Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Find Focus and Avoid Burnout | Steven Kotler #315

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 189 of the podcast with Stephen Kotler, a human performance expert. In this clip, Stephen explains the link between the flow state and happiness, and he gives some great tips to help you access flow, avoid burnout, and feel and perform at your best. 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. Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we perform our best and we feel our best.

Starting point is 00:02:01 Everybody is hardwired to get into flow. And we feel our best. 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, all aspects of creative problem solving, empathy, environmental awareness, all of these things significantly increase in some studies, like up to 500% above baseline. 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 and awareness are going to start to merge your sense of self your sense of self-consciousness even bodily awareness they're 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

Starting point is 00:03:00 will go by in like five seconds and And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, tend to go through the roof. What you offer people with your wisdom, with your research, is relevant to each and every single one of us. I think if you ask anyone, we'd all say, yeah, actually, I would like to perform at my best. 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. You want more flow in your life?

Starting point is 00:03:38 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 triggers. There's probably way more, but there's 22. The most important one, what's often called the golden rule of flow, is known as the challenge skills balance.

Starting point is 00:04:03 The idea here is we pay the most attention to the task and what we're doing when the challenge that task slightly exceeds our skills, right? So you want to stretch but not snap. We hit that sweet spot when you're a little bit outside your comfort zone. So I've been thinking a lot about flow and happiness recently. You just mentioned 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. That's actually wrong, but it's worth teasing apart because it's cool. wrong but it's worth teasing apart yeah let's do it cool what positive psychologists talk about now predominantly um and this is a lot of martin seligman has worked on this scott barry 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.

Starting point is 00:05:05 How do you feel hedonically right here, right now in this moment? And what we've learned about that level is 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, which is why you can make yourself about 10% happier. And, you know, you want to do that gratitude, mindfulness, regular exercise.

Starting point is 00:05:48 If you really want to nail it, do regular exercise in the outdoors. So that's level one of happiness. 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.

Starting point is 00:06:11 This could be flow at work. There are tons of high flow jobs. Coding is a very high flow job. My job, writing, being any kind of a creative, 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.

Starting point is 00:06:49 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 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

Starting point is 00:07:32 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. 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. I don't really feel that that in the moment make us feel good oh i'm happy because i've just done this thing that makes me feel good was i i don't really feel that that's the the the you know level two and

Starting point is 00:08:30 level three as you describe it i feel although it's still called happiness it's very different isn't it it's much beyond that just hedonistic pleasure and i think that's really what people are craving fleeting versus enduring right is enduring, right, is really the difference. For almost 30 years, I would ask almost everybody I met, the people who had accomplished amazing things, 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

Starting point is 00:09:12 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 something 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 well what am i proud of what made the biggest difference in my

Starting point is 00:09:49 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 um 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 got to a, you hit a roadblock along the way, you got frustrated,

Starting point is 00:10:31 you had to overcome it. Because actually, that's what makes it worthwhile when you get to that endpoint. Burnout is super common. 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. 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 just, you have to stay ahead of that curve. 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 do go for a long walk in nature or take an Epsom salt bath or restorative yoga or, you know, be smart about it. So there's a recovery and regular access to flow. Those two things.

Starting point is 00:11:27 And you're getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night. We have discovered it's very hard to burn out. Flow is when we feel most alive. And right. It's really hard to get through hard days, hard times without that feeling. Now 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. Primary flow activity, you gave some great examples.

Starting point is 00:12:12 Could this be, for someone, a 30-minute walk in nature? Oh, yeah. By the way, the most common flow states on Earth are reading. You always know reading flow is is so it doesn't happen 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

Starting point is 00:12:54 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 what like there's lots of activities here that that work yeah just to finish off steven i always love to leave the listeners with some simple 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 nutrition, regular access to social support. Tune 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

Starting point is 00:13:43 until it's quiet upstairs, right, Tan? 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 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. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Find Focus and Avoid Burnout | Steven Kotler #315

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