Instant Genius - How to easily trigger your flow state

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

A state of absolute focus, able to complete a single task or activity effortlessly, flow states are desirable. But how can you achieve one and can they be turned on and off? We spoke to Julia Christensen, author of the new book The Pathway to Flow to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit namea audio.com to learn more. Hello, I'm Alex Hughes, and this is the Instant Genius podcast, a bite-sized Masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. Whether it's a painting, book or Excel document, it can be hard to concentrate on a project, even when we want to do it. But when everything clicks, it can just feel easy.

This is the flow state, an experience of ease with a task where it feels like no time is passing while we breeze through it. But how do you achieve this and can it be done naturally? We spoke to Julia Christensen, the author of the new book, The Pathway to Flow, to Find Out. So this term of flow gets mentioned a lot in all sorts of different areas, and we'll probably come up a lot here in this conversation. So could you explain a little bit about what is actually meant by that term flow? So flow is the state that probably everyone has heard about,

but finds quite hard to reach. So although people might not remember right now when they have last been in flow, if we travel back to our childhood, everybody knows what it feel to be in flow, when you just played for hours and end and time and space disappeared around you. And afterwards, you'd re-emerge and just feel so good. And artists speak about it, movies, songs speak about it. And we all love being in this state, but it's quite hard to get. there for some of us. And in my book, The Pathway to Flow, I tried to explain a bit about what is flow, first of all, what is flow for the brain, and how can we get there? So the Hungarian scientist Mikhail Sizekh Mihani actually spent his whole scientific career researching the flow

state, and he came up with these eight principles that I find describe perfectly what it feels like to be in flowed. So when you're in flow, you're completely concentrated and absorbed in what you're doing. You have a clarity in what you're trying to achieve. So you have some sort of goal and you're getting some reliable feedback of what you're doing. You know you're on the right path in some strange way. And you feel this transformation of time that time zips by or slows down in some way. And you do it for intrinsic rewards. You're not chasing after anything. It's just the pleasure of being in that moment that does it. You feel an effortlessness in that. And one of the principles that people have probably heard about is the thing of being in perfect balance between

the difficulty what you're doing. So the challenge and your skill for solving that challenge. Then also the seventh principle is basically that you experience a fusion of your actions and your awareness. This is sort of this becoming the movement moment, which is really, really beautiful to feel and probably hooks many of us in that state. And you feel in control of what you're doing. So we escape the unpredictability of life. So if something can unhinge our brain and make us feel edgy and not have a good mental health, that's the unpredictability of life. It comes with life. We can't do anything against it. But flow takes it away. There is predictability. There is no ruminative sort loops. That's flow.

And I remember being in that state quite a lot when I was a professional dancer. After I transitioned out of the dance world due to an injury, I had to sit a lot. I had to be really stationary a lot. And I was not feeling well in my body. And I did not have flow anymore. And then I became a scientist and started to research that flow. Because what was really difficult was reaching the state. I had been reaching the state effortlessly for the whole life I had lived up until the accident.

Well, afterwards, I didn't know how to. So my book is my journey, how to find that flow state again when you don't have it anymore. And, I mean, it's probably making this whole idea a bit too simple, but why can't we just be constantly in the state? What is it that's pulling us back out of it? I'd say two things, our lifestyle and lack of training in how to get to. there basically. So our lifestyle in the modern world is not so conducive to the flow because we have every one of us a special edition brain between our ears. It is made in a way that it could survive

in a prehistoric, super dangerous world with scarcity of resources, so very little food that we had to hunt for, for example. At the same time, it's a brain that can do such complicated things like dance on point in ballet, you know. So it's a very special brain that has these super high level systems together with survival systems. And our modern world has some behaviors, or forces some behaviors onto us that are not conducive to flow because of the effect that they have on our body and therefore also on our brain or on the other way around. And here, I'd like to just briefly pause and take a look at the brain. So, all of us we have one, it's floating around beautifully inside our head, but more than that,

it's also connected with our wider body. And that we sometimes forget that via very long ganglia, via our spinal cord, our brain is connected with our organs, our big muscles, and information flows from our brain into our body and from our body into our brain. And disinformation exchange is so important for our health and well-being, because through the behaviors, the actions that we enact with our body, we can actually have some say in what activation patterns we have in our brain. And there's some behaviors that are just more conducive to health and well-being that we'll have a look at now than others. And when we look at what is actually extracting us from the flow state, then three behaviors. that are very common in our modern world are being very competitive and being a bit risk-seeking because risk is nice and it feels good. And then what I would call empty pleasure-seeking.

It's also something that makes us chase. These three behaviors make us chase after something. They are dopamine-mediated in our brain. They are good. We need them in our life. And as I said, they come from a prehistoric world where they were definitely necessary for us to survive. We were necessarily having to be competitive because otherwise scarcity of resources we would not have survived. We would need to be able to take risks because with risk-taking innovation happens and we would find new maybe habitats to live in, for example, or discover new ways of living better. And thirdly, we needed to get rewards for finding pleasure, because if we wouldn't get pleasure for eating or having sex, we wouldn't have done it because it's very, for example, energy consuming

to find food. So if we didn't get a reward for doing that, we wouldn't have done it. So we wouldn't have survived if our brain wasn't responsive to these three behaviors that we enact with our body, right? So I call these three behaviors mind hooks, and there are three more. Mindhawks to be aware of that extract us from flow and its competitiveness, risk-taking, and empty pleasure chasing. So I said, this is dopamine-mediated. So what do we want to do instead? Well, we want to find actions, behaviors that activate different patterns in our brain, not just the

chasing. Don't get me wrong. I say we do need have rewards in our life. But there are ways to activate a state, which is more endogenous opioid-mediated, endocannabiods are at them, and about these are neurotransmitters that are more linked to being satisfied and having this feeling of hovering there and just feeling good now, not because I will feel good when I've chased and I've received something, but in the moment. And there's so many practices that say, oh, you have to be in the moment. But what if the in the moment is not good? It's boring. Or something. something. Well, this is where creative activities come in, where we want to be sure that we create our environment and what we're doing in that moment in ways that cues are funneled from our

body to our brain that activate this liking state, not the wanting state of the chasing, but this liking of being where I am right now. Artistic creativity has this inbuilt, say, in a way, by the cues that are funneled to our brain. So that's what I call the liking, wanting principle. So we want to be sure that we stay a bit on the liking principle for our creative behavior. And that is what activates these more staying states, these hovering states in our brain. And therefore communicate to the wider body. Okay, restorative action is needed now.

We are safe. We're in a state where we don't need to change and have a lot of stress hormones. in the body so they get sucked away and our mind gets freer. We unhinge our mind by being too much in the chasing. We calm it by being in the moment with the arts, for example. And then there's one more thing that is a special ingredient to finding flow. And that is making sure to have movement in our daily life. And that's because our brain has these movement systems that are intimately linked with the rest of the systems in our brain, the memory systems, the language systems, the sensory systems. When you speak to physiologists, they tell you that everything is interlinked.

And knowing that tells you something about how important movement is. So if we then think that most of us adults sit up to 10 hours a day, no wonder that our brain gets unhinged by that. And the World Health Organization actually recommends that we have around 150 to 180 minutes of aerobic exercise in our lives every week. That's 30 minutes per day. We can do that, even if we just go out walking. The important thing is that we get our heart rate up over 140. So you can maybe choose an art that has this aerobic part in it, like dancing.

But even if your art doesn't involve aerobic exercise, you didn't just need to make sure. that you have these 180 minutes of aerobic exercise in your life, because then you calm your brain. And as we were saying, our brain and body are intimately linked. So calming our brain by letting it have enough movement in its life, we'll make sure that it is calmer. It might be useful to speak about what sitting does to us. Longitudinal assessments have shown that if we sit for longer times a day,

over a follow-up period of 12 years, researchers have found that the risk to have cardiovascular disease actually increases by 34% and mental health issues increase. So why is this? Movement is important for body and brain, but also just the act of sitting is an activity. It's a behavior that we enact. And when we sit, our hips are bent forward in a very unnatural way. With time, this will send alarm signals to our brain. Stress hormones, it will say something is wrong. This communication channel is not verbal. It's just inducing arousal in our brain.

And our brain is made to act on arousal to make sure that this doesn't persist because it's dangerous for the body when stress hormones are out and about for too long. So it will insert thoughts into our mind because when we have activation patterns, they activate memories that are accordant with these activations. So we will have maybe ruminative thought patterns starting. And that's just from the act of sitting too much. Another biomechanical actually way of how this might happen is by the mere fact of sitting bent over forward, as many of us do, for example, looking at our phones or screens,

that we are compressing the solar plexus, that's a nerve bundle just under our breastbone. And if we compress that so long, it's nerves. So of course, they will be sending messages to our brain about being in a dangerous arousal state. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. for Citizens Bank. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. I wanted to go back to something you were saying earlier around the points of creativity and that's involvement in the state of flow. For people who are naturally creative, you know, they enjoy the arts, they enjoy some kind of creative process. Flow might be easier to achieve. What is the sort of advice for people that maybe aren't so creative or their hobbies or their interests don't revolve around something that can help them get into a flow state? So it's very important to know that creativity is a skill. It's something that we can practice. And there is this myth out there because it sells so good that the mad genius woke up one morning and had this idea, this creative idea. So that's not how it really works. Because if you look at these creative outputs of geniuses, they have a long history of practicing their skill. So it's not just creativity.

that we need, it is actually practice of a technique, for example, having a routine with our technique every day that then makes those neuro connections that our brain can use when we're trying to come up with a creative idea. Creativity is the ability of our brain to come up with new usages that are both new, novel, innovative, and useful. So how does our brain do that? Well, it needs a scaffolding to rely on. And in any creative activity, we have a technique. We shouldn't get caught up on the technique, not become too competitive, not just chase after that it looks pretty, but we do need the technique practice. And it can give us a bit of the routine also. And that practice will make our brain learn. And the principle by which our brain learns is by encoding habit loops.

So we have a cue on that cue follows an action and a reward follows. So when we practice, for example, a drawing, you know, our brain learns with these habit lutes to do the trace in the right way. And that's not super creative, you might say. But in doing this simple movement on repeat, our brain encodes the movement. And when our brain learns that we're doing something repeatedly, it's sort of sweet. which is on an energy saving mode, and this action passes from explicit memory systems into implicit memory systems. This means that it becomes more effortless and that we don't have

to think so much about it. And that's when we can kind of use an action a bit like our second nature. So for someone who's maybe not practicing a creative skill, we could compare that with learning to drive a car. So first of all, it's a lot of actions that you need to learn on cue and then you need to repeat them until you get the reward so it's right. And you at the beginning just think I will never be able to do this without thinking about it. And sometime later you are there driving the morning traffic, talking to a friend at the same time, maybe listening to music, singing and everything is effortless. That's because these actions of driving a car have now passed into the implicit memory systems. And the same goes for anything creative

and the arts or other actions that people might want to learn, the important thing is to understand that this principle of learning goes for any activity, be that something functional or a creative act. We don't have a brain for driving cars and one for painting. It's all the same. And once we have created this habit, actually, that's when we are able to tap into it like a language and use it for expression. So there's some interesting studies.

about this where people have had expert jazz musicians improvise and you'd say, oh, this is so complicated and it's so beautiful to listen to. How do they do it? They must know so much and they must be so creative. And yes, they are, but what does that actually mean in the brain sense? So there is a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation TMS, which is used to introduce extra energy to the brain. And you can maybe think that prefrontal systems, those that we use to learn something and to do something effortfully, that jazz musicians would benefit from introducing some more energy into this system when they want to improvise, because then they would be even better in following the rules that they have learned. Actually, that's not what

we find. When those prefrontal systems are stimulated, they get worse. But novices, get better. So this is very first evidence, I should say, but isn't that exciting? Because if that confirms in subsequent experiments, it means that the novices who are still relying very much on rules, yes, they are helped by little electric currents that are introduced to their prefrontal systems. Well, actually, it rouses, it takes the expert jazz musicians out of the flow state and their creative improvisation. What does that mean? Well, it means that they rely on much deeper structures to do this creative improvisations. And that links back to what I was saying about this, becoming your second nature with the arts. So using it as a form of expression,

as a language with which you express. I know this very well from myself when I was a dance student, actually. We learned so many rules about how to move. It was like a corset. And sometimes some choreographer would say express. And we wouldn't really know what that meant. But one day, and I still remember it, we were so tired and so full of pain in our bodies and we just wanted to let go and dance students should not do that in a normal disco, but we did. We snuck out at night and we actually went dancing, just dancing to techno. And I remember how at some point you just passed this moment where, yeah, action and awareness just had a fusion. And it was a very key moment because we became movement. We were in sync or out of

sync, but we were with ourselves especially. And this feeling are just flowing. And I remember just saying things with my body. It was like a language. Suddenly, finally, I understood what this expression means. And so my brain had encoded over many years the vocabulary of ballet. And now my body spoke ballet. And I'm always thinking afterwards, it must have looked so crazy because we were dancing ballet on the disco dance floor. But it was expression pure, if you want, right? And later then as a scientist, I read all these paper and I researched what this might have been, and it is this passing from explicit into implicit memory systems that you then find. And a very exciting finding from the therapeutic domain where we're trying to help people with mood disorders,

for example, to overcome their challenges. Dance movement therapy, for example, can be an accompanying tool in that process. And a recent meta-analysis and systematic review by Susan Koch actually showed that the active ingredient, the treatment factor that is linked most strongly to the positive outputs, that is actually the expressive component. So as scientists, we reduce phenomena and we want to know what contributes most decisively to the output. So we dissect artistic phenomena, in this case, dance. And yeah, this finding that actually expressivity is what helps us to get better, what

accompanies us. That's important. And that just highlights how important it is to practice your skill and to make it your second nature so that when you need it, you have it. You can use it as expression. It's obviously not at all just linked only to dance. There's beautiful work by Professor Pennebaker about expressive writing, about how if you instruct people to just write what you feel for 20 minutes, not much longer, twice a week, interesting well-being effects, follow, even health effects over follow-up periods like six months, a year, they see that people who have been just writing expressively

without showing it to anyone, so not engaging in the competitive mindset, they would have better immune markers, less visits at the doctor, and better wound healing. So of course, this is first evidence, and we still need to know exactly how we need to use the art so that they're good for us, but it's very promising first evidence if compared to people who just wrote something objective, the expressive writers had all these positive health outcomes, right? Something that we haven't touched on yet that I think would be interesting to go into is how this idea of creativity and flow can influence mental health and nervous system.

It's something you discuss in your book. Yes. So in the recent very newest neuroscientific findings, we see that engaging in creative activities and having flow in your life seems to be linked to increases in mental and physical well-being and also kind of makes us nicer people to be around seemingly to have flow more frequently. But there is a very interesting little kiva to these findings. And that is that when we look at creative achievement, so the higher up in the ranking people get and how much creative achievement they have,

So when we look at professional artists, for example, actually the health effects are no longer there. And we see rather the opposite, that very high levels of creative achievements are rather linked to negative health outcomes. And that's, of course, also very important to say and then to try to find explanations for. So there are two interesting ways to explain this. And the first is, the higher up in the creative achievement you are, the more likely you are to, do this professionally. And any professional practice is linked to stress and stress hormones in your body. And that's by no means healthy. So that's maybe why we see negative health outcomes in people with very high creative achievement. On the other hand, it might also show a self-selection.

So basically people who are already struggling in their life might naturally be drawn to the arts. For example, because of that expressive component that helps them deal with what is happening to them, which then also would explain why we see less good mental and physical health outcomes at the higher levels of creative achievement. So this again highlights how important it is to choose the behavior as well that we choose to enact with our body because of the effects that they have on our brain. So not focusing too much on the beautiful output of what we're creating, but much more focus on the process on the moment of creation than on chasing after the reward, so the competitiveness of it, because that's not linked to health outcomes. And at the

same point, of course, also, if you are already struggling, it could be that the arts are the way for you to feel better. As a companion, the arts can never be the only treatment if we're struggling and we think we need help, but definitely a companion. And that's when the arts can be this wonderful mind medicine. I was just wondering if we could basically summarize a lot of this conversation. We've been chatting for a little while now about flow. If there's maybe a few quick tips that you'd have for people that are trying to maybe find this flow in their lives. Absolutely. So identifying what's right for you. I have a whole chapter on that, let's go real quick. So it's often a really good idea to take a quick trip back to childhood and

try to revisit what was it that I was doing for hours on end or what have my parents or caregivers told me that I was doing. I couldn't get stopped again. And then just do some empirical research yourself. Arm yourself with a computer and Google, different art forms, painting, crochet, dancing, different dance style, different music style, singing. And just time yourself on which homepages, are you staying longest? You know, if you get lost in reading about different yarns that you can knit with or the different ways you can train your vocal systems for a better voice, well, try it out. And then within the arts, there are so many subcategories. So you do need to maybe find a community and ask questions. There are online forums, but there's also

art shops and just ask. And there are often little places where you can go. For me, it's the dance communities wherever I travel, I go to an Argentine tango community. I have friends immediately. And then I also propose a little navigation aid actually because in the book I say there are certain active principles that are good for our life just in general and we should try to have them in our life sort of as a navigation aid when you're you found your art and now what do I do? Well, you want to be sure that you have all these seven little advices that I have for you in your life. Not too much, not too little, but just have them, navigate after them, try to have them. Use your art maybe to have a routine, for example, by practice skill and technique. We do need that. Create a community. So in all arts, there is a community,

be it online or somewhere in your city, you just need to find the right brick to knock on, like in Harry Potter and go into Diagon Alley and you have your community. Aim for connectedness and aesthetic feelings. You know, the arts can give you all and being moved. And these are transformative emotions that might make you change something in your life for the better. And don't be worried about using your imagination. We all have it. We just need to find ways to optimize also our life with it.

We need movement, very important, and we need movement with emotion inside. expressivity. Your artistic creativity, your arts teacher can help you with how to find this. And with that, we will connect very low-level reward circuitries of our brain that make us feel like, but high together with those more broader meaning-making structures of our brain that also give us reward feelings. We will connect them together. And that will give us the seventh principle. we will cultivate purpose and intention in our life. This might seem a bit abstract for someone who hasn't found their art yet,

but that's why I'm putting those seven principles, like seven stars, like the seven play arts, you know, like the player, the star cluster. You just need to navigate after this. This is not something you have to rigorously adhere to. I'm just giving your pointers to what we know is good for brain and body. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Julia Christensen talking about flow. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine,

which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.