Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPLive: Unlocking Peak Performance with Steven Kotler | Cut Version

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Have you ever been completely in the zone? Hours go by without you noticing, your creativity and productivity seem to be off the charts? Or you’re out for a run and your pain and exhaustion seem to fall away, and you are only focused on that exact moment? If so, you’ve been in a flow state. A flow state is a place of high productivity, creativity, and happiness. It’s when we are living in the moment, feeling and performing our best. But is this something that can be harnessed? Can we learn how to get into a flow state? Productivity expert and best-selling author Steven Kolter believes we can all regularly reach peak performance. In this episode, Hala and Steven define flow states, go in-depth about the neurobiology behind flow and hypo frontality, talk about flow as a spectrum, cover flow state triggers, dive into the limits of flow, and give actionable advice about reaching peak performance and managing anxiety.      Topics Include: - Intro to flow states - What happens to our mind when we’re in a flow state  - Defining transient hypo frontality - The deep now - Why does the brain perform hypo frontality? - What gets amplified during flow? - Peak performance in evolution - Flow as a spectrum  - Flow state triggers  - The importance of setting aside time for flow  - Can technology help us get flow?  - What are the time limits of flow? - Helpers high and passion as caveats - Is there anything that prevents flow? - Peak performance basics - Three techniques to manage anxiety  - And other topics… Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of thirteen books, nine of which have been bestsellers. His books include The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold, and Abundance. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast. Steven’s work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and more. Sponsored By: Athletic Greens - Visit athleticgreens.com/YAP and get FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase. Constant Contact - To start your free digital marketing trial today, visit constantcontact.com Sandland Sleep - Go to sandlandsleep.com and use the promo code YAP15 Native - Go to Nativedeo.com/yap or use promo code YAP at checkout, and get 20% off your first order. WRKOUT - Visit wrkout.com/yap to book a FREE Session with a world-class trainer and get 30% off your first TWO MONTHS with code YAP Resources Mentioned: #YAPLive: Unlocking Peak Performance with Steven Kotler on Clubhouse:https://www.youngandprofiting.com/yaplive-unlocking-peak-performance-with-steven-kotler-on-clubhouse/  YAP Episode #32: Flow Into The Future with Steven Kotler: https://www.youngandprofiting.com/32-flow-into-the-future-with-steven-kotler/  YAP Episode #138: Master the Impossible with Steven Kotler: https://www.youngandprofiting.com/138-master-the-impossible-with-steven-kotler/  Steven’s Website: https://www.stevenkotler.com/  Flow Blocker Website: https://www.flowblocker.com  Steven’s Books: https://www.stevenkotler.com/books  Steven’s podcast, Flow Research Collective Radio: https://www.stevenkotler.com/radio  Steven’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-kotler-4305b110/  Connect with Young and Profiting: YAP’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting/     Hala’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/     Hala’s Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/yapwithhala/     Clubhouse: https://www.clubhouse.com/@halataha   Website: https://www.youngandprofiting.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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minimums and participating stores. Taxes and other fee still apply. You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halla Taha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world.

My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of XFBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and bestselling authors.

Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, had to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young & Profiting Podcast. Have you ever felt so engaged in a project that you've lost track of time, or maybe during a brainstorm with a coworker, hours flew by without either of you realizing it? If so, then you've likely experienced a flow state.

Flow states are periods of time where you perform and feel your best, your productive, creative, and pretty much unstoppable. We all want to tap into our full potential, but for many of us, getting into a flow state may seem like it occurs at random, or like these periods of peak performance are only reserved for athletes and artists. Well my guest on today's episode, Stephen Kotler, believes that everyone can learn how to make flow reliable and repeatable. Stephen is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's a New York Times best-selling author, an award-winning journalist, and the executive

director of the Flow Research Collective. He spent decades researching human performance and sharing what he's learned with audiences around the world. In this episode, Steven talks about the science behind peak performance, flow state triggers, the deep now and why time passes differently while in flow, how peak performance is linked to evolution, the six basic needs to achieve flow, and so much more. This episode is a cut version

of a previous Clubhouse Live from last June. And I've also been lucky to have hosted Stephen on Yat Podcast twice before episodes number 32 and 138. I know after listening to this episode, you're gonna wanna go back and listen to his full length, one on one interviews with me.

So I've dropped those links in the show notes and I highly encourage you guys to check that out after this. And if you're looking to tap into your full potential, increased productivity and creativity, you'll wanna pay attention to this one. There's lots of synonyms for flow. And I think even if people don't know what flow is, they've probably experienced it and they might call it

something like being in the zone or having a runner's high. We've all had this at some point in our lives. To kick things off, to level set for people who have never heard of this concept, what is your definition of flow? Thank you. It's a good place to start. I don't actually have a definition of flow. Science has a definition of flow. Thank you. It's a good place to start. I don't actually have a definition of flow. Science has a definition of flow, which is an optimal state of consciousness where we

feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, that refers to any moment of kind of wrapped attention and total absorption. Where you get so focused on what you're doing, so focused on the task at hand, everything else just seems to disappear. Action or awareness are going to start to merge your sense of self, sense of self-consciousness, the voice in your head, that inner critic, they're going to diminish and get really quiet. Time is going to start to pass strangely. The technical term is time dilation. What that means is sometimes most commonly time speeds up. You get so sucked into what you're doing that five hours go by and what feels like five minutes. Or occasionally if I've been in a

car crash you've experienced time slowing down so you get a freeze frame effect. And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So that's sort of a shorthand, quicky definition. We'll start there. Psychologists have a little more precise definition and I work on the neurobiology of flow. So we look for 10 or 11 different brain and body markers. And that's how we define flow. Got it. I think that was that's how we define flow.

Got it. I think that was a really good introductory to flow. So let's talk about some of the ways that our brain reacts to being in a flow state. So what happens neurobiologically when we are in a flow state? What happens to our mind? So the first thing that happens as we move into flow

is the prefrontal cortex. That's the part of your brain that sits sort of right behind your forehead gets very, very quiet. It deactivates. The technical term for this is transient hypofrontality. Transient meaning temporary, hypohypio, it's the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down, shut down, or deactivate. Frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, party of brain right behind your forehead under normal circumstances a really powerful part of the brain

It does things like complex logical decision-making long-term planning your sense of will power lives there So does your sense of morality? In flow what happens is the brain says, okay, you need a lot of energy to focus on the present moment, to keep all your attention locked on the right here right now. So we're gonna perform an efficiency exchange. We're gonna shut down non-critical structures, things that aren't working right now

and aren't needed to solve the problem at hand, and we're gonna repurpose all that energy for attention and focus. This is what happens to the prefrontal cortex. As it starts to shut down, this is why our sense of time gets so strange and flow. Time is essentially a calculation. It's performed by a bunch of different structures in the prefrontal cortex working together and it's a network. And like any network, as parts of the network go down,

you lose the network functionality. So in this case, we lose the ability to separate paths from present, from future. We're plunged into an experience that scientists talk about as the deep now or the eternal present or the elongated present that now just seems to stretch out forever. This from performance perspective is really cool because most of our fears and most of

our anxieties are not, unless you're kind of in a combat situation or an action sport situation, very rarely are fears in our anxieties, present tense. So like as this time dilation stuff happens, what it's pushing stress hormones out of our system, which and resetting the nervous system, something similar, by the way, that's exactly what happens to our sense of self. You sense a self, self-consciousness, that inner critic,

that's a network effect. It's a bunch of different structures, the prefrontal cortex working with other parts of your brain and produces our sense of self. In flow, as this part of the brain shuts off, we lose our sense of self. That inner critic gets really, really quiet. And once that happens, as a result, risk-taking goes up. Creativity, because the voice in your head, it's no longer doubting every need idea you

have, goes up. So does enjoyment and satisfaction, and joy and euphoria and a whole bunch of other stuff like that. So that's the first part of it. You're seeing a deactivation in the prefrontal cortex. I'm gonna pause there and go further if you want me to. Yeah, so I'd love to dig deep on that.

Can we talk about why our brain is designed this way? I know that it's all because of evolution and survival. So, talk to us about why our brain is designed to kind of shut off in some instances so that we can perform our best and be in the now and be super present. Okay, so you're asking two separate questions. So, let me tease them apart and answer them one at a time. The first one is why is the brain performing hypophrontality? This is not all that unusual. The brain as a general rule is an energy hog. It uses 25% of our energy at rest and it's 2% of our body weight. So at least a quarter of everything you

eat is going to power your brain and this is at rest. When you're doing something hard that is requiring focus and attention and work and effort, so using a lot more energy. The brain essentially has a fixed energy budget, so it will shift around resources. So that is just sort of standard biology. It also happens as we move into any altered state of consciousness You get deactivation in the prefrontal cortex. This happens during Dremeng it happens during meditation it happens during Transstates people have experienced out of body experiences. This is very common across the board, so it also shows up in drug addiction. That was actually the first discovery

of hypophrontality was in drug addicts in the 90s, and they realized that drug addicts damaged their prefrontal cortex, and that was that loss of self-control. You see an addiction, because self-control is part of the prefrontal cortex. In the flow, there's an energy exchange, and you don't need to moderate behavior

because in flow, essentially, all your actions are sort of as close to perfect as they're going to get. There's no need to modify behavior. So that part, and you're running essentially automatic motor programs, you don't need the prefrontal cortex to steer. So that's why that happens. The second question, the larger question you ask, every human being is hardwired to get into flow.

This is one of the things that's really well known about this state. Evolution designed all human beings for peak performance. We're all designed to perform it our best. We're all designed to drop into flow. Every listening to me right now can get into flow. Anyone, anywhere provided, certain initial conditions are not can get into flow. So peak performance is available to each and every one of us. And one of the things we have to address is what gets amplified in flow.

And it's a huge swatch of ability. So in flow, we know, for example, motivation, productivity, and grit will get significantly amplified in flow. We know, for example, motivation, productivity, and grit will get significantly amplified and flow, sometimes a 500 percent above baseline. The Department of Defense found that soldiers and flow will learn 250 to 500 percent faster than normal. You see creativity, innovation, all aspects of creative decision making, spike 400 to 700% in flow. We see huge amounts of overall well-being, life satisfaction, joy, euphoria, all these things spike in flow. In fact, it's one of the most well-known things in psychology at this point is the people with most flow in their lives are the people who score off the charts

for overall life satisfaction and well-being. So there's a huge surge in happiness factors as well. There's a shared collective version of flow states. So there's individual flow, me and a flow state, and there's me and all of you in a flow state together. That's group flow. It's a team performing at our best, and to facilitate that in flow,

you also see in amplification, in collaboration, in cooperation, empathy that in flow, you also see in amplification, in collaboration, in cooperation, empathy increases in flow. In fact, we're doing a lot of work these days the flow research collective with various police organizations throughout America who are really concerned in today's climate about actually increasing empathy.

They think it's gonna make them better at their job in the modern world. I agree. So we're working with them on flow. And you also have the last thing that could exemplify this ecological awareness, which is our ability to see and perceive the natural world. This is the full suite of cognitive stuff.

There's a big boost on the physical side as well, strength and endurance, fast, which muscle response goes up. Our sense of pain is decreased. And the question you have to ask when anybody lifts off a whole bunch of benefits like that is why would one altered state of consciousness do all that? Like what the hell? Where does that come from? From an evolutionary perspective is USed. And the answer is evolution shaped us to survive. And the biggest driver of that survival instinct was scarcity of resources. Scarsity of resources is the largest driver of evolution.

And that's the beginning of the answer to this question. So when resources are scarce, you have two choices. You can fight and flee. So you can fight over dwindling resources, and you can flee to avoid being somebody else's resources. Or you can get innovative, get creative, get cooperative, get collaborative, and team up and make new resources.

That is everything flow amplifies. It amplifies everything you're gonna need, fight or flee, or get creative, get innovative, get collaborative collaborative and make new resources. That's what's being amplified by flow. That's why it's such a complete package. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Young and profitors,

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And the best part, they offer a money back guarantee. If your dog's tail isn't wagging within 30 days, they offer a money back guarantee. If your dog's tail isn't wagging within 30 days, they'll refund your first order. No fillers, no nonsense, just nom nom. Go right now for 50% off your no risk 2 week trial at trinom.com-shap. That's trinom-n-o-m.com-shap for 50% off. Try num.com slash app. It's so interesting. And I would love to kind of get your take on the types of people who typically experience flow.

Because when you're talking about kind of losing yourself, it sounds so intense. And it sounds like something that only like a surfer would be able to experience or you know a runner or an artist some sort of musician So I guess my question is Can normal people experience like true flow like that macro flow that you're talking about? Everyone anywhere can get into flow in fact Just to give you a couple of examples that are so far outside of extreme sports

and where it sports in general, the most common flow state is middle managers in conversation at work. We can talk about why two people start talking at work that gets so sucked in the conversation that ideas are really just spiraling. You see that sort of creativity in a couple hours go by and they didn't even notice. That's incredibly common. Coaters and flow are foundationally common.

But you have to understand that like video games can drive people into flow and it's so common that they can use the amount of flow produced by a video game to tell how well the video game will do on the market. The more flow the game produces, the better it's going to sell. When they went looking for the highest flow environments on our website of sports, and art, one place that they discovered was Montessori education. There are a bunch of reasons for that, and we can talk about why later, but really flow is universal. It shows up anywhere, and anyone provides certain initial conditions are met.

To put it more specifically, flow is really trainable. And the reason I know this is the flow research collective, we train about a thousand people a month. And we train everybody from Olympic athletes and professional athletes and members of the US Special Forces to see sweet executives and Fortune 500 companies to large swatches the companies themselves. And I think right now we're working with everybody from Ascensure, who's a business consultancy, to Audi, the auto manufacturer. So huge swatches of corporate America.

And then we train the general public. Everybody you could possibly imagine insurance brokers in London and coders in Delhi and soccer moms in Iowa and on and on. And so on average, we could measure flow pre and post. We see a 70% increase in flow. This stuff is incredibly, incredibly trainable. That's so interesting. I want to talk about flow triggers. So we were just talking about evolution, biology, and basically the fact that to get into flow, you need to really be focused on the now.

And for my understanding, these flow triggers really help you become more in the present moment and then they help enhance and further your state of flow. So can you give us an overview of what these triggers are? I know there's like 20 or so of them. We don you give us an overview of what these triggers are? I know there's like 20 or so of them. We don't need to go through all of them, but maybe some of the big ones

and how they trick our brain into getting it into a deeper flow state. Perfect. So yeah, flow states have triggers, right? You take one of our classes, one of my trainings, that's what we're teaching you how to do. We're teaching how to use and deploy these triggers. If you want more flow in your life,

it's how I'll point it out. The triggers are your toolkit and there are, you were close. There are 22 that have been discovered. There are way more, there are way, way, way more. This is just what we've discovered. And the easy way to think about it, and then I'll get into a little bit of the science. Triggers will lower cognitive load. Coggle loads all the crap here. Think about it at any one point in time. And if I lower cognitive load, I liberate a bunch of energy that you brain will then repurpose for paying attention to the present moment. So that's from a neurobiological perspective of what all the triggers are doing. And some of them are obvious.

Complete concentration is a flow trigger. And that's the place you have to start when I work with companies, I always walk in and I say, look, if you cannot hang a sign in your door that says, fuck off, I'm flowing, you can't do this work. And I'm not actually joking. I'm pretty serious. We can talk about what that means for organizations

with open office plans in the second. But on an individual level, what it means is you want to set a time for flow. And how much time what the research shows is that you want to block off periods of time for uninterrupted concentration if you can that are 90 to 120 minutes long. This is an arbitrary, just like we have a 90 to 120 minute long REMS like cycle when we dream. We also have a waking focus cycle that's roughly the same amount. So the brain is essentially designed to focus

for this period of time. Earlier, I mentioned that Montessori education is one of the highest flow environments on earth. Why is that? One of the reasons is they break learning into 90 to 120 minute blocks. So they literally map their learning periods onto what the brain is designed to focus for. In real life, what does this mean? So in my life, in my life, it means that I like to start my day with my focus period. What the research shows is that if you really want to maximize flow, you want to start your work session,

you're 90, 20 minutes in accordance with your circadian rhythms. So I'm an extreme lark. I love getting up super early in the morning. I've been up since 3.30 this morning. That's when I got up to startark. I love getting up super early in the morning. I've been up since 3.30 this morning. That's when I got up to start working. My wife's a night up. She's gonna wake up in a couple of hours and she's gonna work all night. Most people are sort of best alert in the morning, eight o'clock, nine o'clock. That's where they kind of stop into consciousness, but you can't really fight your circadian rhythms. So if you have any control over your schedule, what you want to do is sort of block off 90

to 20 minutes kind of the period where you're going to be most alert towards with your biological clock and practice distraction management. You can't be kind of the salance network. It's going to win. So you want to basically shut off anything that's going to distract you from what you're going to focus on from I like to start my work session my hardest task the hardest thing I have to do all day and the thing that if I completed It's the biggest victory from my day. I want to start with the biggest win

Always if I can or the thing that's going to just take the most effort or both together and for me That's usually writing my book whatever book I'm writing at the time. So that's sort of how I start my day. And I turn off Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and my cell phone and instant messages and all my alerts and my phone ahead of time. And I also have conversations. You know, if you need me and you work with me, you know, there's certain hours that I'm just not available. My life knows these hours I'm not available.

And one of the, I always tell people, have your conversations at a time, you're going to do this work, flow massively, amplify productivity, but you need focused time to get that amplification. So it's worth saying, hey, to all the people who love you or your bosses or want your attention, hey, you're gonna get more of me, but to get more of me, I need to be more productive and you need to leave me alone for this period of time. That's the most common flow trigger. I'll stop there and we can go on.

God, I got it, that's helpful. As we move further and further away from our ancestors and now we live everyday device from device and we're spending so much time on these screens, and there's so much new technology out there. Do you think that there's any technology that actually helps us get into flow? Or are you suggesting that when it comes to flow,

really, it's just ourselves and our brain and kind of like hacking our own biology? No, I'm not suggesting that at all. There are lots of technologies that can help us get into flow. I mean, there's brainwave and training stuff that you can use that will help train up focus, but you can use the brainwave technology or you could use a mindfulness meditation practice

to learn how to focus the same way. Either there are a lot of those things. You know, at the flow research collective, some of the work that we're doing is, first we're building what's called about this waste flow detector, something that can measure neurological signals. Right now we have 12 or so different signals that we can look for, but nobody's put them all together into a single device.

They can say, okay, you're in flow. In the labs, I mean, even there's no one thing. We're trying to use a bunch of machine learning technology coupled with a bunch of neuroscience to try to solve that problem. Once we have that, we can start kind of building high flow trigger based kind of applications. Okay, this is where your brain is.

This is how we can drive you into flow. And what we really want to do, VR is particularly well-suited to get people into flow, possibly better than video games, not 100%, but it's much better. It gets it more flows triggers. So we're interested in trying to use virtual reality or possibly augmented reality plus some of the other technology I already talked about us developing to build worker retraining programs, high flow, virtual worker retraining programs in the face of kind of coming technological

unemployment. You know, if that's a real deal, for example, autonomous trucking is coming. Trucking is the largest blue color employer in America by 2035, 2038 when all the old trucks are off the streets and we've got autonomous trucks a lot of people are going to need retraining and so if flow amplifies learning rate 250 to 500 percent above normal we want high flow worker retraining devices obviously if you're listening to this yes the same virtual reality platforms could be very useful in education to build a high-flow educational environments. And we're hoping somebody will do that with that platform. I am

not going into that space mostly because I don't want to end up in a giant curriculum battle with parents over what we should teach kids. I don't care. I just care that we teach them faster and more efficiently That's not my particular fight. There are a lot of smarter people in that room, you know in the education space than me I don't want to wait and do it Hey, what's your question for Stephen? Thanks, Halla for the data. This has been fascinating. So Stephen I read your book stealing fire and I was a big fan of it

We kind of described in the Navy steels and how they get into flow states So it's Holly you asked you ask my Navy's seals and how they get into flow states. So, Hala, you asked me a question about technology and kind of getting into flow states, but my question would be, how long can we, as humans, as any research on how long we can spend in these flow states, is it kind of a time limit to it, or is it depends from person to person or how good you are in tapping into the flow state?

So, great question, I say, in a hard one. So, let me just start and say that there's this idea out there that somehow permanent flow like I could live in flow and that might be what we mean by enlightenment or like that floats around out there. From a scientific perspective, we have a term for somebody who's always in flow. We call them schizophrenia. Sometimes actually we call them manic, but mostly we call them schizophrenia. You can't live in flow. It is a four-stage cycle. It's a process.

It's a, and there are four distinct stages. Only one of them is flow. You have to move to this complete cycle to get back into flow. People often sort of misconstrued dopamine and balances as kind of like perma flow states. So people with bipolar disorder can have, you know, huge, long manic episodes that sort of feel like flow, but aren't quite flow. And there's literally differences in the quality of decision making and a whole bunch of stuff. So there are actual neurobiological

differences there. The question you asked is equally difficult, like how we know most flow states just last about 90 minutes. And one of the reasons we know this is because dopamine and norepinephrine underpin these states. And those chemicals really in their peak concentration sort of can only exist in your brain for about 20 minutes. So this is why, for example, TED Talks are 20 minutes long, because the brain's major focus and chemicals have basically 20 minute shelf lives.

You can get another burst and continue, but there's unlimited supplies. You've ever seen an action movie, a James Bond movie. They do this to me every time I've ever seen one. Opening scenes have so many explosions in them that every time you see an explosion, you're getting a lot of dopamine, a lot of kind of noir-apthan-effron. And usually about an hour into a two and a half hour

James Bond movie, Your Board and A Little Depressed. That's because those explosions stole all you dope mean in noir-apthan-effron. And now you actually have to focus through the rest of the movie without feel good, neural chemistry to kind of propel you along. But here's the wrench and all that. There is an altruism based flow state. So if you've ever done any charitable work and a non profit work really helped others. My wife and I operate in an animal sanctuary, dog sanctuary, and helpers high. We work with very sick and very old and we do hospice care and special needs care for dogs predominantly.

My wife's favorite version of flow is helpers high. Helpers high was discovered by Alan Luke. He started Big Brothers big sisters back in the 90s. He noticed that people who were volunteering, Big Brothers big sisters would like to come back from their experience doing that work and they'd be high and like a low grade flow state for a day, maybe two. And so helpers high for reasons we're not entirely certain about, but may have something to do with the fact that oxytocin gets into the mix when there's helper high involved

and maybe larger concentrations. We don't know, but that's one hypothesis, but it seems to last for a couple of days. Now here's the other caveat. You'll have experiences I've had in writing. Anybody who's ever been involved in a startup, especially if it's really early days and everybody who joined the company has really passionate and you're working towards that first big product launch.

That's like a group flow experience. Every time you show up at work, you're dropping right back into flow. Maybe you go home and you sort of pop out of flow and go to sleep and whatever, and recharge and come back in your bag in the flow. And that'll stretch out for like two to three months. So the real answer is we don't have a clue. You can't stay there permanently, but you can pop in and out for a while. But I will say, and I'm actually speaking from very personal experience right here right

now, I just came through a very intense period. I undertook a very difficult, essentially, year and a half long adventure that was extremely flowy for the past nine months. And it sort of got shut down at the end of May, and I've been sort of locked out of flow for about six weeks because I really was in flow on offer for nine months, a lot of the time. So it's a really hard question to answer. It seems to be individual. Some of it's genetic, some of it's early childhood experience, some of it is how good you are at working with the state. People are good at flow. You know, any given day, I'm in and out of flow two or three times. And so

is most of the folks that like I work with and a lot of the people we've trained. They're micro flow states. They're not big macro flow states, but that's definitely common. I don't know if that answered your question, but it's the best I can do because we don't really know for sure. It's one of those ongoing mysteries. Thanks, Stephen. Excellent answer. I really appreciate it. I'd like to talk to you. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hear that sound, young and profitors. You should know that sound by now. But in case you don't, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that's revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you sell edgy t-shirts or offer

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for 15% off an annual membership. Masterclass.com-profiting. of an annual membership masterclass.com slash profiting. I'd like to go off with so, hey, just asked and I want to ask, is there anything that like prevents flow? Are there any situations where it's almost impossible to get into flow? Because I think that will also help us understand how we can actually get into flow and what kind of environments are conducive for flow. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. So I should talk about a bunch of different flow triggers, Dan, so that question.

But I have to start with, let me just actually start with something for everybody, because this is easy. If you go to www.flowblocker.com, there are six major flow blockers, things that stand between people and more flow. We built the diagnostic. It's free. Anybody can take it.

It will not take more than I think 10 minutes, quick little analysis. You'll get email of your results and you'll get an action plan in that email on what's and it's very, very practical and it's very thorough on exactly what you can do. That's flowblocker.com available. Anybody that's one place to start. But I want to start by saying, Hey, flow is peak performance. It's a high energy state. And if you want to make it reliable and repeatable, and you want more of it in your life, psychology is sort of said, Hey, for all peak performance, all optimal performance, there are basically six basics. There's three things you that matter on the physical. I've got enough physical

energy for a high energy state like flow. There's three things on the mental side. My brain is sort of ready to even start doing this work. So I want to start there on the physical side. Flow's high energy state. How do you maintain energy for flow? Research shows you need three things. You need seven, eight hours of sleep a night. It's not really negotiable. Yeah, you can cheat on it and get by every now and again, but for flow to be reliable and repeatable over time,

seven, eight hours of sleep is pretty much the standard. And I always tell people who, you know, in the startup community and the out of the narrow community get a lot of pushback I can get by in five hours of sleep is this badger on or and I always tell people uh-huh why don't you take a cognitive assessment online like a wonder like test or anything like that they're all over the net they're free take one after five hours of sleep take one after eight hours of sleep I don't think you'll ever go to work and

try to perform your best lack of lack of sleep again. It's amazing how many percentage points of intelligence you lose with lack of sleep. It's just in two days in a row, three days in a row, the emotional regulation goes out, the window, you lose a bunch of stuff you can't fight against. You also need hydration and nutrition. And it has to be high quality, high quality, and high quality nutrition. I'm not an expert on those subjects. I'm just, you know, and I'm not going to tell you, I don't think there's any diet that works for everybody. I think we're all individual and you've got to figure out

what works for you. And you really adhere to it, because it matters for flow. And finally, you need robust social support for regular flow. And this is well known in psychology with what people talk about if you're kind of mental hygiene all the time, like you need robust social support networks if you want longevity, for example,

and positive mental health. That doesn't mean you need a lot of friends. What it means is you need solid intimate relationships with a couple of people and you need regular contact with those people. I'm an extreme introvert. I can get by. I'm very little each week. Some people need a lot more, but you sort of got to figure out what you need and get it. And the reason is this. Flow is peak performance. And when we need it most is one more facing a problem, right? When a problem shows up, the brain makes a threat assessment every time. And one of the questions it asks is, hey, are you alone? If you have to

solve this challenge by yourself, if you don't have robust social support networks, if you don't have people who love you in your life, your brain goes, oh, wow, you're solo. This is a big challenge. We need lots of fear. I'm gonna need lots of energy. This is a heavy thing. If on the other hand, you have robust social support that works and you've recently reached out and had good conversations with people who love you and such, when a challenge shows up, you go, oh wow.

Yeah, this is hard, but I got a lot of people to kind of help me out and pick me up should I fall down and it requires a lot less energy and produces a lot less fear. So there's a physical energy penalty for not maintaining robust sources of support networks and it really matters. What I tend to tell people on this side of the equation

on the physical side is to maintain peak performance. You can usually screw one of these things up a day. You know what I mean? You don't get enough sleep, but you've got good hydration, good nutrition, and you had a good conversation with your parents, your significant other, your brother, your friend, or whatever. You're okay. But you don't want to do it two or three days in a row because it's not sustainable, and you really kind of want to maintain those things. That's a physical side of the equation. There's also a mental side of the equation. For reasons we're going to get to as soon as we start talking

about flow triggers, basically too much anxiety is going to block flow. Anxiety actually is essentially the norapinepheren. A little bit of norapinepheren, you get curiosity and focus and excitement. Too much norapinepheren, you get anxiety and panic and excitement to much more up enough for you get anxiety and panic and vigilance and you can't stop focusing, right? It's a spectrum kind of thing. To sort of counteract that anxiety, the research is really clear. There's three

techniques you should pick one a day under normal conditions. If you want a manage anxiety, you can do a five minute gratitude practice. List three things that you're grateful for and turn one of them into a paragraph or my preference. I write out 10 things I'm grateful for. I write out each one three times. And the reason I write out each one three times is what you really want me to do in a gratitude practice

is the feeling of gratitude. Gratitude makes us feel safer. You're being thankful for something that already happened. You're basically telling your brain, see, look, life is not as scary as you think it is, calm down, and it works. It works automatically. As a bonus, we've done a lot of work at the flow research collective on the neurobiology of gratitude, and how it works with flow.

We've done it in conjunction with Glen Foxx at collective on the neurobiology of gratitude, and how it works with flow we've done and conjunctually Glen Fox at USC is one of the world's leading experts on the neurobiology of gratitude. We've discovered that one easy way to actually get more flow in your life, people with regular gratitude practices, possibly because it tunes up the nervous system possibly for other reasons that we don't quite understand yet, have higher flow lifestyles than other people. So it's a quick flow hack for more flow. We also know that the other option is mindfulness. 11 minutes of focus, breath, work, meditation, respiration, work, a day, tunes up your nervous

system. It calms you down. It removes stress hormones from your system, makes you, gives you greater emotional regulation or 20 to 40 minutes worth of exercise depending on your fitness level will calm you down. And what I say under normal conditions, pick one, stressed out, pick two. If you worked for the flow research collective during COVID, for example, where everybody is stressed out, and it was really important for me that my staff, you know, maintain flow and maintain peak performance, they were doing all three things every day or

that wasn't where they weren't working for me because it was a really high stress time and I felt that our every-estate systems were totally out of whack and everybody needed as much help as possible. So those are sort of this peak performance basics and that's where I start to get into the peak performance game. We're not talking about flow yet but we're now we're ready to start doing the flow work. Now you can see why I keep asking Steven to come back onto Gap. There is a reason why he's the world's number one expert when it comes to peak performance. Steven gave us so much great information about the neurobiology behind flow,

like how we're genetically designed for peak performance, and how our brain reacts through hypofontality to make flow states happen. In fact, when you're in a flow state, the prefrontal cortex of your brain slows down. This is a process called transient hypofontality. And with this transient hypofrontality, and by the way, I feel super smart saying this,

it switches off your inner critic and ego, and then triggers a distortion of time. The brain then releases powerful performance enhancing neurochemical cocktails while we're in a flow state, which leads to increased learning, increased productivity, increased creativity, and the ability to focus. That is absolutely amazing.

The human body is so amazing. This is why I love to study human behavior. This is why I love to study peak performance. We are amazing beings. Stephen also dropped some stats, which blew my mind. He said that when you're in a flow state, motivation, productivity, and grit increase 500% above baseline and creative decision making spikes between 400 and 700%. If that doesn't alone make you want to put in the effort to more regularly get into

a flow state, then I don't know what will. So with that, we're going to recap some actionable advice on how to reach peak performance and enter flow states more often. The first tip is to set aside time for complete concentration. Complete concentration is a flow state trigger, and researchers have found that 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration is the sweet spot. So if you want to get into a flow state, you've got to block off 90 to 120 minutes of time, where you turn off your phone and tell your friends, family, and coworkers to pretty much

f off. You are unavailable at that time because you are fully focused. We also talked about how we need to be ready to reach peak performance. And this means taking care of ourselves both physically and mentally. The physical aspects in terms of peak performance are seven to eight hours of sleep. We always talk about the importance of sleep on the podcast. If you're not getting your sleep, you are not going to reach your peak performance.

Quality, nutrition, and hydration is also important as well as social support, which is something that people often forget about, especially high achievers like all of my young and profitors. You need to make sure you get that social support as well. The mental aspects revolve around managing anxiety. Anxiety completely blocks off flow. So Steven talked about three techniques to help us manage anxiety. The first practice is gratitude. The second is mindfulness and meditation, and the third is exercise.

We've got plenty of episodes about gratitude and mindfulness and meditation, so if you want to learn about any of those things, go check out some of our past content about those topics. In terms of exercise, I'd love to share that now, before any of my interviews,

to make sure that I feel super clear headed to make sure that I don't feel any foggyness. I feel energetic. I bounce on my trampoline for about five to ten minutes before the interview and really just get my heart rate up and just get my blood flowing. And I find that it really helps me feel more on point. So there's a hack for you. And all of these different things can help calm yourself back down and remove stress hormones from your system so you'll be able to maintain peak performance and flow. Well I hope all these tips will help you throughout your weeks and your years and I hope that you access peak performance easier now. And if you're interested to hear more from Stephen

about reaching your full potential we've got so much great content with him. Go back and listen to his full length YAP episodes, number 32 and 138. Also the YAP Live, the unedited version is from June 2021, so you can scroll back and find that one if you're interested to listen to it. And everything is linked in the show notes for your convenience. You guys can find me on social media at YAHP with Hala on Twitter or Instagram. You can also just search for me on LinkedIn, HalaTaha.

As always, thank you so much to my YAHP team, and this is Hala, signing off. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben podcast. My co-host and Happiness Guinea Pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft.

That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences about cultivating happiness and good habits. Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness without spending a lot of time, energy, or money. Suggestions such as follow the one-minute rule. Choose a one-word theme for the year or design your summer. We also feature segments like know yourself better where we discuss questions like are you

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