Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #189 How To Achieve The Impossible with Steven Kotler

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

CAUTION: This episode contains swearing and themes of an adult nature.    Today’s conversation is about unlocking your full potential, striving for peak performance and ‘going big’. My guest, Steven Kotler, lives and breathes ‘flow’. He’s an expert in this optimal state of consciousness, where we feel and perform at our best. And you don’t have to be part of the business or sporting elite to benefit from his research. Steven believes we can all attain flow, because as humans we’re hard-wired to achieve. Whether you’re taking a walk, writing an email or cooking a meal, you could find yourself in flow.    Steven is a prolific author, journalist and entrepreneur. He founded the Flow Research Collective, which uses neurobiological findings to train people to achieve peak performance in all walks of life. By understanding what’s going on in the brain and body when humans are performing at their best, his goal is to help us access the flow state more often and realise our full potential.    Flow is something I’ve written about in my own books and I describe it as being so absorbed in a pleasurable activity that time seems to disappear. Steven and I talk about how psychologists and neurobiologists identify and measure flow. He provides insights on the brain chemicals involved and we discuss the links between flow and happiness. We also uncover tools you can use to access this creative state; why initial struggles are part of the process, and why active recovery is vital if you want to avoid burnout.    This is a super-charged episode, packed with insights, information and enthusiasm. Steven is certainly an advert for the energy and productivity that results from seeking out a flow state. I hope this conversation sets you on a path to finding yours.   Thanks to our sponsors: http://blublox.com/livemore http://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/livemore http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore   Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/189   Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/   Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/   Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

I spent those 30 years studying those moments in time when the impossible became possible. That which has never been done suddenly gets done. And what I wanted to know in all this time was, how the hell did you do it? What went on in the brain that allowed you to do something that had never been done before? Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Chastity. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Hello and welcome to my podcast. My name is Rangan and I am delighted that you have decided to join me. Today's conversation is about unlocking your full potential and how we can all access peak performance in our lives. My guest is Stephen Kotler. He's a journalist and he is the author of a brand new book, The Art of Impossible.

Now, Stephen is considered one of the world's leading experts and researchers around the subject of flow state. He actually founded the Flow Research Collective, which uses neurobiological findings to train people to achieve peak performance in all walks of life. By understanding what's going on in the brain and body when humans are performing at their best, his goal is to help all of us access FlowState more frequently, and in doing so, help us realize our full potential. Now, Steven really is a fascinating character who literally lives and breathes flow. And as he explains in our conversation, flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel and perform at our best. But you don't need to be part of the business or sporting

elite to benefit from his research. Stephen believes that we can all attain flow because as humans, we are hardwired to achieve. So whether you're taking a walk, writing an email, or cooking a meal, you could perhaps find yourself in flow. Now, flow is something I've written about before in many of my own books. And I've described it as that state when we are so absorbed, usually in a pleasurable activity, where time seems to disappear. And I've also shared numerous case studies about how accessing flow more often can improve our health and well-being and reduce levels of stress. And I actually remember one case of a lady who was really struggling with migraines, stress-related migraines in my view. And the only thing that managed to help her get rid of those

migraines was accessing flow state every single day. So it's something I'm very, very passionate about. Now, in our conversation today, Stephen and I talk about how psychologists and neurobiologists identify and measure flow. Stephen also provides insights on the brain chemicals involved, and we discuss the links between flow and happiness. We also uncover tools that you can use to access this very creative state, why initial struggles are part of the process, and why active recovery rather than passive recovery is vital if you want to avoid burnout. This is a supercharged episode.

It is packed with insights, information, and enthusiasm. I really hope you enjoy listening. information and enthusiasm. I really hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with the inimitable Stephen Kotler. One thing I've heard you say before is that we are hardwired for the extraordinary. We're hardwired for peak performance and not going big is harmful. I wonder if you could explain what you mean by that. Yeah, why don't you just start off with an easy question that doesn't require me talking for 25 minutes. All right, best place to start is with the simplest, which is what do we mean by peak performance? And peak performance is really nothing more or

less than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. What has happened in the science of peak performance over the past 10 to 15 years is we've uncovered enough parts of the system to realize it's a system. Evolution shaped us all to work in a certain way and to work at our best in a certain way. The simple example here is the state of flow, which is the center of the work I do. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we perform our best and we feel our best. We can go into more specifics later, but the first thing to know is everybody is hardwired for flow. Actually, at this point, we think it's most mammals are hardwired for flow and it actually may go deeper into the

evolutionary chain, but that's what the research has shown so far. One, when we say everybody's hardwired for big performance, everybody's hardwired to go big, one of the things we mean is everybody is hardwired to get into flow. And flow as optimal performance is a significant amplification of a host of skills. On the cognitive side, you see motivation, grit, productivity, learning rates, creative problem solving, all aspects of creative problem solving, empathy, environmental awareness, all of these things significantly increase in some studies like up to 500% above baseline. So 500% above baseline is a huge amplification in performance. That's what we mean by everybody

is hardwired for the extraordinary, everybody is hardwired to go big. Now, to get to the second half of your statement, which is not going big is bad for us, that requires a little bit more about the biology of peak performance. Because flow, while absolutely foundationally necessary for peak performance, it is, but not sufficient. When you actually look at the full suite of biological tools, especially on the cognitive peak performance side, the mental side, there's a bunch of motivation skills that sort of get you into the game. There are a bunch of learning skills that help you stay there, keep you there. There's a bunch of creativity skills that help you steer and then

there's flow skills on the back end that have you help you amplify the results that's the full suite now to answer why going big it's bad for us we have to break one more thing down which is when we say motivation it's a catch-all term, right? Psychologists say motivation. They mean extrinsic motivation, stuff we want in the world that will motivate us, right? Money, sex, fame. Intrinsic motivation, and there are five major intrinsic motivators, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery. They also mean goal setting and grit. That's the motivation sort of suite, right? That's what we mean under

motivation. Now, those intrinsic motivators I mentioned, curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, you get it all right, you get all those things pointed in the same direction, all on board, you end up getting a lot of flow. That's all you need to know. Now, what do I mean by not going big is bad for us? As I said, the system is designed to work in a certain way, work in a certain order, work with certain components. We're designed to go big. Not going big is bad for us. Let's look at probably the largest plague in the modern world. I know it's one that you've written about extensively, which is anxiety and depression. One out of 10 adults is going to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression this year, right? And it's the largest strain on public health coffers in the

world. And we're losing the fight because somebody kills themselves once every 12 seconds. All right. So this is a major plague. It's a major crisis. There are eight known causes of anxiety and depression. Two of them get a lot of attention. One is trauma. The other is genetics. Trauma, something horrible happened to me, and I can't get past it. I've got anxiety and depression genetics. I can't produce enough serotonin, enough norepinephrine, enough dopamine, take your pick. And thus, I've got anxiety and depression. But when you look at the data, what you actually see is that trauma, the vast majority of the time, it leads to post-traumatic growth, right? This is Hemingway's idea.

The world breaks everyone. And afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places. But emphasis on many, if you look at the data, most people get post-traumatic growth. They don't get anxiety and depression that lingers for the rest of their lives. And if you look at genetics, genetics are only ever 50% of any anxiety and depression equation. At maximum, everything else is lifestyle, mindset, etc. What are the other six major causes of depression? Number one, lack of meaningful work. What does that mean under the hood? Work that I'm not curious about, work that's not aligned with my passion, that it's not aligned with my purpose, that I don't have the autonomy, the freedom to pursue in the way I want,

and it doesn't afford me the opportunity for mastery mastery and to boot, doesn't produce any flow. That's what we mean by lack of meaningful work, the number one cause of depression. Lack of meaningful values, what does that mean? Well, it means having values that are not aligned with your passion, your purpose, and don't produce flow, and I could keep going, right? Even the one that I know you've worked on as well, which is lack of access to nature, right? If you dig under the hood of that, it's not just nature. It's that nature helps drive us into flow for a variety of reasons. So it's nature plus flow. In other words, the system was designed to work a certain way. If you get the system working the way it was designed to work, you get extraordinary performance. If you don't use the system the way it was designed to work, you get anxiety, depression, probably a whole bunch of health problems, which is much more your area of expertise than mine, etc, etc.

Stephen, as I reflect on what you say, it's for me, the point I just want to make clear to people who are listening or watching. And I wonder if you share the same view is that what you offer people with your wisdom, with your research is relevant to each and every single one of us. right? So we can talk about peak performance and a lot of people, that sort of puts them off to think, hey, I'm not like a Wall Street guy. I'm not a top athlete. But I've always said that we're all seeking peak performance in our lives,

whether it's to be a great dad or a great mother or a great office worker or whatever it is. I think if you ask anyone, we'd all say, yeah, actually, I would like to perform at my best. I couldn't agree more. And if you don't mind, I'm going to break down one step further, which is, so I wrote a book called The Argument Possible. It is a book based on 30 years of research, both kind of running the Flow Research Collective and actively studying the

neurobiology of peak performance and training people to do this. But mostly I spent those 30 years studying those moments in time when the impossible became possible. That which has never been done suddenly gets done. I did this in every domain imaginable. I did this in sport. I did it in science. I did it in technology. I did it in science. I did it in technology. I did it in art. I did it in culture. Just to give you one example so people can wrap their heads around this in technology. I cover my beat was those moments in time when sci-fi ideas became sci-fact technology. I wrote about this for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Forbes, on and on and on for a very long time. So I was in the room most times when like bionics became real, when the

world's first artificial vision implant was turned on, I was there. When the world's first private spaceship was launched, I was there and so forth and so forth. And what I wanted to know in all this time was how the hell did you do it? What went on in the brain that allowed you to do something that had never been done before? Then I wrote a book about everything I learned called The Art Impossible. Everything I've been talking about these never before four minute mile kind of things. And we could be talking about, you know, this could be athletic impossibles, four minute miles. It could be cultural impossibles. Rosa Parks here in America sitting at the front of the bus and saying no more.

It could be Einstein theory of relativity, intellectual impossibles. We could be talking about creative, artistic and on and on. We get the picture. That's capital I impossible. That which has never been done. The book, though, is meant to be utilized by anybody who's interested in small I impossible. That which you think is impossible for you, right? I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1970s. It was a blue collar steel mill working glass town. I wanted to be a writer from the time I was five or six

years old. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know how you became a writer. There was no one around to ask. There was no internet. There were a few books, no TV show. It was like I woke up one day and said, mom, dad, when I grow up, I want to be an elf. No way to hobbit, right? Like, what the hell do you do? So that's a small line possible, meaning there's no clear path between where I am and where I want to go. And statistically, that is the odds of success. What are other small-line possibles? Overcoming trauma. Rising out of poverty.

Getting paid doing what you love. Becoming world-class at anything you do. Becoming a successful artist or entrepreneur. And because peak performance is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us, the exact same biology you would utilize to capitalize that which has never been done, impossible. You would utilize to use small I, that which I believe is impossible for me. But here's the kicker. And I think this is where your point is. Let's say you're listening to me and you're like, I can't stand this schmuck, man. I just want to get through Monday. You know what I mean?

Could I be a little more productive? Could it be a little less hectic at home? You get my point. Well, it turns out it doesn't matter. Peak performance is getting your biology work for you rather than against you. The same toolkit that you will use to go after capital I impossible, you use after small I impossible, you use to have a slightly better Monday than you did last week. It's the same toolkit. That's the cool thing, right? In a sense, it's the same formula. And we can all use that formula because we're all essentially evolutionary, hardwired to take advantage of it yeah i love that answer steven and it's this is what one of the things

i love about your approach and i know you do a lot of research in in this area is i've heard you you say this gorgeous phrase that personality doesn't scale biology does all right so you have to understand a little bit about me um i grew up i was to say i was a difficult kid is an understatement my sixth grade teacher told me i wouldn't live to see 30. She wasn't wrong. I when I became a journalist in the early 1990s, my beat, I had two things I was covering. One was neuroscience, right? I was really neuroscience in the 90s was this cool area. Because for the very first time, we were going from like the mechanism of the neurobiological changes to actual human behavior that's what's starting to come online and whoa like psychology is metaphor useful metaphor but

it's metaphor if you're really interested in being practical and doing some damage you want mechanism you want the neurobiology and suddenly the neurobiology was being linked to behavior was exactly what i was interested in so that's what I was studying on one side. The other side of me was the same kid who grew up that way. And I was studying, you know, I was covering action adventure sports, surfing, skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding and the like. The extreme wing of these, you know, of these activities. the extreme wing of these, you know, of these activities. And, you know, there's a saying in action sports, which is most people call it trauma.

We call it Monday. And, you know, I chased at professional athletes around mountains for a decade in my attempts to keep up. I broke over 70 bones and, you know, nearly died on a lot of occasions. My, and on top of that, I was also a journalist, so I was covering some other hard, complicated stories. My point in all this is I was born with naturally high risk tolerances. And then I went into careers that developed risk tolerances that were through the roof. And then I learned some stuff about flow and peak performance along the way. And I started writing about flow and peak performance. And I had a couple of books out and I had a column for Psychology Today. And my friends thought I knew what I was talking about. And I thought I knew what I was talking about.

And you do what what like everybody makes the same mistake when they learn a little bit about peak performance which is they tell other people how to live their lives I mean they give advice right and when I gave advice to my people who I was very close to right like I was writing about this but I was giving advice to people I was close to I'd never tried to coach anybody but I was essentially starting to coach my friends a little bit. I put two people in the hospital. I nearly caused a divorce. One of my friends still won't talk to me and it's been 25 years. And another friend, one of my closest friends didn't speak to me for five years. Why? My advice was a fr freaking disaster. It was an absolute disaster. I made

a mess of their lives. Why? Because foundational aspects of peak performance are based on personality. And personality is set up by nature and nurture. But essentially, it is roughed into place by 12 to 15 years of age. Now you have your traits by that point, right? Now we used to think those were locked in stone, like where are you on the introversion, extroversion scale, or what are your risk tolerances? Now we know that those things are mutable, but it takes a while, five, 10 years of the work to really shift those things. But if you're trying to train people in peak performance, most people make the mistake I make. They learn what works for them and they try to teach it to other people and expect it to work. And most of the time it's a disaster. And the reason, as you pointed out, is that personality doesn't scale. Biology scales. Yeah, I mean, it's so important

that and I mean, even even as you were talking there, I think a lot of people, a lot of doctors I've come across a lot of people who listen to this show, will kind of know also that when they've had a little bit of an insight into their own life, and they've improved something, oh, I've got it. I've got the secret now. I want to tell everyone. I tell my friends. I want to tell my parents. And then we find out, ah, this is not going so well. Either it's not working for them or they don't want to hear it from us. If we talk about biology and neurochemistry, I think it would be really useful to really understand what goes on. What are these kind of chemicals in the brain? What do they do?

And sort of how do they show up in various states? So whether it's flow, peak performance, even happiness. Do we get a different cocktail of chemicals in different states? And if so, are you able to explain some of that for us? Why don't we start with flow? Okay, because it's a good place to start. Okay, so let's expand on our earlier definition. I when I started, I said, hey, flow, it's a state of optimal performance where we feel our best, and we perform best. And that's the standard scientific definition of flow. But it doesn't get us very far. So more specifically, flow refers to any of

those moments of rapt attention, total absorption. You get so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing that everything else just seems to disappear. Action awareness are going to start to merge. Your sense of self, your sense of self-consciousness, even bodily awareness are going to fade. They're going to diminish. Time is going to dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely. Occasionally, it'll slow down. More frequently, it speeds up, and five hours will go by in five seconds. Throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, tend to go through the roof. Now, that is how it's a colloquial definition of flow. When psychologists define flow and they want to measure it, they say, hey, flow has six core phenomenological characteristics.

Phenomenological is a very big word for how does the experience make us feel? Flow makes us feel six ways. When those six experiences show up during a given moment, oh, you were in flow. What are those? So instead what you feel is a sense of control because you're performing so well, both mentally and physical, you feel like you can control things you normally can't control, right? I'm a writer and suddenly like my language is dancing or I'm a skier and suddenly I'm dancing down the mountain.

Doesn't matter, right? You're a surgeon and suddenly you're dancing your way through the operation. doesn't matter right you're a surgeon and suddenly you're you you know you're dancing your way through the operation doesn't matter and finally flow is an autotelic experience it's a fancy greek word for an end in itself what it means is the state is exceptionally pleasurable it's euphoric in fact um we now know that the people who score the highest for overall life satisfaction, meaning, purpose, well-being, these are the people with the most flow in their lives. So that's autotelic. Those six characteristics, that's how psychologists define flow and measure flow, right? Do all those six things show up?

And because flow is like any other experience it could be a spectrum right it's not anger you're a little irked or you're homicidally murderous it's still anger right you could have a state of micro flow this is when those six conditions show up but they're really quiet so you're at work you sit down to write a quick email to your coworker and you'll look up an hour later and you've written a huge essay and time disappeared. And maybe your sense of self didn't diminish, but bodily awareness was gone. And when you pop back into consciousness, you're like, oh, wow, I really have to go to the bathroom. You run off to pee, right? That happens to all of us all the time. That's microflow. Macroflow is when all those experiences

show up and they're dialed up to 11. And this is where self doesn't just vanish, but it can start really strange things can start to happen. Outer body experiences, oneness with everything, experience that we talk about as cosmic unity, that's a macroflow state. Now, macro flow state now neurobiologists the work that that i work on we define flow by a bunch of different characteristics neuroscientists will talk about four really four levels of the things that you want to pay attention to right there's neural electricity brain waves and neural chemistry now brain waves and neural chemicals are this is how the brain talks to itself these are signaling molecules right the brain sends signals either via electricity or via chemistry to itself and other parts of the body it's communication modules or you want to know

about neural anatomy and networks which is where things are taking place right the prefrontal cortex or the parietal lobe or take your break, but you get these things very rarely take place in one spot in the brain. They're usually networks. We're talking about links that are either hardwired between parts of the brain or they're functionally connected, meaning they do work at the same time, right? So that's what you're talking about. You asked about neurochemicals and it's a good way in because neurochemicals are at the heart of so much peak performance. So I could give you the big picture in flow. What we see is five of the most potent performance enhancing neurochemicals that the brain can produce all show up and all show up at once.

And this may be the only time you get all five. Now, what makes these chemicals special in flow is, first thing to know, neurochemicals are multi-tools, right? When I talk about dopamine, most people know dopamine as a so-called reward chemical, right? Because they're phone dings. They know that curiosity might be underpinned by dopamine. It's that little pleasure of like, oh, who did I get a text from, right? That's dopamine. Dopamine also underpins pattern recognition, right?

You fill in an answer in a crossword puzzle. You find the pattern. You get a little rush of pleasure, that's dopamine. Dopamine does something cool also. It amplifies pattern recognition. That's why when you find that answer in the crossword puzzle, you're likely to find three or four right after it. Sometimes dopamine also underpins risky behavior and et cetera, et cetera. And it's also a massively rewarding chemical,

right? Cocaine is widely considered the most addictive drug on earth. And all cocaine does is force the brain to release a bunch of dopamine and then block its reuptake, its reabsorption into the system. So we get a lot of dopamine in peak performance when we talk about for example um dopamine showing up in flow but it also shows up in other places motivation is complete every intrinsic motivator curiosity passion purpose autonomy mastery they're all underpinned by dopamine there are other chemicals involved but dopamine there. You also have norepinephrine. Now, norepinephrine is peculiar because it is curiosity and excitement, and it is also anxiety and terror. So a little bit curiosity, a little bit more excitement, too much anxiety, way too

much terror, right? So it's a spectrum, but you get norepinephrine and anything that you're curious about or you're excited about obviously drives focus, right? And drives attention. You also get serotonin. This shows up at the tail end of a flow state. We believe though a lot more work needs to be done on serotonin. This is the calming chemical, the heart of the Prozac revolution. And Nandamide, the same psychoactive that's in THC. In the body, it naturally occurs as an incredibly powerful pain reliever, stress reducer, might heighten creativity, may amplify lateral thinking, the ability to think outside the box. And you also get endorphins, really powerful painkillers.

In fact, endorphins are the internal version of external drug opiates, right? And there are 20 different endorphins found in the brain. And as a pleasure chemical, just to give you an idea, the most common is 100 times more potent than medical morphine. And by the way, all of these neurochemicals, these are endogenous, meaning internal to our brain. They have exogenous, meaning external drug things that bond to the same thing. And these are drugs of abuse, right? Endorphins are opiates. Dopamine is cocaine. Norepinephrine is speed.

Anandamide is THC. What am I forgetting? Serotonin, which is LSD or MDMA, depending on the pathway it takes in the brain, right? So when you say flow is this huge cocktail of pleasure chemicals, and flow may be the only time we get access access these are five of the most addictive neurochemicals in the world and if this is the only time you get all five at once now we can start to understand why is flow so autotelic it's the most addictive experience on earth what are you kidding but just to put it in context curiosity what is curiosity oh it's a

little bit of norepinephrine, a little bit of dopamine. Passion, which is built out of curiosity, it's a lot of dopamine and a lot of norepinephrine. Purpose, which is built out of passion, is that same norepinephrine and dopamine now coupled to a bunch of the pro-social neurochemicals like oxytocin or endorphins or serotonin, right? And so forth. So when we are motivated, depending on what level, the brain is giving us more and more of these reward chemicals. And since these reward chemicals are multi-tools, they don't just make us feel better, they make us perform better. Now you start to understand why flow, right, is a state of peak performance where we feel and perform our best at the same time. Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating. And as you describe that, Stephen, I can't help but think that, so I've been thinking a lot about flow and happiness recently. And you

just mentioned maybe five minutes ago that the people who access flow the most have the highest scores on life satisfaction questionnaires, i.e. by certain definitions, they would be regarded as happier people. And it's... So that's actually wrong, but it's worth teasing apart. Yeah, let's do it. Cool. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven

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The first is that, let's just park this and get it out of the way. Flow states, you want more flow in your life? How do you do it? Flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. And the easy way to understand that is flow follows focus. It only shows up on the right here right now. Now there are 22 known balance. The idea here is we pay the most attention to the task and to what we're doing when the challenge that task slightly exceeds our skills, right? So you want to stretch but not snap. So this is psychologically not on but pretty close to the midpoint between boredom, not enough stimulation here, I'm not paying any attention, anxiety, whoa, way too much. In between is a sweet spot known as the flow channel. To put that more familiarly, we hit that sweet spot when you're

a little bit outside your comfort zone. So you have to get to do this work. You got to get a little uncomfortable with being uncomfortable, pushing on your skills. Okay, let's take that a chunk of information, park it for half a second, and return to your question. What positive psychologists talk about now predominantly, and this is a lot of Martin Seligman has worked on this cup a lot of people have contributed to these ideas um there are three levels of happiness that are available to human

beings level one happiness how do you feel hedonically right here right now in this moment and what we've learned about that level is there is not, because of nature and nurture, there isn't a whole lot you can do on that level. You can, as Dan Harris pointed out, probably get about 10% happier. But because of something called emotional set points, by the time we're 10, 11, or 12, we have a low point and a high point, and our whole life is going to take place pretty much in between. Now, we now know that those can move a little bit, and certain experiences can really mess with them. But as a general rule, they don't move, and that's our lives, which is why you can make yourself about 10% happier.

which is why you can make yourself about 10% happier. And you know, you want to do that gratitude, mindfulness, regular exercise. If you really want to nail it, do regular exercise in the outdoors, you know, so you can make yourself 10% happier. That's level one of happiness. That's what's, that's what we know. What's level two. This is literally they call it engagement or enjoyment. But what does that mean? It's a high flow lifestyle. And this means that you just have regular access to flow. This could be flow at work. There are tons of high flow jobs. Coding is a very high flow job. My job, writing, very high flow job. Being any kind of a creative is

a very high flow job. Being an architect, on and on. Being a doctor, all these are very high flow jobs. Or I live in Tahoe. It's a mountain area. The bunch of dudes around me who, like, they work construction jobs all summer so they can ski all winter. Or they work construction jobs all winter so they can mountain bike or fish all summer. You know, take your pick. Those are high-flow activities. So this is the second level of happiness available to all of us, right? You can get 10% happier on the first level.

But on the second level, if you figure out a way to live in which to get regular access to flow, now you've skipped up a level. Now you're getting into life satisfaction and actual well-being, right? Highest, the best we get to feel, what the research pretty much shows is it's a high flow lifestyle and the things that are producing flow make the world a better place for other people. You want to take the focus off yourself, put it on other people, put it on animals, put it on plants, put it on the ecosystem as a whole, but you want to make the world a better place. And if you can get flow while making the world a better place, that seems to be the best we get to feel on this planet.

better place that seems to be the best we get to feel on this planet so flow is now you know standard part of our definition of uh level two and three of happiness but here's the kicker and this is why i talked about the challenge skills balance and this is what i wanted to go back to and this is why you're wrong about that one that one thing that you were talking about and this is interesting if you have a high flow lifestyle or you have a high flow lifestyle that's tied about that one thing that you were talking about, and this is interesting. If you have a high flow lifestyle or you have a high flow lifestyle that's tied to purpose, the higher two levels, you are, by definition, you are making good use of the challenge skills balance. You're pushing on your skills to the utmost again and again and again and again, which means most of your daily experience is uncomfortable. It's not pleasant.

What is pleasant is the unbelievable satisfaction of a job well done again and again and again. Right. And little victory after like we like that more. after like we like that more but on a moment by moment experience flow actually a high flow lifestyle may actually make you a little less happy in the moment because you're always pushing so hard yeah no i love that and i mean one of the things when we talk about happiness or a lot of people talk about it, they're just talking about level one. They're talking about more hedonistic experiences, more experiences that in the moment make us feel good. Oh, I'm happy because I've just done this thing that makes me feel good. Whereas I don't really feel that that's the, you know, level two and level three, as you describe

it, I feel, although it's still called happiness, it very different isn't it it's much beyond that just hedonistic pleasure and i think that's really what people are craving i agree with that completely i think you want fleeting versus enduring right is really exactly right is is really the difference you know i i did this for years as an experiment until I can now kind of say this with confidence. But for almost 30 years, I would ask almost everybody I met, the people who had accomplished amazing things, you know, to tell me about the stuff in their life that they're proudest of, that has led to the most life satisfaction and well-being, that has led to enduring peak performance, meaning like it was an experience where they trained up so many skills that everything is different afterwards. Not once in 30 years of asking people this question, did anybody ever tell me about a time they sort of got lucky?

And so it was just given to them right like those are not the things you hear about you hear about the things that took 10 years of really hard work that's what people talk about over and over and over again that's the stuff that we're proud of that's the stuff that and i think that's the same for almost everybody we know what i mean when we look inside a little bit and we think that's the same for almost everybody. We know what I mean. When we look inside a little bit and we think, well, what am I proud of? What made the biggest difference in my life? It's never the time we got lucky because you can't trust that. The problem is luck while cool and phenomenal. You, it doesn't, there's no guaranteed luck or whatever that is, is going to

happen again. Right. And the human brain likes patterns like safety and security and patterns that can be repeated over and over and over again. That's one of the things that really makes us happy and luck doesn't fit that. Yeah, I love that. And it sort of fits with this thing that we intuitively know that anything worthwhile in our life usually has had an element of struggle to it. You've had to work hard. You hit a roadblock along the way. You got frustrated. You had to overcome it. And then when you get there, man, I'm four books and I'm currently writing my fifth book. And man, you've written more than me. But that process of, you know, I'm at that phase at the moment where, oh man, I just can't, you know, it's, it feels like a

struggle. It feels like, but I bumped into someone yesterday when I went out for a walk, who said he has again, I said, what I said was like, I'm at that phase, which I know I always go through, which is a struggle, but I know it's necessary because actually that's what makes it worthwhile when you get to that end point. Yeah. So I want to tell you a story first, and then I want to explain something really amazing neurobiologically about peak performance that relates totally to this. The first is just, I always used to say to people that guaranteed, I've written 13 books, 14 books now, if you're counting the one I'm working on. At one, at some point or another, in every one of them, I end up screaming, face down on my office floor, punching the floor.

And for years, I was almost mortified by it. You know what I mean? By the fact that my book were, and then I heard this interview with David Foster Wallace, one of my giant heroes, the novelist. And he said, and I wish I could find this again and that all i almost believe that it didn't happen because because i can't find it again but he said in this interview that i think i heard you know it never fails but once a book i end up screaming sobbing punching the floor and i can't figure out how i got there and i literally literally went at that moment, oh my God, it's not just me. And it turns out, not only is it not just me or you, David Foster, all this, here's, so we have been working in my lab at the Flow Research Collective on, for a couple of years now, on what happens in the brain during flow state onset as we transition into the state itself.

So what you could metaphorically call the first two seconds of flow. What happens in the brain during the first two seconds of flow? And here's what we've learned. It appears that before you can drop into flow, you will always have to trigger the fight response. Now, the fight response is there. People put them together, fight, freeze, flee, and they think it's the same response. And it's not. The fight response, it lives in the thalamus. The freeze and flee response is the amygdala. They live in different parts of the brain. They're

different responses. And when you self-stimulate, when humans self-stimulate the fight response, two things are interesting. There've been very few experiments on this because letting humans self-stimulate their brain is not something we do. But there've been a couple of experiments. And one, it seems to be people's favorite spot. We love stimulating this spot, but the feeling it generates is one of frustration. But we love the frustration because it's actually the frustration of leaning into a challenge that translates to courage. And courage may be our favorite feeling, but the actual experience is frustrating. Meaning you have to go through

that frustration if you want to get into flow. Frustration is a sign that you're moving in the right direction. So even though it sucks, you take it as a sign of progress because it actually is. We always say in peak performance, there's a couple things that are very counterintuitive. And one of them is your emotions don't mean what you think they mean. And part of that is frustration. Frustration does not, most people think frustration is a sign that they need to stop and back off. And in this work, it's often a sign that you need to keep going. And you're on the perfect track. I mean, I think that will be so reassuring for many people who are consuming the podcast at the moment, because whoever we are in whatever job we've

got, there's always going to be a project on or something that we find challenging, right? And therefore you're sort of framing it and saying, Hey, that struggle is part of the process. You're sort of framing it and saying, hey, that struggle is part of the process. But I guess it has to be the right struggle. Because if you're struggling over the wrong thing or your boss has made you do something that you don't want to do and you don't enjoy, the struggle is not going to be the kind of preconditions of flow there, is it? It's going to have a slight difference yeah as a general rule um when it comes to you've got a job and your boss says you know you don't you like your boss you like your job he says do this so she says do this you don't want to do that what you have to do is reframe the task around an opportunity for mastery right so this used to happen to me all the time when I was coming up as

a journalist. I was young. I was poor. I had to take whatever work came my way. I mean, one of the reasons I'm often credited as being one of the most successful freelance journalists in the history of magazine journalism, and that's because I was poor. I needed the work, man. I'll take any, like I took any job you could possibly give me, which meant I had to write about a ton of shit that I was not interested in. And when you've got to live inside a story for three months, you know what I mean and really like that's that's a detriment to creative work so I'd have to find the thing inside the story so maybe I hate the whole story but I'm going to try to write it in the style of Charles Dickens because that's gives

me the opportunity to get better at writing which is this thing I love or maybe I hate the entire story but it gives me the opportunity to learn to get along with difficult people because the people I'm interviewing are difficult. And that's something I'm going to have to do over the course of my life to be successful so I can use it. You got to find autonomy and freedom inside the thing you're doing. why attention and autonomy are coupled. So if you can't pay full attention to something, you can't perform at your best. And you can't pay full attention to something if you don't feel like you're pursuing it

out of your own desire, out of free will. feel like you're pursuing it out of your own desire out of free will um so even if you hate it find a reason to learn something from it anyways um otherwise it's otherwise it's really difficult but if you can do that then it affords you the opportunity for flow and and mastery and a whole bunch of other stuff. So that's sort of the secret to that situation. But burnout we've discovered, which is really common to executives today, everybody today, I think, especially post-COVID, we found that if you have sort of a rather active recovery protocol in place, meaning like you don't finish work and drink a beer and watch television, you finish work and go for a long walk in nature or take an Epsom salt bath or restorative yoga or infrared sauna or get a massage or be smart about it so there's a recovery and regular access to flow those two things um and you're getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night we have discovered it's very hard to burn out it's almost impossible to burn out with those things what you said about burnout there really struck me burnout

is super common yes in the executive population but i think, but I think it's common in all grades and whatever your job status is. I think we're seeing it. I'm certainly coming across it more and more in my work. And when I sort of talk for companies, I'm seeing it everywhere. And so what you said there was, if I've got it right, it was regular active recovery, regular access to flow state and seven to eight hours of sleep a night makes it almost impossible to burn out. So let's just break that down. When you say active recovery as opposed to passive recovery, you did give some examples, but can you just explain what the difference is? Because I think at the moment, what I see in my patient population is many people will come back or they finished a long day on Zooms at work if they're working from home and relaxation is the

glass of wine and the television. Why is a more active form of recovery better what what does it do to our biology okay so um i am not not a fan of booze or tv right i'm not saying booze or tv are bad and you shouldn't do them but what i will say is if you're interested in significant peak performance, ongoing. So when you finish the day and you want to relax, problem with booze is once you have really more than like one glass of whatever, it starts messing with your sleep cycles. So you cannot get seven, eight hours of sleep a night. You're going to start running at a detriment, not pretty much instantly. It's hard to make that up, which is the problem with one of the big problems with booze. There are a couple others, but that's one of the bigger ones.

And then if you're drinking more than two or three, you're hungover, right? And now you're drinking, you know, more than two or three, you're hung over. Right. And now you're now you're like now forget peak performance, like you're hung over. Right. Like, so, okay. So that's the problem with booze, which is not like, I like to tell people shake the snow globe and go on vacation every now and again from your brain. I'm fine with booze and drugs. I really am. Like I got, I've got no judgment. I find they're very effective tools. Sometimes when you can't take a vacation, you can't whatever, but you just want to shut it off. But there's a huge physical penalty on the other side of that.

And you better spend sleeping the entire next day than trying to go to work. TV, here's the problem. For real recovery, you have to spend a bunch of time, you have to change your brainwaves. So brainwaves normally are when we're awake and we're alert and paying attention to the world, they're in beta. It's a fast moving wave, wave. Right now, you and I are having a conversation with both in beta. If I crank beta up, give you a high beta wave, that's anxiety. Underneath beta is alpha. Alpha is daydreaming mode. It's where you're going from thought to thought without a lot of resistance of resistance underneath that is theta theta is REM sleep it's where you're going from thing to thing with no internal resistance right

REM sleep you know in in alpha you may think of a green sweater and it might remind you of a green turtle right like that you might predict but in theta the green sweater becomes a green turtle, right? Like that, you might predict it. But in theta, the green sweater becomes the green turtle, becomes the green planet, becomes the green universe, becomes the incredible Hulk who's, right, it's just one after, leads to the next, leads to the next kind of thing. Flow, by the way, takes place on the borderline

between alpha and theta. Television, you need, what are all the techniques that you and I were talking about? Restorative yoga, a long walk in nature, Epsom salt baths, what all those do. As a general rule, they help flush cortisol and some of the stress hormones out of our system, and they help kick the brain towards alpha. Alpha seems to be be some time and alpha seems to be what we need to recover here's the problem with tv tv makes us feel passively like we're in alpha it makes you feel like you're relaxing tv even if you're dealing with like acorn TV, slow British dramas, right? Even then, anytime there's a quick cut between things, you have what's known as a salience network,

right? This is a novelty detector and it's scouring the world at all times for anything new and novel. And it's doing this because one, anything new and novel could be a danger, could be a threat, might want to run away from it, or could be an opportunity, could be something to eat, could be something to mate with, right? So we have a salience network. It's hyper-tuned. And as soon as there's a quick cut, that's a novel perspective change. Oh, my God, novelty. So even though you feel like you're chilling out, your brain is going from alpha, jumping up to beta every time.

And if there's any violence in what you're watching or anything else like that, it's going to high beta. And even though it feels like you're relaxing, you're not. So your brain is not recovering. And if you couple the not recovery of television to booze, and you do this consistently as your way of unwinding night after night after night, you're not recovering at all. at all. Regular access to your primary flow activity is sort of part of that as well. And more than anything else, to put it colloquially, flow is when we feel most alive. And it's really hard to get through hard days, hard times without that feeling. Now, if people are working from home and for Zoom, there's other things we can layer into this that are sort of how do you survive in a crisis? We can add on to that, whatever. But for burnout, regular access to what we call your primary flow

activity. Primary flow activity is that thing that you've done all your life. It could be skiing, surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, dancing to hip hop, dancing salsa, playing chess, walking your dog, whatever it is. Everybody's got a primary flow activity and you want to double down on that in times of stress for sure. But you definitely want regular access to that. And this is key. So we're talking about two things that busy executives or busy, let's not even say executives, busy 21st century citizens don't like to do, right? They don't like to play because we're adults now and we're going to put down childish things and i'm not going surfing and i'm not going skiing and i don't get to go out and dance to hip-hop anymore because i've got an adult and i have responsibility right i've got kids and i've got

family and i've got you know i gotta put away childish things and it's just a disaster and it's the rest we were burnout primary flow. Primary flow, you gave some great examples. Could this be for someone a 30-minute walk in nature? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. By the way, the most common flow states on Earth are reading. You always know reading flow is, so it doesn't happen. It usually happens when you're reading something that's a little bit intellectually challenging and makes you think.

So when your brain starts pinballing from idea to idea to idea like you're totally engrossed and then suddenly you have that insight and it leads right then that's reading flow very common so yeah this could be whatever works for you um and it could vary from week to week or season to season or month you know what i mean some months it could be from week to week or season to season or month. You know what I mean? Some months it could be you're learning to cook and being in the kitchen is the most flowy thing you could possibly do. And some months it's playing with your kids. And so, you know, like there's lots of activities here that work, but you have to double down on it. And the reason is this three things are really key. on it. And the reason is this, three things are really key.

Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is

also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision-making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things

it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them

and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. One, especially if you're fighting burnout or if you're just fighting crisis like COVID, 21st century life right now. One, as we move into flow,

21st century life right now. One, as we move into flow, stress hormones are flushed out of our system. There's a global release of nitric oxide. It's a gas-less stickling molecule. It's everywhere in the body. It pushes stress hormones out of our system. So you're automatically resetting the nervous system. This is another reason that primary flow activities are so important, A, to combat in crises, and B, to pausing burnout, because they flush the stress hormones from your system, they reset the nervous system. Secondly, the same neurochemicals that show up in flow, besides performance, enhancement, pleasure, they boost the immune system. pleasure, they boost the immune system. So you're getting an immune system boost, you're resetting the nervous system, you're getting an immune system boost, which is important for staving off for an outer covenant crisis as well. Here's the coolest part, the increase in motivation, possibly definitely increase in creativity. We know this from work

that was done at Harvard. These are massive increases, by the way. Depending on whose numbers you're going for, flow will amplify creative problem solving 400% to 700%. It's a huge amplification in creative problem solving. And that heightened creativity, and this is Teresa Amabile's work at Harvard, and this is Teresa Mablo's work at Harvard, outlasts the flow state by a day, maybe two. So one of the reasons this matters in crisis situations or burnout situations, you want that creativity because it's how you get the fuck out of the bad situation you're in. You need it, right? So you've got one state, primary flow activity that's going to reset your nervous system, boost your immune system,

heighten creativity, and heighten motivation, and generally increase overall well-being and life satisfaction. That is, so when we work at the Flow Research Collective, we work with everybody. We train about 1,000 people a month. But on average, they're peak performers. Now, we could be doing – these could be insurance brokers from Delhi or stock brokers from Munich or soccer moms from Indiana. Like it doesn't matter, but they're just interested in peak performance or to U.S. Navy SEALs or CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. And here's what's interesting. When I teach active recovery, for example, or primary flow activity, these are grit skills to peak performers. They require grit. That's why in Art Impossible impossible i have actor recovery is a grit skill peak performers don't like to

shut it down you don't want to stop you want to always go go go but the lesson here there's two really big lessons in peak performance the first is your emotions don't mean what you think they mean the second is a lot of times you got to to go slow to go fast. This is one of those times you have to go slow to go fast. Burnout is so costly. Any kind of stress and anxiety is costly. Burnout is so exceptionally costly to performance. It will set you back so far that you have to stay ahead of that curve. So you've got to go slow to go fast.

Yeah. to stay ahead of that curve. So you got to go slow to go fast. Yeah. Primary flow, um, activities. How often do you recommend people access them? Because obviously it depends if it's skiing and you don't live near a mountain while you're going to struggle. Um, like where it's a 30 minute walk in nature, if you can get into flow doing that. And I that and i wonder where that comes into flow because if we have to hit that challenge um sort of sweet spot where it's hard enough yeah it's totally accessible i can walk i can break that down for you but yeah i mean get into flow any way you possibly can more important than your primary flow activity what we have found and i think it's first of all you got to start by starting right like if you've got 10 minutes a week then you've

got 10 minutes a week that's what you're doing if you've got 20 great what the research seems to show and i think we need way more research on this particular thing um but the way research seems to show that about an afternoon a week is is sort of the minimal requirement now you could split that and by afternoon i mean like three to four hours right now you could split that up half an hour half an hour hour, half an hour, right? 20 minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, however you want to do it. That seems to be what works best. But I think there's going to be a lot of individual variation.

I think it's going to change over time. I think it's going to change with age. It may be different men to women. So run the experiment for yourself. But three four hours is is sort of what we see and so for a primary flow activity how do you walk yourself into flow i do this all the time um i do this every day in fact um though uh so i start my day with a four-hour writing session i write every morning from 4 a.m to about 8 a.m um and then i take my dogs for a hike in the back country i live in the mountains and i just walk out the door and go up the mountain and um sometimes this is just

an active recovery process i'm just going for a walk. Or sometimes, especially if the writing was a real struggle, right, and it didn't put me into flow, right? Usually writing will drop me into flow. But if it didn't, and I'm really frustrated, then I will do a flow walk. So what's a flow walk? we have something called exercised induced transient hypofrontality the temporary deactivation of the prefrontal cortex of the part of your brain that's right back here this is why all those strange things happen and flow for example why does time pass so strangely and flow when you go out and for a walk in nature and you walk depending on your fitness level about 20 to 40 minutes it gets quiet upstairs right it gets that shuts off now that's not flow but it's the edge of flow and you've now produced one of the conditions one of the major conditions that has to happen in the flow if you now want to so this can just go out for a walk 20 to 40 minutes now and you may want to time this

ahead of time meaning because you there's a location thing that's going to matter here so you're not probably going to get this right the first time out but at the point that you tend to for me it's about i'd say 30 minutes of hiking uphill you know slowly with my dogs in the morning it'll quiet things quiet down once that happens you want to introduce some dopamine into the system um usually the easiest way to do this, I do it with risk. I hike up a hill and then I run down the hill. If you don't want to do it with risk or you want a lesser version, hike into the forest and then just jog through a forest. Just weaving in and out of the trees is going to be enough. It's novelty. It'll be enough new visual stimulation novelty also gives you dopamine so you don't need risk you can just have novelty um unpredictability will also give you that dopamine

so take a walk into a part of the city that you don't you've never been to before where there's lots of novel things to look at that will do the same sort of thing and then i like to like or if that once you've got a little bit of dopamine in your system if you really want flow at that point um i try to exhaust myself i basically like what i'll do is i'll hike for 20 minutes go uphill really hard for five minutes, and then run downhill for five minutes. And then you're essentially in a low-grade flow state. So 20-minute walk, I would make things more vigorous for like five minutes. That's just to get a little bit of endorphins and anandamide, the painkiller, right? And then you want to introduce some dopamine. So walk until it's quiet upstairs, make it hard.

But just for a brief, you don't need a, you don't need a lot of hard. You just need like 30 seconds to a couple of minutes just to get a little bit of pain, natural painkiller flowing. And then you want some dopamine. And that is either novelty or risk. and anybody can do that pretty much anywhere yeah i love that and it's i mean the benefits i can i can just see a profound you know whether it's you're trying to deal with burnout just generalized stress whether you're trying to solve a problem and your work that you can't solve. You've written about the impact of nature on our neurobiology also, right? Yeah.

So if you walk in nature, right, you're also getting, you know, additional benefits. And if you walk in nature someplace where you can find really wide vistas to look at, that's even additional benefits. But like walking in nature where you can see far and wide, it's really freaking good for you. And it's going to outperform pretty much any antidepressant in the market. And then if you add in a flow hike to boot, you're doing some good stuff for yourself. Does it matter if you are listening to music and or podcasts when you walk walk? And the reason I ask this is because clearly it's very, very popular these days. I do it myself sometimes, but I've

also noticed sometimes if I'm really busy in my head, if there's been lots of, I'm trying to process a lot of stuff, let's say for writing and all these different ideas. And I sometimes start walking with a podcast on, I say, no, I don't want all this noise. I just want peace. I want calm and, and I'll either move to relaxing music or I'll take my earphones off and just listen to the wind and the birds or whatever. So I think this is really interesting. So I think podcasts are, you don't want, you want your brain, turning off right you need it to go from beta awake and alert down to the alpha theta borderline to get into flow you can only do that if you're not you really using too much brain power or if you're reading you can get into reading flow you

can kind of like one thing, but hiking, walking, that's going to be taking your energy. And I think you, it's a limited thing. Flow is a high energy state. As it gives you energy or it takes your energy? Well, both, both. It gives you a lot of energy, but it takes a lot of energy. So if you want to be in flow on a regular basis, you gotta, you know,

you have to hydration, nutrition hydration nutrition seven eight hours of sleep a night these things matter because these are high energy states right um so that that that's part of it uh as well yeah wow there's just so much so much to think about with respect to these things i wanted to move on to emotional intelligence. It was a really interesting section in the book on emotional intelligence and what's the relationship between emotional intelligence and peak performance. But then also what really struck me in that section was that you wrote about empathy and you said that empathy is an easily trainable skill. Now, I don't think most people think it is.

I think many people think you're either born with it, you're either, you've, you've intuitively can be, can, can practice empathy with other people or you can't. So that really just made me stop and pause and reflect a little bit. So I wonder if you could explain a little bit around those, those areas. Emotional intelligence and empathy. So let's start with emotional intelligence and empathy. So let's start with emotional intelligence. Positive psychology has spent 30 years sort of outlining what are the peak performance basics.

There are cognitive basics and there are physical basics. On the physical side, we've been talking about you need hydration and nutrition to maintain proper energy levels. You need seven, eight hours of sleep a night you need a third thing on the physical side that people often don't talk about on the physical side which is social support when you do not have a robust social support network and i don't mean you know lots of people i mean you may know only a handful of people, but they love you and you love them. And there's a deep relationship there and you regularly check in. Why does this matter? Whenever you encounter a challenge, right? Your brain says, oh, here's a problem. Is this a

challenge or is it a threat? Now this is all day, every day for all of us, right? You're always encountering stuff, and you're like, challenge your threat, challenge your threat. And when your brain makes that determination, one of the things it asks is, hey, do you got posse? Because if you're solo, man, solving that challenge, it's a threat. And I got to sound the alarm bell. Here's some anxiety. Here's some stress. But if you've got posse, you've got people around who love you, help you, will pick you up if you fall down or et cetera, et cetera.

Now, oh wait, maybe it's just a challenge and you can rise to the occasion. So on a fundamental level, social support, emotional intelligence matters because you have to maintain remote robust social networks just to sort of be able to perform at your best more importantly at a really kind of mercenary statement between you and your dreams other people lie like it's just there's no way around it there are other people standing between you and your dreams. Maybe these people are going to be in your way and you're going to have to find ways

to move around them. There are obstacles and maybe they're there to help you out and you can find ways. And if you can get along with them, you can really get farther faster. But either way, if you want to navigate that situation quickly, and you really want to get where you're going, emotional intelligence matters. And to put it another way, peak performance is hard. Life in general is difficult. And if you're going after high, hard goals, which is what peak performance is really about well it's going to be even harder why would you not train emotional intelligence it's i mean it just doesn't make any sense right it gives you better energy levels at a foundational level we know by the way that you know chris peterson has

the positive psychologist who's at the university of michigan um has said that you can summarize 30 years of positive psychology in a single phrase which is other people matter right like that's what he's talking about we need other people we're social creatures we need other people and they're going to be between you and wherever you're going anyways now what i say when it comes to emotional intelligence is, first of all, it's readily trainable, right? Like I tell people to take an 80-20 approach to it, right? But tend to get 80% of our results from 20% of our efforts. What really matters the most when it comes to emotional intelligence?

Where are the things that, where do you get the most mileage? Active listening, right? That means that when I'm in a conversation with you, I'm not thinking about the cool, where are the things that where do you get the most mileage active listening right that means that when i'm in a conversation with you i'm not thinking about the cool witty thing i'm going to say next or that sarcastic thing you might have just maybe said so i'm just paying attention to you i'm listening to you i'm not judging you i'm not thinking about what i'm going to say next i'm paying attention to you and listening to you and when when it's my turn to speak, then I speak. Then I start. You know what I mean?

That's active listening. The other thing is empathy. Now, empathy is totally cultivatable. There are a couple of really easy ways to do it. The simplest way is to get into flow more often. We know flow foundationally expands empathy. It expands perspective taking, our ability to see things from other perspectives. So you have more empathy when you come out of flow state? Yeah. In fact, we are doing, you know, you'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to be

ignoring the situation that's been happening in America with the police forces. So we have been doing a lot of work with a phenomenal organization called Blue Courage that works with Chicago police, San Francisco police, et cetera, et cetera. And they're working with us because they're interested in flow for peak performance, but peak performance right now for the police means empathy. They're training with us. Yeah, they want more flow. They want to be better at their job and all that stuff, but they need empathy. Otherwise, we're looking at an open revolt in America if the cops don't figure out how to get it together on that stuff. So we, the Flow Research Collective, have been very busy training police forces in flow because they want empathy.

training police forces in flow because they want empathy but if you you know if if flow isn't if you don't have the regular access to flow if that's not you know your way in or you want to boost it dad dan goldman and uh richard davidson um have done significant amount of research into compassion inducing meditation they've worked with the dalai lama and um i'm not going to just look up compassion enhancing meditation or read the art impossible um because it's in there it's fairly easy to learn how to do and they've discovered that i want to say it's two weeks it may be a month but two weeks of 20 minutes a day of this form of mindfulness is for it's a it's a breath work plus visualization training basically um will significantly expand empathy so empathy is very very very trainable and for going a to b it's i

mean it's a weapon. It's a skill to get you through every day with every interaction, right? You have to understand, like, I'm an introvert, as I said. And I don't love people in a general role. I've been massively successful. One of the reasons I've been so successful is when I was a little kid, I made a living as a professional magician, did birthday parties and bar mitzvahs.

And then I became a bartender and then I became a journalist. What do those jobs have in common? You have to talk to strangers a lot. You've got to find common ground with anyone. Right. In magic, you've got to find the common ground so that you can then pull that common ground out from under the person. In bartending, you've got to find that common ground because I need your tips to live. And in journalism, I got to find that common ground because I got to get the story. But either way, I was forced to develop emotional intelligence.

I probably came at mine the hard way, but it's such an advantage. It's such an easy skill to get. Yeah, no, I love that. And I just want to really get an understanding just to make it super practical for people. Flow, right? We're clearly from what you're saying and from what the research shows, we want to access flow more often. It will have multiple benefits in our life. So if I think about my own life, I think there's multiple things that I do, including book writing that gets me into flow. But in terms of discrete activities, I meditate first thing every morning as part of my morning routine for about 15 minutes. Some days, it just feels like it's happening. I'm in the zone and everything just quietens. Other

days, it doesn't. I'm just, you know, paying attention to my talking busy mind. That's one thing I do. I like walking or running. And I often find that my brain can switch off, that the prefrontal cortex can just quieten and I have a new perspective when I get back. But the other thing is typically something I do in the evenings is my son and I really like snooker. like snooker. Billiards pool. We've got a snooker table at home. And I used to play as a kid and this sort of stuff. But I've realized now in my early 40s, like if I'm on my way to bed and the kids are asleep and I just pass the sort of snooker room, I'll go in and I am so obsessed with the game. Like I love trying to learn new shots, new kinds of spin. I love the sound when the balls clink together.

I love watching the reaction come off the cushion with different levels of check spin depending on how much you've delivered. I honestly feel I get in flow when I'm at that snooker table because time stands still. And, you know, I'm just mesmerized in that process. So from what I'm describing, would you say meditation, walking, running and snooker gets me into flow? How do I know? Is it important to know? Meditation was the first question. Let's start there.

There was, so the short version is, there are differences between meditation and flow. They're not the same state. They share a lot of underlying properties. So Judson Brewer at Yale has done some really interesting work on meditation. One of the things that we seem to think happens in most flow states, if not all, is the medial prefrontal cortex, the very middle of your prefrontal cortex, almost every other parts of the prefrontal cortex shut down and flow, as I mentioned, transient hyperfrontality. This part seems to get really active. Why? Does a bunch of different jobs. One of the things it does is creative self-expression.

Flow is all about creative self-expression. That's what is going on. You're always sort of, it doesn't matter what you're doing. You could be playing snooker. You could be, right? But in meditation, self is trying to go away. No self, right? So this portion of the brain gets really quiet. So the different states, but back in the, I want to say the 80s, sort of the god of intention research, Michael Posner, super great guy. He pointed out, hey, I think meditation would be really good training for flow this was back before anybody had any idea how to train flow and he pointed this out really way ahead of his time and it turns out yeah we train people um we often use box breathing you can look that up on the internet um it's a it's a it's a

breathwork protocol developed primarily by former navy seal mark devine um we like it because it just tends to train a bunch of different things at once including focus and also um i got a really busy brain so like if your brain is like mine if your brain is hyperactive box breathing is is a really like it's it's an easy way to distract yourself for 15 minutes and anybody like you can the research shows that you need 11 minutes minimum of focus breathing a day to really sort of regulate your nervous system if you want to use mindfulness that way um so box breathing i find is a really fast way to pass those 11 minutes anyways um meditation not is not flow but it's really good training for flow because it focus it teaches you focus so second question was walking and running we sort

of covered walking i guess before but we covered walking running is um if you want more flow in your life there are 22 flow triggers, right? I break them all down at the end of the Art of Impossible. There's a whole section on it. Running for certain people is totally a fact of those flow triggers. I'll tell you that I have been running on and off since I was 16.

I am probably one of the world's leading experts on flow, and I've been running since I was 16, and we all talk about runner's high, which is a low-grade version of flow. I have not once ever run myself into a flow state. It doesn't happen to me while running. But for certain people, running is packed with flow triggers. But this is where personality comes into play. These 22 flow triggers, they all work by driving attention to the present moment. They will work for everybody. But which triggers are you're most susceptible to to are going

to work best for you? Totally individual, based on your personality. And it's not going to be fixed in time, right? The triggers that are going to work for you today could be different by next Friday. Probably won't, but they're probably going to be different 10 years from now, right? That sort of thing. So running is a maybe but for you yes very flow and we covered walking the final one was okay so snooker snooker uh i was i was laughing when you were saying this because one of the earliest lessons i learned in micro flow was uh i played a lot of pool. And what I discovered is, for me, if I want to maintain my micro flow state while playing,

I can't talk to anybody. Same with golf. It's really easy to lose focus for me. Now, I don't know if this is true for everybody. Again, this is a personality thing so novelty complexity and unpredictability are all flow triggers um so is autonomy mastery challenge skills balance if you're trying to learn new shots, you're pushing it, right? All these things are flow triggers. So yeah, of course, very high flow game. And the final question was, does it help to know you're in flow? And the answer is yes. It helps for a couple of reasons. One, the goal has got to be to turn microflow into macroflow most people don't notice when they're in microflow in fact there was uh recent research that shows we spend about five percent

of our work life in microflow five percent automatically it just happens right even if you're not trying um and uh if you notice it you can stretch that out, right? You can protect your flow states in various ways, but protecting yourself from interruption or distraction or that sort of thing. That's one thing. You can turn microflow into macroflow by proper usage of flow's triggers, right? This is when you walk yourself and exercise induced transient hyperfrontality and then you run down the hill to get some dopamine or run up the hill to get

some endorphins right you've noticed you were in micro flow and now you're pushing it to macro flow because you know what you're doing that's also really helpful and the third reason is this is very true macro flow the really potent flow states. Has anybody ever been in one? I can tell you they're incredibly pleasurable, but pattern recognition is all turned up. Anything you look at is going to lead to a new idea, to a new idea, to a new idea. You have to have, I always say that if you haven't spent a lot of time in flow, most people sort of act like stone teenagers for the first time.

Like people get stoned for the first time and they're like, Oh, look at the sky. Look at the pretty lights. Look at the right. Like it's all distraction, distraction, distraction. That'll happen in flow. Same neural chemicals, dopamine and anandamide that are producing that in marijuana, they show up in flow. You're going to act the same way. That's not useful, right? Flow is a great state for performance.

You don't want to waste it. You don't want to be frivolous with it. You want to identify it and be able to drill down in it. The other thing that I think is finally the most important thing, so at the Flow Research Collective, we don't have a lot of swag. We don't have blood t-shirts or stuff that we follow. We have one t-shirt and it says, never trust the dopamine. The reason it says never trust the dopamine is dopamine is a wonderful reward chemical it feels really really good um but not every idea you have when pattern recognition is turned way up is a good idea so you have to

be able to just because it feels like the truth with a capital t, right? Doesn't mean, I always say that there's an order to this. Insight, then research, right? Then publication, then communication. And that's how I train my staff. Meaning have whatever dopamine addled insight you want to have, get all excited about it. But then you don't get to stand in a stump and preach it to the world as gospel which is what everybody does is that's the personality doesn't scale thing that's what everybody does but you don't get to do that you have your inspiration and now you do way more research to figure out was it real we tell people all the time we teach people don't go shopping if we're going to train you in to go we teach people, don't go shopping.

If we're going to train you to go get in the flow, don't drop yourself in the flow and then like go clothes shopping or something like that. Unless you really have an unlimited budget, because like in flow, pattern recognition is amplified. Everything looks good right you're in your idea to single-handedly revise 70s poly disco fashion it's going to seem great at the mall and then you're going to get home and be like oh what am i doing i wonder is i wonder if that's to do with you know when you know when you've i used to be like this when i used to go a lot of rock concerts, you'd be that probably, you probably have experienced collective flow. It's something we didn't get into today. We can do next time. I'm sure. But, um, you know, you're, you're, you're buzzing at the end of that concert and then you pass the merchandise store and suddenly, you know, I walk out with four different

t-shirts and then you come home. You're did i need four of these things you know you know what you know what the funny i noticed this yesterday i do this thing where i'll be writing in the morning and i'll i'll have a tangent it's usually a tangent it very rarely happens when i'm actually like doing the thing i was supposed to be doing but I had a tangent and it reminds me of something and suddenly I'm like oh my god I need a t-shirt that says blah blah or I need a t-shirt that represents you know Hong Kong phooey like and then I'll like Amazon is just terrible right you're like anything you want and that's why like I literally have to remind myself because it's four o'clock in the morning and there's nothing like i literally have to remind myself because it's four o'clock in the morning and there's nothing like there's no one around to protect me from me and like if i've

been writing for a while and i'm deep in flow and suddenly like i want a break and something just moved me i'm like oh i gotta go buy a like no no no you don't no you don't that is so helpful because i'm sure a lot of people will actually resonate with that steven that in that in that sort of creative flow state you end up buying things just to close off like first of all you have shared so much information i really really appreciate it um the book the art of impossible is fantastic I really would recommend people pick up a copy. They're going to learn so much more than we covered in the conversation today. But just to finish off, Stephen, I always love to leave the listeners and the viewers

with some simple tips that they can utilize in their life to improve the quality of them. And you know so much, but could you leave my listeners with just three or four of your very top tips to enhance the quality of their lives double down on your primary flow activity right seven eight hours of sleep a night hydration nutrition regular access to social support um tune your your nervous system, right? The research shows there's three ways to keep your nervous system in check to perform at your best. You can do a five-minute gratitude practice.

You can do an 11-minute breathwork mindfulness practice. You can do 20 to 40 minutes of exercise, exercise until it's quiet upstairs, right, Tan? Though all three of those things help you regulate your nervous system because the challenge skills balance, right? Too much anxiety blocks flow. So helping to flush the anxiety out of your system on a regular basis really, really matters. Those are like where I start with the absolute basics.

The only other two things I'm going to say are this. We didn't talk much about flow triggers, but flow follows focus. It shows up best when all of our attention is the right here, right now. The first flow trigger is complete concentration. And what the research shows is that 90 minutes of uninterrupted concentration is the absolute best. In the same way that we dream 90-minute REM cycles, we have 90-minute waking alert cycles, same kind of biology. So I'm not saying if you – so what I like to do is start my day with my hardest task, the one that if I accomplish it, it's the biggest win for the day. And I try at least 90 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. I practice distraction management the night before.

So long before I'm sitting down at my desk at four o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the morning, my phone's off, my email's off, social media, anything that's going to distract me. I keep the lights in my office off. I look at my screen and focus for you. I literally, it's nothing but the words for me because that's what worked best, but distraction management. And if you don't have 90 minutes for uninterrupted concentration, cool, great. Start with five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. The single largest intervention that we've seen is 90 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. Start your work session with that to really block that off for flow. That plus a

primary flow activity, you're really getting far. By the way, one last thing about a primary flow activity. One of the reasons you really want to double down on that activity, I forgot to mention this earlier, flow is a focusing skill. The more flow you get, the more flow you get, right? Like you're training your brain. So I go skiing and get into flow. It seems like some, if not all of that skill, the way I'm using my brain, it shows up when I sit down to write or when I go to work and I'm running my company, right? So the more flow you get, the more flow you get, the more flow you get. So doubling down on your primary flow activity and starting your work session with a 90-minute block for uninterrupted concentration, you are really, really, really going to see increase the amount of flow in your life.

And since flow amplifies motivation, grit, productivity, creativity, learning, empathy, and environmental awareness, everything is suddenly going up, right? It also is amplifying strength, stamina, endurance, fast-witch muscle response, and a couple other things too. But like, whatever, you get it. Flow is superman or superwoman for each of us and it's accessible. Yeah. Stephen, thank you. You've shared so generously.

Thank you for your time. Thanks for writing a great book. And yeah, good luck on your next project. Thank you, sir. Good spending time with you. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, please do have a think right now about one thing that you can take away from this episode and apply into your own life. And of course, do check out Stephen's latest book, The Art of Impossible. And before we finish,

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