People who have regular access to flow, like professional surfers
or people who organize their lives around flow report the highest levels of life
satisfaction that exists. So this is not about, “oh,
how do we find happiness?” It's really like,
how do you build flow into your life? Because we're talking about states north of happy.
A flow state is a state of consciousness in which you feel your best
and you perform your best, it's as simple as that. Everything's amazing and performance levels go
through the roof. It's characterized by the acronym STER,
the features of flow, it stands for selflessness,
and that your sense of self completely vanishes, and that means that the inner chatter,
what they call the inner Woody Allen, it's the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,
it's responsible for self editing, it's the inner critic,
that actually gets knocked offline. So you experience that as a sense of selflessness,
of losing yourself and finding yourself, and that's experienced as liberation
because you're here and you're now and there's no inner chatter.
So that's the S from STER. Then T, timelessness.
The way the time is ordered in the brain gets knocked offline too.
So time passes by kind of strangely, it can speed up,
it can slow down, it can get warped, time becomes relative in an “Einsteinian”, sense.
So selflessness, timelessness, there's a sense of effortlessness,
you don't feel the labor when you're in flow, whether you're playing jazz or whether
you're cycling down a mountain, it doesn't feel like you're putting
a lot of work into it, it's just like
you're watching yourself do it and it's just every move follows the next move perfectly well.
And finally richness. The sense that there's more information access,
you're accessing more information, you're seeing more data,
lateral thinking increases, pattern recognition increases,
risk taking increases and performance levels increase when you're in flow.
So all this stuff is happening at the same time, essentially it's the ideal human state.
People who have regular access to flow like professional surfers
or people who organize their lives around flow report the highest levels of life
satisfaction that exist. So this is not about, “oh,
how do we find happiness?” It's really like how do
you build flow into your life? Because we're talking about states
north of happy, beyond happiness. And so for me,
there are universal flow triggers and there are specific flow triggers
for specific personalities and temperaments and certain predispositions.
And I suppose a musician finds flow when he plays music,
a golfer finds flow when he plays golf, a mountain biker…
I would say experiment, try different hobbies, learn a different language.
Universal flow triggers tend to include novelty and a little bit of risk.
Not so much risk that you shut down and not too little risk that you're
bored or disengaged, flow follows focus. It's also good to understand flow cycles.
You can't flow all the time because it's cognitively expensive.
There's a lot of neurochemistry happening, again, it's norepinephrine, it's dopamine,
it's all these different, this cocktail of chemicals,
and these get depleted and you have to have
good sleep, it’s crucial for flow, if you're not getting good sleep,
you're not going to get any flow, sleep is incredibly restorative,
I treat my sleep like a religion, getting to bed, getting my eight hours is crucial,
I can't get on stage, I can't do a talk if I'm not sleeping well
I can't manage the world, I lack the resources to deal with things, so sleep is huge.
So when you're in that present and that unencumbered sense of first sight,
everything is new again, including
the ideas that are emerging in your brain or the perceptions that you're having,
you become what you behold, you notice where you are,
you stop and smell the roses, you see the world in a grain of sand,
you see heaven in a wild flower, you hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
you hold eternity in an hour. And so whether it's
playing jazz, whether it's freestyle rap, whether it's writing, whether it's dancing,
you're so present, you're so free from the tyranny of later and before
that what happens now becomes infinite man. When you're in that stage, you're mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, your desirous of everything at the same time,
you never yawn or say a commonplace thing, you burn, burn, burn
like yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.
And in the book, “Stealing Fire”, Wheal and Kotler talk about
what they call the altered states economy.
The trillions of dollars a year that people spend to see other people
in altered states, to see other people in the present and in the forever box.
Whether it's going to a concert to see jazz musicians lose themselves
in that ecstatic magic that they create with their music
or whether it's theater, whether it's watching a gymnast
do flips in the air or going to watch sports events.
We pay money, we pay money to see people in the forever box
because we have theory of mind, we can infer mental states,
we can read other minds, we can reflect other minds
and so sometimes watching is enough to get a taste of it,
experience it vicariously.
And because many of us don't have access to that amount of flow
on a regular basis, we pay money to watch the elite athletes or artists
who have built their lives around it do it and in beholding it, we become it for a moment
and we spend a trillion dollars plus a year to get access to those states.
Human beings live in a better time now than they've ever lived in all of human
history by a factor of I don't know how much
and yet if it bleeds, it leads on the news. The media is incentivized to hack our attention,
our attention responds to fear because of the amygdala that we have
inherited from the most nervous humans in the past that were the quickest ones to run
away from the predators, and so we have a predisposition
towards anxiety and hyper vigilance. And again, the problem with that is that then
the incentive of attention hacking of a media enterprise
that works because of advertising business model is that
there's mechanisms that again have incentive to feed us negative news,
which warps our perception of reality, which makes us feel a kind of
existential bummer on a day to day basis that the world is going to shit,
that we can't do anything about it and so we might as well either
hide and take refuge or live in what Jamie
Weald calls 21st century normal, which is this fibrillating nervous
system that's constantly oscillating between anxiety and depression.
What we need is more fucking flow. Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book,
“Beyond Boredom and Anxiety”, was the guy that first
popularized the notion of flow, the state of consciousness in
which you feel your best and you perform your best,
a state of consciousness in which you lose your sense of self,
you lose your sense of time, you lose all sense of effort,
and you are essentially in a cloud nine. Selflessness, timelessness,
effortlessness and information richness. Performance levels go through the roof,
the inner chatter goes quiet, you experience this as liberation,
you step into the eternal now, the forever box,
and you're the surfer in the wave, you're the jazz musician in the zone,
you're the writer who is like fucking having the flow go through him,
and no matter what your particular flow trigger is you respond to the world better,
you feel more present and you feel like you have more
agency to make a dent in the universe. So what we really need is to
figure out ways of organizing people's lives so that they have more regular access to flow
on a kind of daily basis I would hope. So even if flow is temporary
or even if, “awe” is a transitory, enchanted moment,
it does leave you with increased feelings of well-being,
increased feelings of compassion and increased feelings of creativity,
not to mention that neurophysiologically, the experience of, “awe”,
is an antiinflammatory experience too. So having regular access to this
primes our nervous system to be better citizens, more compassionate, more creative beings.
So what we're talking about here is improving the human condition fundamentally.