Kenny Franklin and Charlotte Heffelmire as an example. They both somehow managed to lift cars to save the lives of other people.

Wait…how is this even possible? It doesn’t make sense. Logically speaking, a light car is around 3,000 pounds. The world record for deadlifting is just over 1,100 pounds.

That is almost 3 times heavier than what is possible by the strongest human being. Now, think how everyone in society is nowhere near that level of strength, so again how did they do it? The state of flow is how they got there.

What is flow?

“I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow — the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”

– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If you don’t already know Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he is a Hungarian-American psychologist recognized for his findings of the concept of flow.

Think back to the example of the two people above, you realize they were so immersed in the danger and the fear of the life or death situation that their survival instincts took over.

They were so present in the moment that they were no longer thinking through their prefrontal cortex (involved in planned rational thoughts) and they started thinking with their amygdala (emotional control center). This allowed them to perform far better than any human being.

This flow state is also known as “being in the zone”. In this state of mind, every action, every movement, and every thought all flow one after another in perfect harmony.

You become so immersed that hours can go by in a flash. The tunnel vision makes you feel like you are in another world. The best part is that this can be applied to absolutely everything. Reading, writing, painting, your history presentation, and doing homework.

Characteristics of Flow

End Result of a Flow State

There are 3 main areas that accompany the experience of flow. These factors are primarily based on feeling rather than something quantitative. This makes self-awareness the key in recognizing when you are in a flow state.

1. The activity is intrinsically rewarding

There is no expectation for a pat on the back or external validation from others. You are doing the activity for yourself, for your own self-fulfillment.

2. Complete focus on the activity itself

In this time, your external stressors disappear where you lose the feeling of everything around you. Your ability to focus is so strong that you become tunnel-visioned. You are so focused on the present moment that nothing else matters.

3. The task is slightly outside your current skill set

To be able to do something for long periods of time, you need a challenge. Without a challenge you can get board easily, while if it is too hard you will give up right away. The optimal way is you challenge yourself to something slightly higher than your current skill set, this encourages to increase your skill set to rise to the challenge, which encourages flow.

How to Achieve Flow

Hopefully, you are intrigued by the idea of flow and how to achieve it. Here are some of the ways that helped me get into state flow time and time again:

1. Cutting out distractions

Constantly checking your phone to reply a DM is extremely destructive action that if done enough time can completely ruin your day.

When you return to working you lose 23 minutes every time to get back to the same level of productivity that you had before the notification.

Flow is about a hyper-focus on one thing rather than multiple. Every disruption makes it less and less likely for you to be in a state of flow.

Of course, somethings are urgent and are unavoidable distractions. I can tell you for sure, most of your distractions can either be minimized or eliminated.

2. Listening to the same song on repeat

Preferably, this should be done with headphones to isolate your hearing.

Why? Listening to only one song (if it has lyrics) makes the words fade out and you start going with the vibe and feel the energy as you are working.

When you think of flow it isn’t a tangible thing, it is more a vibe or a state of mind. Having strong energy from your music can be an extremely powerful way to get yourself started.

What type of music should you have? According to Thomson’s research, “Only soft fast music had a positive influence [on learning], whilst loud fast, as well as soft slow or loud slow music, hindered learning.”

According to Peckham’s research, “Instrumental music disturbs learners less than music with lyrics.”

Takeaway: Listen to soft and fast instrumental music (to get the most benefit). You should also try different types of music to see if something works better for you than the research recommended ideas.

Pro Tip: Listen to songs on 1.5x or 2x speed to get the fast feel to get yourself going.

3. No Multitasking

This is exactly what not to do

Have you ever had those days where you worked on so many different things and somehow still got nothing done?

Before I even dive in, let’s first explore multitasking. You might be thinking “Isn’t it when you are working on multiple different tasks at once?”

You can’t do two things at once. In reality, you are alternating between your tasks at hand. Every time you switch a task, your working memory needs to “load” what you are doing again. This forces your brain to spend valuable mental resources trying to go back to where you left off before.

As a result, you experience something called the Cognitive Switching Penalty. Simply put, the more you switch, the more the cost(on your mental resources). Psychology Today, claims it that you can lose up to 40% of your productivity if you are constantly multi-tasking.

Going back to flow, we need the most amount of mental resources to be able to achieve our high concentration, laser-like focus.

Flow Applications to Everyday Life

I know many of you are thinking “This sounds good and all, but my school or my work is so boring I can’t achieve flow.”

We are going to fix that right here, right now!

Studying and Homework

“Can’t wait to do my homework!” Said No One Ever.

Despite how many of us dread the time we have to study for that test, that exam, or have to sit down and grind out that project. This is a tremendous amount of opportunities for flow, we just don’t take advantage of it.

Firstly, we need to understand that for us to be motivated to work, we need a motive. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that we involve ourselves in the process of gamification. This is where we change our perspectives on how we view things and start treating mundane tasks like a game.

For example, you can challenge yourself to see how many problems you can solve in a given amount of time. Or when working on a paper, see how many words you can write within a time limit. There will be times when you have to do boring work you don’t want to do.

Gamification is good to overcome all of these barriers of starting your tasks. This will also help you to start enjoying your processes of working, the more you en’joy what you are doing, the more likely you will be to do it well.

Work

According to a global poll conducted by Gallup, out of the world’s one billion full-time workers, 85% are unhappy in their jobs. Flow is the solution.

Csikszentmihalyi describes an “autotelic personality”, which is someone who can create flow experiences even in the bleakest and the most lifeless situations. He argues that anyone can develop this attitude, even if the work they do is “boring” on the surface.

In his research, Csikszentmihalyi and his team of researchers interviewed people from all over the world. The people were asked about the times in their lives that they felt most content, most happy, most fulfilled (all outcomes of flow).

For people who are factory workers, farmers, and living in intense poverty, even they reported flow experiences. As it turns out, your approach is much more impactful than the experience itself.

For example, when I was working as a “doorman” in a grocery store during COVID. I was legit getting paid to tell people “Hi” and “Bye.” Even though it was nice getting paid for doing no work, it was also a very boring experience.

I kept myself engaged in it by turning it into a flow activity. Whenever a customer would come in to the store, I would make a random story that involved them and how they got here.

To be honest, at least half my stories made no sense, but it was really fun letting my imagination run wild. That was an activity worth doing for its own sake, which is a good way to know if your gamification is helpful to you.

Free Time

Remember all those times you said you would take a 20-minute break on Netflix and you ended up binging an entire season.

The reason this happens is very similar to how people interact with drugs. The first time you always achieve you maximum pleasure per dosage. Every other time after that, the same dose gets less and less gratifying making you need more and more to satisfy yourself.

“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

To make sure this doesn’t get put out of context, I believe there needs to be a clear distinction with how to engage with your work.

There are times where you are extremely immersed in an activity or the span of days, weeks, even months. As compelling as it might be to continue working on it for hours on end every single you need a break.

You might be thinking “Don’t breaks make you less productive? NO NO NO

Studies have found that breaks can reduce or prevent stress, help to maintain performance throughout the day and reduce the need for a long recovery at the end of the day.

In 2016, A study by Korpela, Kinnunen, Geurts, de Bloom and Sianoja found that taking lunchtime breaks and detaching from work, increases levels of energy at work and decreases exhaustion.

A relaxing break can help to facilitate recovery, by returning your mental and psychical functional systems to their baseline. Additionally, a relaxing break can help to reset your mood, thereby promoting positive wellbeing and reducing stress.

Working all the time even if you are constantly in flow makes a very unhealthy and unsustainable way of life.

You need free time (or self-time) to make sure you are doing well emotionally and constantly in a good mental state.

As Jim Kwik mentions in his learning podcast, “Learning is state-dependent.” If you are feeling bored you are less likely to digest the content well. Gamifying everything could be a good way to have a good state of mind.

Remember “Learning is state-dependent.” If you feel bad you will perform badly (or relatively bad to your good state).

This doesn’t mean that you always need to use your free time constructively. You can still watch Netflix or scroll through TikTok, but in moderation where you enjoy a short break rather than hours going by without much use.

It is really important to recognize when you need a break vs you being bored, for some people you still scroll out of habit rather than you enjoying the content.

Benefits of flow

• Dopamine: popularized as the ‘feel-good’ chemical. It is also involved in memory, and attention.

• Anandamide: It is involved in pain modulation, mood regulation, and has anti-anxiety and anti-depressant properties. Anandamide has also been associated with neurogenesis (birth of new cells).

• Norepinephrine: often described as a stress hormone and is an active source in our fight/flight responses. Its activation allows us to be hyper-focused with laser eye concentration.

• Serotonin: a mood stabilizer that helps to regulate emotions and control sleep and waking patterns. This can stop us from having really high highs and really low lows. This makes us be more in control of ourselves rather than being slaves to our emotions.

• Endorphins: known for creating the euphoria effect which is a state of intense happiness and self-confidence. They are also natural pain blockers, which are good through times of suffering.

Why Does Flow Matter?

“Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I know I might have presented flow as a productivity hack, but it is so much more than that. As Mihaly explains, being present is the key to developing ourselves and humankind.

Flow matters because of the feeling of control it gives you. You feel like everything is in your hands and you can do something about it.

Instead of being reactive to your environment and start getting overwhelmed because you feel everything is being thrown at you. You start taking a more active role, where you own your life, not someone else, not something else.

Creating flow requires deliberate intention and effort. When you learn how to induce flow, you also learn how to control that voice inside your head.

Once you can control that voice you can cleanse your thoughts and be aware of what you are thinking, this way you can start shutting off the negative parts within those thoughts that don’t bring you any value like hatred or jealousy.

At this point, you become at peace with the world, where things don’t bother you as much. You worry less, you hate less, and you lie to yourself less.

Action Items:

1. Remove Distractions From Your Environment

2. Gamify your Activities

3. Work for 52 minutes then take a 17 minute break