Ideas - How to develop 'into the zone' hyper focus

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

You've likely experienced it: that state of being in the groove, on a roll, lost in the process. It's what researchers call 'flow': a state intimately familiar to athletes and artists — or anyone who's been fully absorbed in a given task to the point where time seems to stand still. In this state there's a sense of self disappearing, presenting a paradox between a state in which you lose yourself, yet become yourself. Writer and triathlete, Suzanne Zelazo, delves into the mystery at the heart of flow in this documentary.*This episode originally aired on June 25, 2021.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan, advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve.

Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.caver to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Before we start this ideas podcast, could you follow follow us on the app you're using. It's the easiest way to find out about new episodes as they drop.

On ideas, there's something for everyone. We talk to deep thinkers and produce compelling stories to help us better understand the world in which we live. The podcast is available every weekday, so our feed has lots to choose from. If you already follow us, thank you. Maybe you could give us a review or a rating. And if there's an episode you can't stop thinking about, please recommend it to a friend. Every little bit you do helps other listeners find ideas. Thank you so much for listening. Now on to today's podcast. For me, flow is, um, okay. I'm Nala Ayyad. Welcome to ideas. For me, flow is... To me, flow is basically the combination of good and hard. A balance of challenge and skill. I think that flow happens when... When those things overlap.

When everything's clicking. Things that should be difficult become easy. The Toronto Half Marathon in 2009, I had never run the time that I ran there. Suzanne Zelazzo is a Toronto-based writer and a former professional triathlete. It was really well beyond my fitness level, but I just stopped looking at my watch. And it appears when you let go. I just kept going and you let your body. play and it does these things that surprise you.

And then I ended up winning that, but I was struck by how easy it felt. When you're totally focused on the task at hand. There is a loss of sense of time. Flow is, um, I think part of it is complex. It's just so hard to put words on it, maybe because it doesn't belong to the realm of language. Okay, sorry, let me just think for a second. When I think of flow, I think of being in the zone. Something that's physically challenging or something that's cognitively hard becomes almost instinctive.

I just enter this space of being able to do something I didn't think I could. To me, that's what I think of when I think of flow. Her documentary takes us inside the state of mind and body and is simply called flow. There is a sense of ease and mastery at the same time. I mean, I think that's what we chase. that feeling is when I'm after and it's total joy. I was totally just finding a groove. It's about finding rhythm and a steady breathing pattern.

Then I can find my groove. Finding that groove is something almost all of us have experienced, but describing it is really elusive. It's a focus, a kind of focus on nothing. Ease with effort. Yeah, but that still doesn't capture it. It's a space that you can get into, and it's not predictable either. I have overthought this so much.

I think there are conditions. The first condition of flow is that you are focusing your attention on a very restricted field of stimuli. And then something shifts and I'm in it. In retrospect, when you look back on what happened, it seems like what you did lasted a few minutes only. By what you're doing it, you are not. even aware of time at all. It's not an issue. You're just moving along with what's happening, but that's partly why we call this the flow experience. Mihai Chixenet Mihai pioneered the scientific study of flow. He actually coined the term as well. What you're hearing is from a 2014

TED talk, where he outlines the nature of flow and the necessary conditions for it. When all of these conditions are present, the activity becomes autotelic. And autotelic means that the Greek word, two words, auto means self and telos's goal. The goal is just to do the activity. You're not concerned about even succeeding or getting paid or any of those things.

If you are playing a musical instrument, you don't play it in order to get to the end. You play it for the next note, the next chord. And then when it's over, when you finish, said, gee, I wish it would continue, but you don't play to end. So these are the conditions of flow. Now, the question is, how does flow happen?

Answering that question turned out to be a lifelong quest for Mihai Chiksenk Mihai, starting when he was growing up in Europe. World War II caught me when I was between seven and ten years old. This is from another TED talk he gave in 2004. I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them. How few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war.

So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living. And I tried as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that I could see as a possible answer to that question. And finally, I ended up encountering psychology. When Chick-Semihai coined the term, he coined the term because he had gone around the world conducting what was at that point, the largest study anybody ever conducted in psychology. When we do studies, we have with other colleagues around the world done over 8,000 interviews of people from Dominican monks to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo

shepherds who enjoy their work. And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. I mean, it's a phenomenal logical description in the state. I think it, you know, underneath that flowy sensation is a better kind of working definition of flow, which is kind of near perfect, high-speed decision-making. I'm Stephen Kotler. I'm an author.

I'm a journalist, and I'm the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. I call this flow because the people themselves, when they described how it felt. Flow was the term that kept coming up. And they used the metaphor of being carried by a river, carried by a current. And the thing that is so key to chicks at me high that so many people don't appreciate is the complexity. That it's not, flow is not just relaxing. I'm Rustin-Wolf and I teach creativity and flow at St. Mary's University of Minnesota. Flow is a balance of challenge and skill that's complex. Otherwise, heroin would be enough.

Shik Zemihai is talking about flow. He's talking about something that is incredibly difficult, but feels kind of easy. This happens when we sing, we dance, when we do sports. But then very quickly, I realized that it's, although it took me about 40 years to get here, but anyway

the interesting part about flow is that that you can do it when you separate yourself from everyday life and you do something artistic or athletic but you can do flow

when you're studying when you're working when you're at home and with the family and that's really the best application of flow is how you can use it in everyday life

yeah I think what I would count as flow is working in the architecture studio late at night, and you are working in some design software. But imagine working under pressure. I am Donna Vicalis, two-time Olympic pentathlete. I'm trained as an architect as well, and I research green building, so I'm just finishing up my PhD in civil engineering. and there was this time where I had a deadline,

and I spent all night working through the night, which is not that uncommon in an architecture studio. And I remember at some point just appreciating how much I was getting done because I was just working so quickly with the software I was using, you know, rotating the design and working in a way where you're at double speed what you normally do. not making any mistakes. And I think there's this, there's this mysterious feeling sometimes with a certain kind of problem where you don't just look at it and go through the rote actions of,

oh, I, I know how to solve this. You just plug away one, two, three. There's some problems where you stare at them and you have to make a kind of a leap in your mind in order to get the solution. And when the leap comes, it's just like a bolt of lightning and you get it. And I was facing one of those types of problems. And I got it. And it's almost like then you let your mind play. And sometimes it can do these wonderful leaps and bounds. And your mind just does these things that surprise you.

What I find most fascinating about it is not even flow itself, but the level of analysis. Rustin Wolfe. When I was in college, I was bored with everything I studied. But he was fascinated with creativity. And I started asking around, who is good at this? Who is a good person? Who would be a good mentor? And Chicks at Me Eye stood out to me because he had structure behind it. He had a discipline. And when he studied creativity, he discovered something that we all sort of knew, which was the experience. of doing it is flow. So Rustin rolled the dice. I sent him a letter and within a week I got a phone call and it was him. That phone call changed his life.

He went on to study under Chick Sent Me High and learned that while psychology, sociology, and anthropology all offer insights into human behavior and happiness, they weren't the only way. Phenomenology is another different way to think about it. Phenomenology is the systematic study of conscious phenomena, such as perceptions, emotions, and thoughts as experienced subjectively by individuals. And flow is one concept within phenomenology, and the idea that you can study the human experience quantitatively, even, as he did, opens up all sorts of amazing opportunities. One of those opportunities came up while he was beginning to write his dissertation.

One of the things that really inspired my dissertation, dissertation was someone had used his methodology, the experience sampling method, to study a woman who was institutionalized with schizophrenia. And they studied her over two weeks and over two weeks. Her experience was sad and depressed and down with two exceptions. Both times she was clipping her nails. Now, that is not something I would have theorized, and I don't imagine there are too many tests that would look for that, but the open-ended nature of this captured this positive experience for her. As a result, they were able to have her clip her nails more often, which was then followed with clipping other people's nails, which resulted in more happiness.

Over the course of some months, she was able to exit the institution, put a shingle on her door, and do manicures. that didn't cure her schizophrenia, but if you're looking at the quality of someone's life, that's astonishing. This completely changed her life. I think that inspiring surroundings and beautiful spaces cultivate a state of flow.

Like being in a really pretty space, like over in that corner. I feel like I get out of my own way in the water. It gives me a sense of arrival. Like I feel like I arrive somewhere. I get somewhere when I swim. You know? It feels like home. That feeling of being at home in the water

is for me a perfect example of the mind-body connection, where the physical and the metaphysical come together. Stephen, when you look at flow through a philosophical or metaphysical lens, what do you see? I try not to look at flow through a metaphysical or philosophical lens, and I don't mean to be difficult, but I think there's been plenty of that. Okay, so no metaphysical or philosophical lens. I am really interested in a neurobiological sense. I'm very interested in the mechanism of flow. I want to understand, and I've devoted my life to understanding how it works in the brain. So let's talk about what goes on in the brain.

When we talk about what goes on in the brain, usually scientists want to talk about four things. So neural chemistry and neural electricity, which are the two ways the brain communicates and neural anatomy and networks. So what we now know, we have a pretty good understanding of what goes on in times of the neural anatomy involved in flow, and we understand neural electricity pretty well. From a neural chemical standpoint, we believe there's five or six different chemicals that are involved in flow. There's noraphenephyran and dopamine on the front end of a flow state.

anandamine and endorphins in the middle and possibly serotonin bracketing the outside. And if it's a social flow state, right, so group flow, team flow, any of those kinds of flow states where it's a shared experience with other people, there may be oxytocin involved with a so-called cuddle chemical. And there's the short non-metaphysical answer. Flow results from six neurochemicals coursing through your brain. But there's a lot going on in your brain. And I think the short answer is we don't know everything that's going on in your brain. All right. Maybe Flow isn't just a cocktail of neurochemicals. I think it's probably reductive at this point, or overly reductive, to be able to say, well, it's the endorphins that do that. It's the endocannabinoids that do that. It's the

adrenaline that does that. We don't really know, but we do know there's a flood of chemicals that can change how you feel, how you perceive your own situation in the world around you. My name is Alex Hutchinson. I'm a science journalist and an endurance athlete, and I'm the author of a book called Endure. mind, body, and the curiously elastic limits of human performance. There's great studies on perception of time. They ask people to estimate the passage of time while they're running at different intensities. And the harder you run up to a certain point, the more time seems to dilate.

The more you misapprehend how quickly time is passing. And so there's something about the surroundings and the context of a race. It doesn't change my muscles, so it can only be my brain. brain that's changing. Could you inject flow into someone? Oh, it's a super interesting question. At this point, you know, there are combinations of substances that can get you close to flow and you can mimic a number of things that happen in a flow state. But I think the chemistry is enormously complicated and I'm not 100% certain it's the same in everybody. Certainly the neural chemicals you like are sort of tied to what motivates you. And in a weird way, not everybody likes the same neurochemicals.

So we're not really sure. I'm suspicious of the flow and a pill idea. I think we're getting closer. I think we'll get combinations of possibly technologies and substances that you can use together. I always say this when I train people in flow. I'm not particularly super interested in these questions. And I'll tell you why as a journalist back when I was really playing journalists on let's say four or five separate occasions I was I was shot at. Somebody had a gun and I was in the crossfire or whatever was going on. I was in the wrong place of the wrong time covering a story. And at no point in those situations could I look at the guy who was shooting at me and going,

excuse me, sir, would you mind, you know, holding off with the shooting while I take this pill and wait for something to kick in or put on this EEG brainwave headset device so I could, that's just not how life works in my experience. But we do know that when you're pushing your body, probably through. some sort of deeply rooted evolutionary set of responses, your perceptions of reality change. Perceptions. The reality change. And without that, there's no question that we wouldn't be able to do the things we do,

whether it's at the elite level of sport or just me going out on the weekend with my friends and going for a run. Or for another way, when I am in training, I have a pretty good sense of what my limits are. And I now know from experience that when I go to a race, I will do things that seemed impossible to me, and I will shatter those limits. I will shatter those limits. I will shatter those limits. All through high school, my biggest goal in life, and actually through most of university, was to break four minutes for the 1,500 meters.

And I ran 402 in high school, and then I got stuck. So for about four years, I was running either 401 or 402 every year. And so at that point, I had a sense that I had reached my physical limits. And what ended up happening? It was a race when I was in 30-year university. Essentially, the timekeeper was giving me the wrong splits. So I ran this race. It was an indoor race.

So every 200 meters, the timekeeper was calling out 27 seconds for the first 200 meters, 57 seconds for the second 200 meters. These are all times that are way too fast. And so by about 600 meters into this 1,500-meter race, I don't know what's happening. Something is going well. I need to stop thinking about it. and just put my head down and run.

And I remember basically nothing after that point in the race. I just remember getting into the finishing straight, looking at the clock and realizing I'm going to be way under four minutes. I ran 352.4, which was a nine-second best after four years. And, you know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what went into that. A balance of challenge and skill. Things that should be difficult. When everything's clicking.

Become easy. and mastery at the same time. That's what I call flow. At the time, it wasn't the first word that would have left to mind. Looking back, I can say maybe the last two-thirds of that race, I was in what you could call a flow state. I was doing something that was absolutely at the limits of what I could do, but I was capable of doing it.

Had no sensation of the passage of time. You know, I had a sense of mastery. So it ticks off a lot of the boxes for flow. The next logical question is, well, can you train that? I would say, yes. Donna Vacalus is a two-time Olympian representing Canada in the modern pentathlon and its five events. Fencing, swimming, horseback riding, shooting and running. But these events are so different from each other that it's almost impossible to be a natural at all of them.

So fencing for me is my weakest discipline. I've trained really hard at it for 10 years. I've repeated practices every week and training camps where you're, you fence intensively. And it never came easily to me. It feels like it took me two or three or four or five times as long to sort of get certain elements of fencing. And I've been told by fencing coaches that I'm the kind of person who over-analyzes the fencing match. And so the example that comes to mind is if you were walking and you had to think right foot, then left foot than right foot, you'd walk much slower and probably more awkwardly.

And so that's kind of what fencing was sometimes like for me. I felt like I had to think really hard about each step I was taking. And that doesn't always work. That word work is absolutely central. Because while being in flow may feel magical, getting into it means hours and hours and hours of practicing, failing, and yet more practicing before you can enter a state of flow. And that process happens through hard work and endurance and focus. You are training focus. And anything that trains focus is great for flow. And that's the magic of sports. They're designed for

that. I think that's why so many people get flow out of sports. Canada. A war for Canada. I think that a lot of things came together really nicely for me in Rio. Canada, of course, hosted the games in Montreal in 1976. The flag carried by... In the morning of Rio, the first thing you do is you warm up for fencing. And so you're putting on your fencing whites and you're putting on your gloves. And I put on my running shoes, which I would never fenced in normally. I was so confident I remember thinking like, oh, this is great.

I'm putting on my running shoes. and I'm still going to kill it today because having done these actions thousands of times with this higher level goal in mind, the small motor skills will take care of themselves and happen even more quickly. So now for Canada, it's Donna Volcalis.

It's a really intense moment when you're fencing in modern pentathlon, you have 60 seconds to score a hit. A lot can happen in a very short amount of time in fencing because the actions are very fast. The crowds around you are cheering for you and for other bouts that are happening simultaneously. There's the clang of metal as blades hit against each other all around the room. And there's the screaming because fensors are notorious for screaming when they get a hit.

So in retrospect, all the things I had done that morning to prepare and the way I warmed up, Those were all putting me into a state of flow. And as I was fencing those very first few bouts, it seemed like my opponents were moving more slowly than normal. Oh, and Zhang attacks and Vakalis picks her off. Every millisecond was going by really slowly. So Zhang knew that she had to go for it, and Donna Vakales picks her off.

And now it's went from an all-Chinese affair to an all-Canadian affair. Years later, we're coming up on another Olympics. I can so clearly recall the way my opponent's arm was positioned and exactly where I was trying to hit them. Just a very certain region on their forearm. and that's where I'm laser-focused in the moment. So I can see my opponent's forearm in my mind right now. And that's where I hit her.

Sorry about that. I'm going to start over because my phone just made a beep. There's no need to start over. We'll just go with the... Never mind. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada. Across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National

and around the world at cbc.c.com. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Every day, your eyes are working overtime. From squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam, includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrists

detect early signs of eye and health conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.caver.ca.ca. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors,

all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarborough.ca.a. This documentary is called Flow, about that state of mind and body

when we're right on top of things, in the zone, in the groove. It's prepared and presented by writer Suzanne Zelazzo, who's also a former professional triathlete. As soon as I lace up my running shoes, there's a definite shift in my mindset that happens. I think lacing up shoes or putting on my cycling shoes,

adjusting my swim cap, and enter into that space of focused intensity. I think it's the precursor to a state of flow. That shift in mindset, that mindfulness, makes me wonder about something. In your work, you've discussed some of the differences and similarities between mindfulness and meditation on the one hand and the flow state on the other. What distinguishes these two states? It's still an open question, right?

There's so much more work to be done. Stephen Kotler's latest book is called The Art of Impossible, a peak performance primer. It's interesting. So there are differences. If you think about what happens in meditation, the goal is to let go with the self, forget the self. The self completely vanishes. And while self-vanishing is one of the fundamental characteristics of flow, it's an action state.

Every action, every decision flows seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last. flow requires what's known as task-specific focus and massive creative self-expression. So in flow, the part of the brain that governs creative self-expression is known as the medial prefrontal cortex smack in the middle of your forehead gets really, really active. In meditation, you're not trying to express yourself creatively. You're trying to let go of this self. As a result, this portion of the brain gets quiet. So that's one big difference that we know about. I also think, though there's a lot more work to be done, most of the meditative systems,

now this is not entirely true with some of the stuff that you find in Tibetan Buddhism and some of the stuff you find in Kabbalistic Judaism, but most of the standard kind of meditative mindfulness training that we use don't tend to produce dopamine, and there's definitely dopamine involved in flow. I often tend to think of flow as a sort of more prolonged and meditative state. Alex Hutchinson. There's also studies that have been done on actually rodents that run long distances ferrets, in fact, that find a similar thing and dogs too, that there's a medium level of effort that maximizes the production of endocannabinoids and other chemicals associated with runners high, which I would say is this sort of overlapping concept with flow. Mindfulness is great training for flow, meaning having a regular mindfulness practice learning how to focus your brain in that way.

First of all, and second of all, the real point of mindfulness is not really just to focus the brain, right? It's to teach the brain that, hey, you're happiest, you perform at your best when the brain is a little calm or a little less reactive to emotional turbulence and that sort of thing is very useful for flow because of how one of flow's main triggers, what's known as the challenge skills balance. And we can measure this very precisely, actually, because we give people electronic pages. was discovered by Miha, Chick-Sent Mihai, a long time ago in the 70s. And two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skills that they feel they have at that moment. I visited Chiksenk Mejai on his ranch, and he had a dog, Cedric. And when we got to his ranch, his dog wanted to play with him.

And Cedric had a stick and was running in circles around Chiksenp Mehi. And he was running just out of reach. where Chicks at Mehigh could grab the stick and throw it again. If he ran a circle too wide, Chicks at Mehigh would lose interest. And if he just gave it to him, it wouldn't be fun. And this went on for a couple minutes before Chicks at Mehigh leaned over to me and said, see, even Cedric knows about flow. Cedric, the dog. It's a great name.

Cedric understood balancing challenge and skill. And that's probably the kind of range of effort you needed to be a persistence hunter to chase down an animal on the savannah. And so these are hypotheses that have been around for a little while. But the idea that we've evolved to push at that medium level, I think, is it has some anthropological evidence put it that way. How long have we humans been in this pursuit of flow? So it's a great question. Certainly the evolution of flow dates back at least 40,000 years based on some neurobiological work that they did, probably farther.

But flow probably got coated into our species very early on. long before we were actually human beings, right? It's how evolution shaped the million brains to perform at their best. I think that it's maybe getting things backwards. Evolution didn't care about flow. It wasn't this separate module that it downloaded two million years ago. We're giving a name to flow and saying, why did evolution make flow feel so good? Evolution cared about getting us enough food to maximize our reproductive success. And so it seems more likely to me that evolution has prioritized a bunch of things that allow us to, for instance, push the limits of our endurance in order to, let's say, cover a lot of ground, to chase down a kudu, and that is part of a

package that we've gone on to label Flow. Come out, Rosanna. Come on, Roscoe. Go, your way, your wage. Wrestling was a sport that demanded absolute focus. There you go. Yeah, Russet. Okay, squeeze it. Squeeze it.

As a small kid with ADHD, my parents were looking for activities. And wrestling didn't punish me for being small. And if you are distracted, there is immediate feedback that you have made a mistake. As you are thrown to the ground. I must have been about six years old, 35 or 40 pounds when I started, wrestled in high school, wrestled into college, I wrestled from about six to 20. When he was on the mat, Rustin found himself in that crucial border zone between challenge and skill, where focus leads to flow.

The whistle blows, and then you don't really know anything but your opponent. I would not be aware of where I was. I would discover injuries after the match that I had no idea where they came from. Matt Burns, scratches, sprains, black eyes. Over the course of six, seven minutes, a lot happens, and you're so focused on competing with your opponent that you don't even have a sense for your own body. I would not hear cheering.

Occasionally, I heard my mother. Score is 12 to 4, the end of the first period. Most of the time, nothing. So far, we've been talking about the intrinsic reward. of flow when you're so far inside an activity that it creates this self-sustaining feedback loop. But what about the extrinsic rewards, like cheering? That's kind of the danger. One of the worst experiences I had in this sport was in high school going undefeated. My senior year, I think I won about my first 28 matches somewhere in there.

and along the way, everybody at my high school knew that I was successful. And it went from people not knowing who I was, to people saying, how did it go, to eventually people asking, have you lost yet? That is not a good question. That framed what I was doing in a way of trying not to screw it up and made it difficult for me to focus on, enjoying a match when I was worried I'd have to go to school the next day and explain why I lost. The other end of that, I was at a meet, a big tournament where I was not a top seed and had wrestled my way into the finals.

And the other guy I was up against was the number one seed. Everybody expected him to win. And my parents noted that, his parents had flowers ready to hand him after he defeated me. It seemed to nothing. It's over. Good job, Rustin. Good job. One minute, 42 seconds, the winner. It was the only time in my entire career I celebrated after a win. I looked at my parents and did a little fist pump.

It was a rare instance where I was aware of what was going on. I wanted him to lose as much as I wanted myself to win. I wanted his parents to eat their words of having brought those flowers. But when you're in the middle of it, you don't hear all of that. And if you do, then it's a distraction. If you're trying to parse out crowd noise while you're in the middle of a competition, then you're not focused on the things that you need to be focused on. There are many ways to look at it, I think.

When I play, I hear literally everything. Jean-Michel Blay is a composer and people. pianist based in Montreal. And what's striking about his performances is how entering a state of flow allows him to incorporate into the music whatever sounds he happens to be hearing around him. Like I will play and there's a chair cracking

and then I continue, there's someone coughing. And in my silences, sounds will fit in the right moments. And when it hits the moment, it's as if I'm in sync with... The whole environment. Yeah. It's just so hard to put words on it, maybe because it doesn't belong to the realm of language.

Not to sound starstruck, but the first time I heard your music, I was actually driving in Toronto. And you were in the middle of playing I'll the title track of that album. And it really did strike me so viscerally. I had such a visceral response that I had to pull over and look for a pen and write down what this was. And then I ended up listening to that album on really. repeat as I was trying to finish my second book of poetry. And it was really powerful. It allowed me to create the conditions for my own flow state. So what helps you create those conditions? I completely relate to what you're saying. And this piece was born in this cafe in Montreal,

where I started to improvise. And when I was playing around those keys, I could feel the people's attraction, people would stop talking and listen to me more. I was like, there's something about those chords. Il actually comes from the guy at the counter, his name is Emil, and ill is like the, I was like, I won't call the track Emil, but ill is more, it's like all the emails and all the whatever in the world, because he validated me and it was like, I love this song, what is it? And it's somehow, it's interesting, because to me, this piece captures the, the art of this their artistic cafe and the energy of their,

I saw it through people's reaction, and that's how it was born. So there's something there. I sound very metaphysical. No, but I think it is. I think it is. It has a metaphysical component. I do.

Yeah. Also in the sense that we cannot now explain, maybe one day science could explain it. Yeah. I don't care. I can really feel and see everything. And there's this very, very beautiful exchange. I'm not doing the show along.

I think the audience is an accelerant, whether you're talking athletically, musically, or in other contexts. It adds a sense of importance. It adds a sense of the stakes being real. Nobody sets world records in training. This is Alex Hutchinson again. Now, I think if you're asking about, let's say, an Olympic champion like Elliot Kipchogi. Kenyan runner, Elliot Kipchoga, is widely considered the best marathoner of all time. In 2018, he attempted the impossible to become the first person in history to run a marathon in under two hours. I first met Elliot Kipchogi about six months before his first attempt in the two-hour marathon. And he had just run a half marathon in a little bit under one hour. So at the time, I figured,

okay, he's going to have to go twice as far at the same pace. So one of the questions I asked him was, you know, Elliot, how are you going to change your training to enable this sort of pretty dramatic leap in performance? And his answer at the time was, oh, I'm not going to change my training, you know, the training will be the same, but my mind will be different. And at the time, I thought, to be totally honest, I thought that was a terrible plan. Like, it doesn't sound like it's going to get you that point. But it became clear he's actually, he really sincerely believes that. He repeated that kind of thing over and over. People would say, you know, how are you going to do this impossible thing? He'd say, well, you think it's impossible, but I think it's possible.

Well, the waiting is over. The moment has arrived. In 2019, Elliot Kipchowge reached for the impossible one more time. We have lift off. Apollo Kipchugge is up and away and the challenge to run 26.2 miles in under two hours. Very easy to say, rather more difficult to achieve. To me, you know, I'm a skeptical guy,

so it's not like I thought, oh, Elliot Kipchogi is, he has the edge because he's working on his self-belief. Self-talk. Self-talk, exactly. It's, you know, one of the great clichés of sports psychology. But it's more than a cliche, because intrinsic motivation is a given. If you're not immersed in what you're doing, you won't achieve flow.

But extrinsic motivation is tricky. It can animate or enervate you. In 2019, Kipchoga's self-talk fused both the intrinsic and extrinsic, and he became his own cheering section. There's now some pretty good research from a variety of labs, including a guy named Stephen Chung at Brock University, who've studied self-talk, who've brought people into the lab, had them do endurance tests, and then given half of them very simple training in how to give themselves positive encouragement.

And lo and behold, they perform better. Elliot is just completely relaxed. He is just in a state of flow. He's just locking in to the pace. It's really hard to watch the last kilometer of Kchoke's 2019 race and not be moved to tears. I think we can say with some certainty now that's going to do it. He's going to do it. He's going to do it.

He's going. Tell us to move away. Come on, he says. Come on, this is it. Shalene, a final thought from you. U.S. marathoner Shaline Flanagan was one of the commentators. And during the last few meters, she says, Elliot's performance is such a gift to the world.

Elliot's performance is such a gift to the world. His running is a gift to all of us. His running is a gift to all of us. Why is that so emotional? It was very emotional. He is almost there. He has one hand on history. There's Grace, his wife, looking off.

She's never seen him race before in the flesh, remember. What a moment for her. To look into his eyes and see, I know I can do this, and the clock is ticking away. We have one minute to go. Elliot Kipchogi is on his way here. I don't know if there's such a thing as like sympathetic flow. I was just going to ask you whether you think that there is something between flow and empathy. Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, if you'd asked me before watching Elliot Kipchogi, I would have said flow is a fundamentally personal experience. But with Kipchogi, you can tell when he's hurting. And he has this tactic of smiling every, you know, five minutes or so. He'll get a smile on his face. And he's smiling again. Now, people can smile for different reasons, mostly because they're happy. We've said that Elliot often smiles when it's really hurting.

And on the one hand, it's charming and it's amazing that he's smiling. But at the other hand, you know he's smiling because it's hurting. He's struggling, he's fighting a great fight, and you can't help but connect with that fight. and feel it yourself and connected to your own experiences. Elliot Kipchogi, got his shoulder while the unofficial... The first band to run a marathon in under two hours. And you know, Kipchogi was right. No Cuban is limited.

He has done it. I think having experienced flow has given me a much better appreciation of just how powerful the mind can be body and mind are so interconnected. I honestly think that mind is just an emergent property of our flesh and tissues and hormones carried around in our blood and vice versa. Our body is a kind of distributed mind. And what I mean when I say distributed mind is like I think of going to the swimming pool

and opening my locker and my hand is spinning the combination lock. And I don't even know the numbers of my locker combination, but my hand knows the numbers. For me, that makes me really appreciate just how fascinating the human being is. Do you think that your experience of flow makes you a better version of yourself? Completely. I think it's working by this trust that there's a common ground to apparent conflicts. By empathy, it's such a comfortable zone that I know and I've learned it a lot,

how people project themselves in me living from my passion. And it inspires people, maybe they should be more often in this place. Okay, let's pull back for a second here. Flow is not a one-size-fits-all solution for all of humanity's problems, despite some of the marketing around it. Truth be told, flow has become a product. Slow sells. There's something of a flow industry out there. There's this magazine, for example, called Flow.

Have a look. And look at the price. How much is it? A bargain at 2499. Right. Do you ever see flow being commodified by the self-help industry? Oh, sure, yeah. Absolutely.

I mean, I guess it's been roped into what I would call hack culture, the idea that there's a hack for everything. Here's how to hack your flow, bro. And I think that's where some of the self-help stuff goes wrong. You can do things that are dumb. You can do things that are bad. You can do things that are ineffective. Does the marketing of flow tap into the conceit that human beings are infinitely

perfectable? Absolutely. Any moment that's less than perfect in your life or any feeling you have can be hacked with the appropriate, you know, wearable technology. It also changes the nature of what flow was supposed to be talking about. And I don't know if you could maintain a state of flow forever. I don't think that would work. I think you would be exhausted. Being there for 15 minutes or a few hours is amazing. But at some point, you need to step back and evaluate if it worked. And that's really what drew me to Chicks at Mihai's research. If you break down Chicks at Mejai's philosophies, you'll find that the intensity of flow needs to be balanced with reflection.

That realization came to me partly from my own experience of World War II, which made me aware that some people, once they lose their financial well-being or their property is lost, they kind of crumble and they become unable to function, whereas others, even under the worst circumstances, seem to maintain their integrity, their purpose, their joy. The most dramatic example I can think of for that is the movie Life is Beautiful, with Roberto Benini.

Without any spoilers, it's a World War II Holocaust film, and Roberto Benini's character throughout all of this horror is engaging with his child and making it into a game and provides his child with a way to navigate all of this that allows him to find joy. The parallel between life is beautiful and Mihai Chix Sint Mijai's own life is uncanny. During World War II, Chicksend Mijai spent time as a child in an Italian prison camp, where he learned to play chess

and absorb himself completely in the game to make life in the camp bearable. In the movie, Roberto Benini plays an Italian Jew trying to survive with his child in a concentration camp. His coping strategy is remarkably similar to Chick-Sent Mihai's.

Roberto Benini's character has told his son this is a game, and every time something bad happens, he explains it in terms of the game. and ultimately the winner of the game is supposed to receive a tank. And it's this beautiful build-up where his son is trying to win. The son doesn't even understand the danger. Toward the end of the film, Roberto Benini's character is killed.

And the child is on his own as the camp is. liberated by Americans, and this lonely child on its own watches a take roll-up. Hi, boy. You all alone? What's your name? You don't understand what I'm saying, do you?

And he smiles. We'll give you a lift. Come on. Come on. Get up here. He won. It's this beautiful, bittersweet story that speaks to me to this day. There you go. If Roberto Benini's character can find joy in that situation, then who am I to complain about wearing a mask or having an ache in my back?

There are so many challenges in life. And if that character can find joy, then we all can. Swimming in the little alcove in the corner where nobody usually swims gave me a sense of disappearing into the water. It's beautiful. The flow experience is transporting. It takes you outside of yourself, but at the same time, right into yourself. And I think that's a really powerful place to create, to think, to be, to exist.

And I think I chase it all the time. And it's total joy. Now I'm always going to want to come. coming over here. That's way better. You were listening to a documentary called Flo. It was prepared and presented by Suzanne Zelazzo and produced by Greg Kelly.

I wasn't thinking there was slime there. Okay. Special thanks to Jean-Michel Bleck, whose improvised piano playing recorded during his interview was heard in the program. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer. Technical production by Danielle Duval with additional technical help from Nick Bonin

and extra audio help from Tom Howell and Harper Goodman's daughter. Nicola Luxchich is our senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.