Have you ever struggled to complete a task that should have taken 90 minutes yet after eight hours of slaving away you still haven't finished the thing? Well there's a neuroscientific explanation for why this happens and a simple way to solve it. Behind the world's most successful people stand the four pillars of flow.
which allows anyone to become effortlessly productive. Now, my name is Rhian Dorris, co-founder and CEO of Flow Research Collective, along with my partner, Stephen Cutler, and we've taught thousands of professionals and organizations how to access flow state at will so they can become drastically more productive in their working lives. It all comes down to the four pillars of flow state. First, there's the flow blockers. Second, flow proneness.
Third, the flow triggers. And finally and fourth, the flow. cycle. These are the pillars that power the brains of the most productive people on the planet.
We'll cover each in a moment. But first, what is flow? I want you to remember for a second the last time you were hyper productive and totally absorbed in what you were doing. That was flow. Now flow is a state of consciousness that makes work feel effortless.
You've experienced flow perhaps when you were riding a bike, surfing a wave, making music, singing, dancing, maybe working on a big project. Many of humanity's greatest accomplishments have happened in this state of flow. Alex Honnold in the movie Free Solo was in a flow state when he summited El Capitan with no gear.
Sam Altman and his team at OpenAI when they were coding ChatGPT, which has already changed the world, were deep in flow while doing it. When Marie Curie did her pioneering research and Einstein finally figured out the theory of relativity, they were harnessing the power of flow to pull off these superhuman feats that drove humanity forward. And flow isn't just a metaphor. In fact, Over 10,000 research papers on flow have found that the neurophysiological shifts that occur while in flow increase the exact skills that research has shown are most critical to thriving in the 21st century, like learning, creativity, productivity.
And the reason why Alex and Sam and Marie and Einstein were able to accomplish such feats is because of what happens in the body and in the brain when flow kicks in. From the neurochemical cascade of dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide, serotonin, endorphins, the alpha-theta brainwaves, and the performance-enhancing alteration, to the neuroanatomical changes that occur in the brain in flow. Listen, this all sounds great.
Flow sounds like some kind of a panacea that's going to solve all of your productivity and peak performance problems in a heartbeat. And that would actually be true if you could access a flow state on demand. But the problem is most of us can't. So until you train yourself on the four pillars of flow, flow is going to remain elusive and nowhere is less conducive to accessing flow with consistency and reliability than the 21st century workplace and the 21st century way of working, where distractions are rampant, procrastination plagues us, and chronic stress is just considered the norm.
You know that horrible feeling of being over-caffeinated and riddled with productivity guilt from delaying doing what you know you should have been doing. And then hitting lunchtime with barely any work done even though half the day is done. Well if this has ever happened to you it's due to the flow blockers. If you're going to run a marathon first off you'd have to ensure that you don't have some foundational injury or health condition that simply blocks you from doing it and it's kind of similar when it comes to flow state because research shows we're evolutionarily wired for flow. Your brain and body actually wants to kick you into a flow state when the conditions necessitate it.
Most of the time, our 21st century work style Blocks flow at every turn. Think about it, when you get up in the morning, what's the first thing you look at? Well if you're like 80% of people, you check it within 15 minutes of waking up and it's packed with flow blockers. Distraction, uncertainty, task persistence, deficit, attention deficit, trait. And this one thing is the source of over a dozen other blockers for flow, like a dam blocking a river from naturally moving forward.
Now obviously this thing is your phone. So what's one tool to remove the most common source of flow blockers? Well, it's simple. We call it flow before phone.
The golden rule is to get two to three hours of productive flow on your highest priority task in the morning before you turn on or ideally even touch that device. Now, this is easier said than done. It's hard to change ingrained habits, especially when the habit itself is linked to a device that's designed to be addictive. But once you try this and once you experience deeper and deeper states of flow, the flow states that you can access become more compelling. and overrule the addiction.
Next up we have flow proneness. So let's say you have removed all the blockers and you still can't get into flow because this is what happens to Lots of people, it's because they missed the second thing, which again is flow proneness. So using the marathon analogy, consider this your overall fitness level, because flow proneness is simply your tendency to access flow and the likelihood of getting into flow at any given moment. We need to make our physiology, our body, our psychology up here, and our environment conducive to flow proneness to maximize our likelihood of accessing a flow state. Now the easiest way to do this is to wake up and get to work within 90 seconds of opening your eyes.
You're probably like, what? This sounds like some kind of a weird workaholic thing to do, but it's actually the opposite. By getting your most important work done within the first two to three hours of the day in a flow state, which is going to amplify productivity dramatically, you can relax a lot more the rest of the day.
The neuroscientific reason to do this is that your flow proneness is highest first thing in the morning. This works for a few reasons, one being that the brain waves of sleep, theta or delta, are similar to the alpha theta brain waves of flow. As a bonus, the first 90 seconds of the morning are also before the rest of the world can impose its will upon you, which makes it easier to focus. Okay, so you've removed the main source of flow blockers and you've increased your flow proneness.
So how do you actually trigger flow directly? Well, this is where the flow triggers come in. These are preconditions that instantly drive us into flow.
Now, back in the 1960s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow, who coined the term flow, identified several of these triggers. And since then, Stephen Kotler and other researchers have identified even more. While Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pioneered the psychological research on flow, Kotler has pioneered the neurobiological research on the state and is commonly regarded as the world's leading expert on flow.
Now the more triggers you have present in an activity, at any one time the faster you'll enter flow, the deeper the flow state will be and the longer you'll be able to hold and sustain that flow state. Certain activities are naturally rich in flow triggers like surfing, playing music, video gaming. The three first triggers for flow that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified were clear goals, immediate feedback, and the challenge-skills balance.
So here's an example of each of these in action. Let's say you're surfing. You spot the wave, you catch it, you ride it.
These are the clear goals that are going to pop you into flow. Then you feel the balance on the board and the wave's power. This is immediate feedback. You're taking action in response to the information you're receiving from the wave.
And as you continue surfing, you ride waves of varying sizes, varying difficulty, and if you're a surfer, varying weight, matching your skill level to keep engaged, which is the challenge skills balance at play. Now that's all well and good for surfing, but what about your work? Well, the trick is to take these triggers and add them to activities that they don't necessarily show up within.
So to apply this right away, you can tune the challenge skills balance by engaging in tasks that are about 4% more difficult than your current skill level. Our constant goal, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book title suggests, is to move beyond boredom and anxiety. That's the sweet spot that leads to flow.
The fourth pillar of flow is seldom discussed, but it's the reason behind the world's most productive people and how they operate. And it's called the flow cycle. Herb Benson was a Harvard cardiologist, and he wrote about this for the first time in his book called The Breakout Principle.
And then Stephen Kotler mapped it further directly to flow in his book, The Rise of Superman. What the flow cycle tells us is that flow states are more like dimmer switches than light switches. Now, first there's struggle.
This is a loading phase. It's when you first start a task and the neurochemistry involved, which is cortisol and norepinephrine, kind of makes you squirm. The discomfort causes us to want to avoid the task, relieve ourselves of the discomfort, and distract ourselves.
The sad truth is that most people spend their entire careers dropping in and out of the first few minutes of the struggle phase. They never persist long enough to get into flow. They're an inch deep into work forever. So start by getting great at persisting through the struggle phase. This comes down to task persistence.
You can do this with something that we call attention span stretching. So if you had a bar that you were hanging from every day, research shows that if you did that, you would actually grow by an inch in height. Similarly, if you stretch your attention, your attention span becomes longer. So for example, read a book all the way through, even if it's uncomfortable.
Even if you retain less, you gain more sustained attention. You're training your attentional capacity. If you do a long meditation, just try adding another minute and another minute.
Same with deep focused work. Add another minute, then another. Treat it like a muscle, max out the reps. Then release happens. Once you reach the edge of wrestling with the task or problem, true sustaining focus and attention.
As you persist, your brain increases dopamine, enhancing focus and motivation, finally popping you out of struggle through release and into the flow state itself. Then next up we have flow, which is the state we've been talking about this whole time. During flow, the prefrontal cortex deactivates. to allow efficient, instinctive, rapid decision-making to occur.
After the flow state itself, we have the recovery phase on the backside of flow, where we're replenishing the expensive neurochemistry that's involved in flow. We're recuperating after expending so much energy, and we're integrating the knowledge or skills acquired during flow. So there you have it, the four pillars of flow, which underscore elite productivity, extreme accomplishment, and hyper-focus.
Bye. By understanding and applying these pillars of flow, you can become consistently productive and achieve incredible results. Our goal here is to take every research paper on peak performance and flow and decipher it down into easy to watch, instantly applicable steps.
So that as you stay tuned to our channel, you build the skillset of driving yourself into a flow state consistently, which is a critical skillset to thrive in the 21st century.