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

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Join Hala for a Live Young and Profiting Podcast Episode with Steven Kotler, one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. They will discuss how converging technologies are transforming business, industries and our lives.   This episode is sponsored by Ivoox and Credit Karma   ***Meet the Moderators***   Steven Kotler Steven is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and entrepreneur.  Has written 16 published works, including Flow, The Art of Impossible, and Stealing Fire  His articles have appeared in over 70 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, LA Times, Wired, Time magazine, GQ, Discover, Popular Science, Outside, Men’s Journal, Details and National Geographic Adventure. Founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective - A research and training initiative primarily focused on decoding the science behind ultimate human performance. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance.   Social Media:   Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Follow Hala on ClubHouse: @halataha Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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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

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You're tuning into a live episode of YAP Young and Profiting Podcast. I'm your host, Halla Taha. And today we are joined by former YAP guest and fan favorite Stephen Kotler. Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author. He's an award-winning journalist and the executive director of Flow Research Collective. He's one of the world's leading experts on human performance and the author of nine bestsellers. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer prizes. It's been translated into over 40 languages, and he's appeared in over 100 publications.

Stephen is most known for his in-depth work on flow, which is what we're going to dive into today, as well as all of his new discoveries in his latest book, The Art of the Impossible. I personally love the topic of productivity and ultimate human peak performance. So I can't wait to dive in. The way this is gonna work,

it's gonna be a guided interview with me for about 60 minutes or so and we are going to bring people up for Q&A. So let's start off with some foundation. I love to start off my interviews at a place where people can really understand the basics and then we can build on from that. And so 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. And we've all had this at some point in our lives. So to kick things off, to kind of 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, 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 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 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 pretty profound shift in how the brain processes information when we move into flow, when you want to talk about neuroscience, what's going on in the brain, neuroscientists want

to talk really about four things, there's a whole lot more, but at least you got to talk about these four characteristics. You have to talk about neural anatomy and networks, and this is basically where in the brain something is taking place. So neural anatomy refers to very specific structures, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex kind of thing. And networks very rarely does something take place just in one spot in the brain. And sometimes there are hard wire networks where there are actual kind of neuronal connections. And sometimes there are a function on that work.

So parts of the brain that get active and do work at the same time, and those are referred to as functionally connected. So you've got to talk about where in the brain is something that's taking this place. And then you want to talk about where in the brain is something that's taking this place, and then you want to talk about neuroelectricity and neurochemistry, and that brain waves and basically neurochemicals. And this is the two ways the brain talks to itself and to the rest of the body. It's like we're not going to talk about all four shifts I'm going to give as a shorthand, and I'm going to talk a little bit about changes in neurol anatomical and network function,

then a little bit of neural chemistry. And it's worth talking about these things as they relate to kind of things we experience in flow. And I said earlier that flow massively amplifies all aspects of performance. So I'll talk about how they change these changes in brain end up impacting performance if that makes sense. Totally.

Cool. 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, the part of your 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 going to perform an efficiency exchange. We're going to 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 going to 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 that'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 in less your kind of in a combat situation or an action sport situation very rarely are fears and 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 the 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 that 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? Like 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 preform 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 dreaming. It happens during meditation. It happens during trans states. 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 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 the 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 met can get into flow. So peak performance is available to each and every one of us. And this happened for an evolution. I mean, do you want the big picture? Evolutionary reason, because it's work talking about what flow amplifies and what peak performance and flow actually means to sort of talk about that but I can pause here and see where you want to go. Yeah I think that sounds great let's

do that. Let's talk big picture. Okay 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 and I gonna give various numbers and I'll try to give you a nod, this was not research that really, some of it was done at the flow research collective in my organization, but there are probably somewhere between 500 and a thousand different flow researchers globally at this point. So it's a big community, a lot of people are working on this. So we know, for example, motivation, productivity, and grit will get significantly amplified and flow. Sometimes a 500% above baseline, the Department of Defense found that soldiers and flow

will learn 250 to 500% 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 or 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 FlowState.

So, there's individual flow, me and a FlowState, and there's me and all of you and a FlowState together. That's group flow. It's a team performing it our best. And to facilitate that in flow, you also see an amplification, in collaboration, in cooperation, empathy, increases in flow, you also see an amplification in collaboration and 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, you know, concerned in today's climate about actually increasing empathy. They think it's going to make them better at their job in the modern world. I agree. So we're working with them on flow. And you also, the last thing that could sample flight is 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, as you asked. 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, or 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 to fight or flee, or get creative, get innovative, get collaborative, and make new resources. That's what's being amplified by flow.

That's why it's such a complete package. Oh my gosh, so amazing. You are so brilliant. And I'd love to kind of talk about how flow is not one size fits all and how flow is really a spectrum. So can you help us understand how there's different levels of flow? Yeah, let's do that.

Let me back up and just give you a quick version of how psychologists define flow, because I can't answer the second question. We're first telling you that. So this is going to sound familiar already. When psychologists define flow, they say, hey, the state has six phenomenological characteristics. That's a big fancy word that means how the experience makes you feel.

So when we're in flow, psychologists say, okay, you just had an experience. How do you know if it was flow or not? Well, did these six phenomenological characteristics show up? And they're going to sound familiar because I named a bunch of them before. So when we're in flow, there's complete concentration on the task at hand. There's a merger of action awareness, time dilation, the diminishment of our sense of self. We don't feel peak performance. What we feel is a sense of control.

So we feel like we can control forces. We normally can't control. Now in athletics, this is in basketball, right? This could be a basketball player in flow and they're talking about the basket. Suddenly it looks like the size of a hulu, but it's gigantic and they can't miss. This could be a writer in flow.

This is me in flow. It's six o'clock in the morning and I'm doing things with words and language that I normally can't do with words and language at six o'clock in the morning. I have amazing control over language. six o'clock in the morning. I have amazing control over language. So we have that sense of control.

And the final characteristic is euphoria itself. The technical term is flow is auto-tellic, which means it's an end in itself. It just means the experience is so delightful, so fun, so pleasurable and addictive that we can't wait to get more of it. And we'll go out of our way to get more of it So when psychologists want to measure flow they say okay these six characteristics you just had an experience How much did they show up scale of one to seven they use a standard like our scale to measure and You can be as you pointed out the experience itself is not singular

It's not a single oh, I'm in the zone. It's actually like any other kind of experience, this spectrum of possible experiences. So take anger, right? Anger is not a single emotion. It's a category of emotions. You can be a little hurt. You can be homicidally murderous.

It's the same emotion, right? You're still feeling anger. Flow is sort of a catch all term for the same thing. So we said that you can be a micro flow. This is when those six characteristics show up, but they're dialed down to like one or two on the scale. They're really soft. So this is an experience we've all had. You go to work, you got to write an email to your boss, you want to write a quick email, take five minutes, and you sit down, and you get inspired. It's stuck to know what you're doing, and you don't know what happened.

You look up an hour later, an hour has gone by. You didn't notice time was passing, and you realize instead of a quick email, you've written an essay, you've got the Magna Cardon in front of you. Maybe your whole sense of self didn't diminish, but bodily awareness did. It disappeared. As a result, you pop back into consciousness and you're like, wow, I need to run to the bathroom. That happens to all of us all the time.

That's microflow. That's very common. Research shows that we spend about five percent of our work lives in microflow, often without even noticing it. Macroflow, other end of the spectrum. Here, you get all these experiences in there, turned all the way up to 11. So, time will pass slowly.

You'll get that freeze frame effect. The now will stretch on and on and on. And you start that get, not only like, does this sense of self-disappear, but you can self-starts to get dislocated. So you can have an experience of feeling one with everything or you can have out of body experiences. These are common in macro-flow states. We understand the neurobiology. Under those experiences, we understand why flow will produce those experiences,

but until the 1950s, most scientists thought macro-flow was a religious and or spiritual experience, meaning it only showed up in religious or spiritual people. And then in the 1950s Abraham Maslow found flow in a giant study group of high achievers. Everybody in a study group used flow kind of as a way to kind of better their lives and through productivity and all that stuff. But every in a study group was nathiest. So suddenly mystical experiences were out and flow states were one of the names that replaced them. It's so interesting. And I would love to get your take on the types of people

who typically experience flow, because when you're talking about losing yourself, it sounds so intense, and it sounds like something that only 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, it shows up anywhere, you know, in any one provides certain initial conditions or math. That wasn't just an arbitrary statement. I think it's still one of the biggest studies I've ever performed in psychology was the study of the University of Chicago Psychology Department in the 70s. Started this study, he went around the world globally talking to anybody and everybody about the times in their life when they felt their best and they performed their best. And he talked, when I say everybody, I mean everybody, started out first looking at experts because

that's what he suspected. He looked at what you suspected. He looked at expert artists, dancers and musicians and actors and poets and writers. And then he started looking at expert athletes and rock climbers and things along those lines. And then he just went everywhere and he started talking to normal people and insurance brokers and stock brokers and housewives. And he talked to Chicago assembly line workers and Detroit assembly line workers and elderly Korean women in Japanese teenage motorcycle gang members and Navajo sheep herders and Italian grapefires and on and on and on. Everyone anywhere can get into flow. If you can get into a deep flow state working

on an assembly line, you can get into flow anywhere. In fact, just to give you a couple of examples that are so far outside of extreme sports and 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. They get so sucked in the conversation that ideas are really just spiraling. You see that sort of creativity and 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 outside of sports and art, one of the places that they discovered was Montessori education. And 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 our map. To put it more specifically, flow is really trainable. The reason I know this is the flow research collective. We train about 1,000 people a month. We train everybody from Olympic athletes and professional athletes and members of the US Special Forces to see sweet executives, a Fortune 500 company, as two large swatges of the companies themselves.

And I think right now we're working with everybody from a censure who's a business consultancy to outing 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, because we measure flow pre and post, we see a 70% increase in flow.

This stuff is incredibly, incredibly trainable. of measure flow pre-imposed, 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 kind of 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'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 you how to use and deploy these triggers.

If you want more flow in your life, Tyler pointed 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, is that flow follows focus, and it can only show up when all our tanges in the right here right now. That's what the triggers do. They drive our

attention into the present moment, into the now. They do it one of three ways. The triggers will either force the brain to release dopamine or norepinephrine into our system. Both dopamine and norepinephrine are focusing chemicals. And what they do is, whatever, when they're in our system, whatever's right in front of us, whatever we're paying a time to do,

we are locked on, we are excited about it, we are curious about it to give you an idea, dopamine and norepinephrine together, small amounts underpin curiosity. If I turn up the knob and I put large amounts of dopamine and norepinephrine into your system, I've just created passion. That is literally the neurobiological recipe for passion. Everybody wants passion in their life, what you're saying is I want that feeling of norapinepernadope mean. In fact, everybody in this room, I would guess,

has it one point or another fallen in love? When you fall in love, the feeling you get about your romantic partner is norapinepernadope mean. Think about the focus. When you fall in love, oh my God, you can't stop paying attention to the person who's in front of you, right,. Oh my god, you can't stop paying attention to the person who's in front of you, right? You're a new partner. You're just can't stop. Think you about them. Chance. I was looking at them so excited to be with them. That's what

don't mean nor up and effort and do. That's how much attention they drive into the present. The other things that triggers can do and sometimes you get dope means sometimes you get nor up and effort and sometimes you get both. The third thing and sometimes you get combinations of all is they 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 want, 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's just 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, your 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 start working. My wife's a night-off. 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, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock. That's where they kind of stuff 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. 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 for 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 am just not available. My life knows these hours I'm not available. And I always tell people, have your conversations at a time, you're gonna do this work, flow massively, advertise 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 who 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. Well, I was gonna ask,

is that what you call non-time, what you're talking about right now, or is that something different? So non-time is specifically important. I think it's important for all of us, but it's really important for creativity. Creativity as a skill demands the brain to do certain things, and one of the demands is the brain to be very relaxed.

And time stress is not great. So one of the reasons I like four o'clock in the morning is nobody's awake. You're not, nobody's calling me, nobody needs me, my day hasn't started, nothing is due yet. And if I need to spend two hours working on a sentence because sometimes I do to get it right, I got two hours, it's a non-time. It doesn't belong to anybody. Non-time is a great way to think about that 9 to 120 minutes, especially if you're interested in using it for something that's really creative.

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Thank you so much. I appreciate you, Steven. Huge fan, brother. I took your 30-day Mind Valley course, and it was absolutely transformational. So thank you so much for the work that you're doing. And I wanted to ask you if you and your team have studied at all the impact of psychedelics in using that as a

modality to tap deeper into flow state. Hey Jeremy, I'm so glad you got a lot out of the class. Thank you for the kind words and thank you for the question. I'm gonna say this right now because I don't want this conversation to go sideways. I don't work on psychedelics. I've done work on psychedelics. I'll talk about it. Talk about why I don't work on psychedelics if you've done work on psychedelics. I'll talk about it. Talk about why I don't work on psychedelics. If you want, I've noticed when I'm on Clubhouse, somebody asked this psychedelic question and we spend the rest of the time talking about drugs and psychedelics and I'm just not interested enough to do that. So I'm going to answer your question and then I'm going to stop the psychedelic conversation right here. I'm not venture further into it. So here's what we know. All altered states of consciousness share a lot of overlap.

Psychedelics, transstates, meditative states, flow states, you get deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, like I mentioned, and you get a bunch of performance enhancing neural chemicals. Most of the psychedelics are serotonin dominant experiences. Flow is not serotonin dominant by any stretch of the imagination. Flow is predominantly dopamine dominant. And one of the ways to think about certain neural chemicals is you often get serotonin and dopamine in the system at the same time, but they're antagonistic. They take you in opposite directions. So when you get them both together, it's fine tuning,

like you need preble and base. So you'll get dopamine in the other psychedelic experiences, front end of an acid trip, front end of mushroom. You'll get a big dopamine burst. It happens, but it fades away and there's serotonin experiences. So there's similarity, but there's differences between the experiences. The next question is, can you use psychedelics as a way to hack into flow? And the jury is really out on this one. some people have said that microdosing psychedelics gets them in too flow. I personally tried it both with mushrooms and acid and a number of occasions, and I hated it. They were horrible experiences.

I was irritable, I was irked, I was unfloy, and it drove me in the other direction completely. I have no idea what people are talking about. So on a personal level I have no zero experience here. It did not work for me and I've definitely tried it under a bunch of different conditions and just found it awful. The reason we do not do this work at the Flow Research Collective, even though it's interesting and there's overlap and we do do some work on cannabis and on CBD that's a little more relevant to flow again same caveat that we're doing it mostly for the science on that rather than the Way to hack into flow and really the reason is this tell people we don't really work with technologies

or tell people we don't really work with technologies or substances that the flow research collected, which is not to say that they don't work for people, but one, I found that the technologies and substances that do work are very individual. So what works for you, Germany, is not necessarily going to work for Hala, is not necessarily going to work for me. I tried to deal in universals if I can. I trained a lot of people I once was going to work for everyone. And more specifically, when I'm being super dramatic and I get this question, I always say, look,

that when I was a journalist on five separate occasions, I got shot at. And at no point when somebody was shooting at me, could I say, excuse me, so would you put down that AK-47 while I microdose some psilocybin so I can drop into flow and dodge your bullet or use this brain wave tuning technology to help me get. It just doesn't seem to work that way in the real world and more specifically when the

boss calls you into his office and says, Hey, that presentation you're next Friday, I need it now, I need to do it for my boss and her boss and her boss. In the future of the world, and your job depends on it, there's no time for a substance or technology. Or the one I like to say is, you know, when you're significant and others, honey, can you come in here for a minute? Can I talk to you? Once again, there's no time for a substance or technology.

You need something that's reliable, that's repeatable, that works for everyone that works in that situation, which is why we focus on flow. And the final thing I will say is the work that we did do, we teamed up with Robin Card Harris' Lab at Imperial College in London, this is where they've done all the foundational brain imaging on psychedelic work. And we did a bunch of stuff, want to know there was overlap between seven setting and psychedelics and flow triggers and we also wanted to look at like the usefulness of flow versus the usefulness of psychedelics in various situations and in our data what it looked like to me is that if you're interested in peak performance flow is the better tool for the job if you're interested in peak performance, flow is the better tool for the job.

If you're interested in spiritual experiences, synesthesia or learning to wrestle with bad trips, psychedelics are probably the better tool for the job. But those were the only categories where I saw significant outperformance. And for me, I'd rather go with flow to achieve creativity and innovation and all that stuff, mostly because there's no hangover and I don't have to lose a day or two afterwards and I don't feel like shit. But this is also, finally, last thing I'm going to say, not a condemnation at all on psychedelics or drugs.

I am absolutely not saying that I think drugs and psychedelics are fine. I think they're fun, shake the snow globe, adventure, break from reality stuff. But I don't think the experiences we have on psychedelics mean a whole lot. I don't think the inspiration ends up being incredibly practical change your life on the ground. Kind of stuff in comparison to what comes up consistently in flow. And that seems to be what our data says. So those are my very, very, very strong opinions on this update. I hope I answered your question, Jeremy. I hope you don't feel like I threw you under the bus on that one. Now, brother, I appreciate you. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, and I know Stoheibe has a question, but I want to kind of ask a tangent to this question. So 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 in our brain and kind of like hacking our own biology? Yeah, I'm not suggesting that at all. There are lots of technologies that can help us get into flow. I mean there's brain wave and training stuff that you can use that will help train up focus but you know 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. 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 wanna 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, 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 for 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 high flow educational environments and we're hoping somebody will do that without 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. This episode of YAP is brought to you by Credit Karma. It's summer time and things are finally opening back up.

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So hey, by no that you have a question for Steven. So hey, it's actually the owner of the Human Behavior Club. Make sure you guys tap that greenhouse at the top of the screen and follow the Human Behavior Club. So hey, what's your question for Steven? Thanks, Paula, for the Piotr. This has been fascinating. So, Steven, I read your book, Stealing Fire, and I was a big fan of it. We kind of described it in Navy steels and how they get into flow states. So, Paula, you asked me ask my question about technology and kind of getting into flow

states, but my question would be, how long can we as humans, as any research and 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, and tapping into the flow state? So, great questions, and 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 most of we call them schizophrenia You can't live in flow. It is a four-stage cycle. It's a process. There are four distinct stages. Only one

of them is flow. You have to move through 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 has last about 90 minutes. And one of the reasons we know this is because dopamine and noraponephrine underpin these states. And those chemicals really in their peak concentration 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 in chemicals have basically 20 minute shelf lives.

You can get another burst and continue but like there's a limited supply. So 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 up in 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 me in the Norap and Effron. And now you actually have to focus through the rest of the movie without feel good and

oral chemistry to kind of propel you along. At least that's my experience of those movies. And I'm kind of a James Bond fan. So maybe it goes to other places, but here's the wrench and all that. There is an altruism-based flow state. So if you've ever done any charitable work, any nonprofit work really helped others, my wife and I operate in an animal sanctuary, a dog sanctuary, and helpers high. You know, we work with very sick and very old and we do hospice care and special needs care

for dogs predominantly. And 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 and 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 were 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, or anybody who's ever been involved in a startup, especially if it's really early days, and everybody who joined the company is 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. And 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 on 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 and off 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 coming. 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. Great to talk to you. I'd like to go off with so, hey, I've just asked. And I want to ask, is there anything that 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 to answer 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 a diagnostic. It's free. Anybody can take it. It will not take more flow, we built a 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 view 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. So 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 has 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. And there's three things on the mental side. My brain is sort of ready to even start doing this work.

So I wanna start there on the physical side, flows 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, in the out of the narrow community, you get a lot of pushback.

I can get by and five hours of sleep is this bad job on her. 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 at your best on a 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, three days, a row, the emotional regulation goes out, the window, you lose a bunch of stuff you can't fight against. You also need a hydration and nutrition, and it has to be high quality, hydration and high quality nutrition. I'm not an expert on those subjects I'm just you know, and I'm not gonna 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 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 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 going to need lots of energy. This is a heavy thing. If on the other hand, you have robust social support networks 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 it requires a lot less energy and produces a lot less fear. So there's a physical energy penalty for not maintaining robust sources, port networks and 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. 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, or your significant other, or your brother,

or 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 the 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

norapinaffron. A little bit of norapinaffron, you get curiosity and focus and excitement. Too much norapinaffron, you get anxiety and panic and vigil too much nor up enough when 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 to 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 ten 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. And it works automatically. And 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 Fox at USC, who's one of the world's leading experts on the neurobiology of gratitude and how it works with flow. We've done it in conjunction with Glen Fox at USC, who's 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,, 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 every 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 my staff, you know, maintain flow and maintain peak performance. They were doing all three things every day, or they weren't working for me, because it was a really high stress time. And I felt that our every-as-nourished 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. Oh my gosh. It seems like Jeremy has something he's clamoring to ask,

are you just clapping? No, just one thing that I don't think we touched on that has really helped me immensely with Stephen's work and my clients is, oh, is the habit. And I know we may be short on time, but I thought it may be useful to speak about. Sure, you broke up a bit. I'm not sure if you can, do you hear what he said, Stephen, if you could read it?

Yeah, I can translate. Jeremy, we're not there yet. That's going to require a very deep, long discussion about motivation and all the care parts of motivation, how they were like to flow, which I'm happy to do. It might be a, if you wanted to segue into how we can get more flow in our lives and some of the flows triggers, it was more I was going to go, but it's not a bad question.

Yeah, let's talk about triggers. Like you said, let's talk about how do we get more flow in our lives? We probably need you back for a part two because really, there's so many ways that we can go down into this And I know in the art of impossible you talk about like Jeremy was just saying motivation creativity learning We're not going to be able to unpack all of those in the last, you know, 20 minutes or so that we have here So why don't you go ahead with talking about getting about a couple more flow traders and if I have time I can sort of answer Jeremy's question, but it takes a little while to get there. Let's talk about oh Let's come off to what I just talked about and build on something I said earlier

So we've got the peak performance basics and I've said you need complete concentration for flow cool Okay, excellent. What else do you need? You're going to attack your hardest task for 90, 20 minutes. You've carved out the time. You practice distraction management. How do you actually attack the task? This is where what's known as the challenge skills ratio. Sometimes called the golden rule of flow or flows most important, most potent trigger comes into play. So the idea here is really simple. Flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you'll want to stretch, but not snap. If I were to say this emotionally, I would say, hey, this sweet spot is near the midpoint between boredom and anxiety.

Boredom, there's not enough stimulation here. I'm not paying much attention, anxiety. Whoa, way too much stimulation. I'm paying too much attention. In between is this sweet spot, the challenge skills balance. Now it is a tricky spot to maintain. It's not very wide. It's been estimated that it's really's not very wide, it's been estimated

that it's really like 4% wide, meaning we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge the task is about 4% greater than our skill set. What does that mean? Well, if you're shy, if you're meek, if you're quiet, if you're a limit timid, if you're not a risk taker, if you're a little introverted, any of those things,

chances are 4% is gonna be tricky because you're outside your comfort zone. And to do this work, you have to get very, very comfortable with being uncomfortable. But you are just outside your comfort zone. So for everybody who sort of clapped earlier when I was talking about on to be nervous, showing up at work and dropping into flow

and working endless hours over and over and over again, the type A hard driving driving hard charging types. The problem with this sweet spot is if that's how you're wired, speaking from experience, because this is how I'm wired. I've got one speed and it's fast and that like everything is that way. I and people like me will tell take a challenge. It's 20, 30, 40, 50% greater than like my skillset just simply for the thrill of it because it holds my attention and is motivating.

And it is motivating. There's high-hard goals, motivation science for a bunch of reasons we won't go into. High-hard goals will increase motivation 11, 25%. You absolutely want to set them. But what you have to do is you have to make sure that the thing you're doing right here right now, the task of hand, that you're going to spend your 90 minutes on, only 4% greater than your sweet spot. And if you can do that, if you can really maintain the challenge skills balance every day, you show up, you have your 90 minutes run under a concentration, you push just outside your comfort zone. And I'll talk about what this looks like in a bunch of different situations

and have a second. This will make flow super reliable and super repeatable. So what they held is this mean in practice. Let me start with a really simple example for my own life. So I'm a writer. I want to start every day by writing. So how do I stay in my challenge-scale sweet spot? Well, it's not a fixed thing. But when I start a book, when I don't really know where I'm going to have discovered that 500 words a day is a really good goal for me. And the reason is that I can write about 350 words sort of easy. That's my eyes closed.

I'm not working that hard. I can do it on half a sleep. I can sort of do it on my own, hungover. I can under all those conditions. But if I really want to get to 500 words, you have to go from one idea and you transition to another. Just in the way that I write 500 words usually means I have to transition between two ideas.

If you've ever written before, you know transitions are really hard. That's where writers really earn their keep. So 500 words is actually a stretch at the start of a book. Middle of the book, my daily goal is 750 to 800 words. And the end of a book, it's a thousand and twelve hundred words. So it's a moving target, but I change it every day. So what's a different example of the challenge skills, sweet spots. So here's another one is my favorite corporate example of the challenge skills, sweet spot. In the 90s, Toyota started the 90s as just another car company and they ended the 90s as based in the most powerful car company in the world.

And the reason is they switched management philosophy. They adopted a management philosophy known as Kaizen. And Kaizen had one sort of foundational principle, which was if you work for Toyota, I don't care if you work on the assembly line, your job isn't just to put hub caps on wheels, it's to put hub caps on wheels, but make the entire hub cap on wheel process better. Make Toyota as a whole better, improve your job, improve the assembly line, improve anything. This tapped two flow triggers,, autonomy is a flow trigger.

Simple reason when we're in charge of our own lives, we pay more attention to our own lives. Just that simple. More technically, autonomy and attention are actually coupled. You literally cannot complete attention to a subject or to a thing if you don't want to. If you don't believe in paying attention to it, if you don't feel like you're paying attention by your own volition, you will not be able to play a continued attention. So, Kaisen is autonomy, right? You don't just do your job, you can make the company as a whole better, so you have a little more freedom, just a little, and challenge skills sweet spot. Your job is no longer rope boring put hub cap on wheel. It's improved the entire hub cap on wheel process. And suddenly those two things, which by the way, were based on flow principles, they did some work which except me high. This was all sort of

intentional. Those two things ended up making Toyota an incredibly high flow environment, way more productive, way more fulfilling, everything shot through the roof. So individual example, the challenge skills balance, and sort of a corporate example of what that might look like. Yeah, bam. If you're ready to take your business to New Heights, break through to the six or seven figure mark or learn from the world's most successful people, look no further because

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And we're gonna go ahead and continue along with the Q&A. We've got a bunch of folks here on stage. I have a personal question, Steven, because as you're talking about all this, I keep thinking about like, you know, what parts of my life do I feel like I always get into flow? And the thing that keeps popping in my mind that and I wanna ask you about it,

is sometimes like I will procrastinate some presentation that I need to do. I own a marketing agency. I often have to put together a proposal and I hate doing it, but I always have to do it and I procrastinate it. But then right before the call, something that should take a normal person two hours, takes me 20 minutes and the client is blown away and I get it done and I'm fully focused and I just knock it out because I have to

So what is the relationship? I love you for this question. This was a perfect follow-up to the challenge skills balance and yeah, this is great So a couple things to know in advance You're literally not procrastinating procrastinating is this word that we use. And the reason is that procrastination is in peak performance in general. We have a saying which is your emotions don't mean what you think they mean. And procrastination is a fabulous example. So the human body is not just designed for peak performance.

We are designed to perform it our best. We will naturally move in the direction of peak performance if we can. And we will naturally do things to create conditions for peak performance if we can. What you are calling procrastination is actually you tuning the challenge skills balance. You're saying, I'm bored. This presentation doesn't hold my attention. I can't perform it my best, so I'm gonna delay it until the night before, two hours before when I have to do it.

Suddenly my attention is locked in and I can drop into flow and get it done. So what I tell people in that situation, procrastination is about one or two things. Either the task is too big and you're scared, and then you have to chunk it down and make it much smaller, or the task is too boring and you're not paying attention.

And so, if you don't particularly like the way, like I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what you're doing, it's totally fine. The reason, I don't think it's advisable all the time as a peak performance technique, is what happens if you're cat sick or you're sick or you know take something happens and blocks your actual ability to get it done in those two hours. If you don't want to take it to chance, you can just make the task harder.

What am I talking about? Give you an example of my own life. I was a journalist. That's how I started my career and I was very poor for a very long time and so I would take any assignment I could take. I was very busy and I got lucky that way but I ended up writing a lot of stuff that I wasn't super thrilled about writing. It wasn't my ideal choice but autonomy is a flow trigger. So you sort of had to find a way to do it and find a way to make it interesting and one of the the things I would do is, let's say I'd have to write 1,000 word article on data caves, for example, okay, and this is a true story.

Okay, I've got to write 1,000 word article on data caves, and I'm a little interested in data caves, but could I write an article for a major science publication on data caves in the style of Charles Dickens? Now, I well aware of the fact that Charles Dickens wrote a hundred years ago in a very different style, but could I like do it and modern? I and that so I would take a challenge that I thought was boring and I wanted to put off the night before, but that's a bad idea for an article. And instead I just made it harder in a way that was invisible to anybody, right? Like my editors had no idea that I was actually trying to copy Charles Dickens' writing style in a more modern verse while I was writing the article, made it a hell of a lot more interesting.

To me, I was tuning the challenge skills balance to deal with procrastination, get out ahead of that. But, know that procrastination is literally your body saying, hey, conditions are not optimal for peak performance if you want, you know, change them. I love that. It's so true because it's like, I feel like I get in the zone because I'm like, all right, I'm having an hour now. I could just bang this out and it's not as boring anymore because it's like under a time

limit. So I think that's really helps to explain what's going on there. All right. So let's go to Wade at the bottom. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for hosting this space. This has been a really cool talk. And the question I posed in my bio, I think, so hey, I've already alluded to it in the sense that is there such thing as too much flow? So with cognitive load, we have maybe a certain amount of time during the day to get specific tasks done.

Now, when you're explaining transient hyper-frontality, it gives a sense that with that time dilation slowing down and really focusing in on tasks, maybe this could last for a very long time, but what were the upper limits of that state? So, you really don't want to live in a flow state. There's so much information and a lot of life is if you were in a constant flow state, it wouldn't be an ecstatic state. It would just become normal, right? The brain habituates very quickly in weird ways, even though flow always remains ecstatic, there's not enough information. You also, there are some things flow is

bad for long-term planning, for example, right? When you're in flow, long-term planning is generally shut down and risk-taking is turned way up. This is not the time to, like, you don't want to make decisions about your marriage or your career status. You may get insights in flow,

but I always say flow is for insights, you know, not being in flow is when you do the research on the insights to try to validate them. Flow is, you get amazing ideas, but there's no guarantee that they're the best ideas. So you want the non-flow states, so you can really hammer on them. And in terms of, we don't know what the limits are.

Like, how much flow can you get in, all those sorts of things. We don't have a really good handle on it and is too much flow bad for you. That's an interesting question that I don't think anybody's really addressed. We do know for sure, because of the nature of the challenge skills balance,

because you're constantly pushing challenges harder and harder and harder, your risk tolerance is go up and up and up with flow, and things to be aware of. I always point out that peak performance is not like self-help. Self-help is like, if I can get a five or 10% kind of improvement in your life weight

and I get it to last for like two-3 months, that's a win. Flow is a huge step-function worth of change and it's, you know, unlike self-help, it can go back. First of all, I always tell people, flow itself is morally neutral, right? Catburglers get into flow. If you go into the literature, there's a big thick literature on war and soldiers in flow, depending on which side of the war you're on and whether or not you like the soldiers in flow. That's a good thing or a bad thing. So it's a morally neutral state in a sense.

More is not necessarily always better. Okay, thank you so much, Stephen, that completely answered my question. And for anyone listening, if you haven't checked out, stealing fire, it's such a great book. And I think you wrote Rise of Superman 2, right? That describes flow as well. I did, yeah. He's got like 13 books, nine bestsellers. He is a legend in this space.

So I do want to make sure you get a chance to talk about the art of impossible. That is your latest book. So I'd love for you to give us your definition. Let me just give you a quick quick look at what that is. Yeah. So we've been talking about flow. Flow is a portion of the peak performance picture, but it's actually only a quarter. And I'm really, let me be clear. I'm talking about mostly predominantly cognitive peak performance here. So when you're talking about cognitive peak performance, you're really talking about four sets of skills. There's a set of skills that falls onto the

heading of motivation. It's more than just motivations. Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, grit and goals setting, but we call it motivation. There's a similar set of skills under the heading of learning, another set of skills under the head of creativity. Finally, there's a set of skills under the heading of flow, which is what we've been talking about most of the night. The art of impossible takes all four of those categories of skill sets. By the way, before we get there, how are they linked? The way I think about this is in any challenging situation, any situation where you might want

people performance, motivation gets you into the game, learning allows you to continue to play. Creativity is how you steer, and especially if you're going after a high-hard, quasi- and possible goals where you're not quite sure how to get their creativity is definitely how you steer. Flow, optimal performance is how you turbo boost the results, usually beyond all reasonable expectations. So that's the peak performance suite. What the Ardham Possible is really about is some new discoveries over the past five to ten years. I'd like in the science-peak performances we used to we've known about parts of

this picture forever. There are great known about parts of this picture forever. There are great books on parts of this. There are books on focus, and there are books on grit, and there are books on intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and passion, and purpose, and learning, et cetera, et cetera. What we now know is that, hey, wait a minute, this stuff is all one giant system. It is meant to work together.

It is meant to work in a specific order. And if you get everything working in this specific order, it was designed by evolution to work in. You go farther faster with a lot less bus. That's the big deal. And so what the art impossible is is literally a very, very practical 30 years worth of research in the neuroscience of big performance. And it's a top to bottom look at here's the full suite of peak performance tools. Here's how they work together. Here's the order that they're used. Here's how to put them into place in your life.

And there's a bunch of onboarding procedures and by the time you're at the end of the book, peak performance is really about six things you want to sort of do every day and about seven things you want to do every week and it is available to each and every one of us and that's sort of the point of the book. Amazing and I think I have you coming on later this summer where we're going to just deep dive in a proper one-on-one video interview just on the Art of Impossible. Given that my audience now has two episodes about Flow, I'll give them the homework to learn about flow first and then we'll dive into the art of impossible.

So we have time for a couple more questions Joshua. What is your question for Steven? Hi, good night. I'm Joshua Caso from Trinidad, Antobigo. So my question is, Steven, are there any principles in like design or design philosophies that you think that people could implement in their lives in terms of adjusting their physical space to get themselves into flow? I'm specifically speaking about do they need to paint their rooms in a particular color? Do they need to put certain graphical images on their walls or just their pen,

two inches to the right from the laptop or whatever. Gotcha, yeah, that's a great question. And really I want to start by saying there's stuff I can add, I'll give you some answers, but oh, I really think design thinking and sort of where it hits flow. I think as the flow triggers have become more and more obvious and well understood over the past five years, design thinking has really started intersects flow science. And so I think your question actually sits on one aspect of where the field sort of is right now. I think there's a bunch of research going in this way. Some of the things we know, like we talked about, for example,

Like some of the things we know, like we talked about, for example, complete costration is a flow trigger. So if you have an open office plan, that's terrible for flow. This means I'm not saying you have to, some people, by the way, find it very beneficial to work in an open office plan. Some people can focus that way. I, you know, I used to, when I was in college, I lived very far away from campus and I was very cold where I went to college, and I didn't have a car, and I would have to walk back and forth. So, I, you know, I was a bartender through college, I paid my way that way, and so, like, I would just hang out and work in bar that I would come on staff at 10 o'clock at night. I would just sit in the bar and do my homework and just be able to focus. Some people are wired that way, a lot of people aren't. In which case, you've seen in those we work spaces, I don't know if they have we work and turn it

out at a tobago at this point, but we're seeing like these little like mini foam boots that are popping up inside of offices where people built open office plans, but they've discovered, oh wow, we need places for complete concentration. Or if you're trying to get group flow, you want to wall the group off from the rest of the company. So you can get kind of complete concentration for the group. So those kinds of, you need facilities for that, just to give you one example. There's been zero work on color theory and flow,

but colors are very, very individual, one way or another. And our preferences are very, very individual one way or another, and our preferences are very, very individual, and that would seem to be a very individual decision. We do know that lower and cogged load is really important for flow. So, keeping your office fairly clean, if you're wired that way, I'm a neat freak. I can't have, you know, when I get busy, my office gets messy and I'll find myself blocked from flow and I will literally stop my work then clean my office just because I need to lower call to load for flow, but that's very individual. There, I, you know, I know a lot of scientists who are not comfortable if they're, you know, if their offices aren't over-sterned

paper and stuff like that. So again, very individual. What we can say across the board is, I'm not sure we can say anything across the board. And you are, of course, right. But if you do hold your pencil two inches above the paper and one inch to the right, as long as the moon is in the 7,000 Mars is aligned with Jupiter, that should work for you. Yeah, thanks. You're welcome, man. OK, cool. So let's see if doctor on the bottom is able to speak now,

because I know. Hi, am I audible to send? Yes. Yes. Hi, Jay. OK, hi. This is Dr. Francis with chemist. Hi, Steven.

It's been a while. My question specifically, and I'll be treated by Rodate, have you considered Kink or BDSM or therapeutic Kink for flow state? I'm sorry, what was the? Yeah, Kink or BDSM or therapeutic Kink. Oh, okay, good. We wrote a little bit about that in stealing fire.

I've done none of this work, but there is a, if you're familiar with the BDSM work, you know that, for example, bottoms experience a pain-induced flow state known as flying. And so, yes, BDSM produces flow, and it is, but it was just, you know, it's the exact same flow state that endurance athletes get into. It's a more endorphin driven pain relief driven flow state, perhaps at the front end of my slightly different triggers work to get you into flow, but there has been a bunch of work.

Orgasm itself is, you know, you get trans-enhypophantality in flow, you get a lot of the same neurochemicals, you get more way more, you know, orgasm. And that totally, you know, it's orgasm is obviously not an action state. You're paralyzed. It's the exact opposite. But there are some similarities. And there's a bunch of thinking around a lot of the tantric sex practices, the sort of long delayed

gratification practices that are very flow based. And one of the reasons is that meditation doesn't tend to produce enough dopamine alone, but you can use some of the sex practices without orgasm, you know, without climax at the end of it, to build up dopamine and it'll drive focus. And so there's overlap there. This is not work that I've done at all, but there are a lot of people poking at it, and it's interesting in it.

So good questions. Thank you so much for your question. All right, the next question that we have and then we're going to wrap this up. Laura, DM me on Instagram and said, I have a question that has been bugging me forever. I'm dying to ask Steve in this question, so I had to bring her up. So Laura, what is your question for Steve? Oh my gosh, thank you so much. Steve, I'm such a huge fan of your work.

So my question revolves around this notion that flow follows focus. But there are some really specific meditation techniques. I'm not sure if you're familiar with open focus awareness, developed by Les Femme, where it's really a style for moving into alpha brainwave states. And so I'm just kind of curious because like, based on what I read in Stealing Fire

and some of your other research, if you have suggestions for moving into alpha and then into theta, I don't know if you're familiar with open focus awareness, which is essentially the opposite of narrow focus, which is interesting. Yeah, no, Laura, you're actually asking some great questions. Thank you for bringing it up because there's a bunch I can do here.

And it's a slightly more complicated answer than you would expect. So the first thing to know is that flow is a focusing style, right? Open sense is meditation, focus meditation. Those are focusing styles. Flow is a different focusing style. The research shows that both focus meditation and or Bapasna open sense of style meditations will promote flow.

Where the research gets interesting is not in flow or say it's what you wanna do with the flow. So if you are doing creative work, really creative work, really creative work, especially in your, if you're in the like idea generation phase, you really want to lean on open senses meditation, open senses meditation, amplifies divergent thinking, focus meditation, amplifies convergent thinking. So logical linear thinking, that's focus meditation. So you need to do your taxes and you want to calm down and focus and maybe drop into

floating your taxes, do an open meditation, open sense, or do a focus meditation first. That's your tool. If you're going to paint the night sky and you want to get all the stars right, you might want the open senses meditation. So it's more about what kind of task you're going to be doing and you want to use flow floor the style of meditation will probably but it seems like any kind of you know I am paying attention to what is going on right here right now which is both kinds of meditation.

Seems to do it. Where things get much more interesting, Laura, is that neither of those techniques, alpha is not flow, as you know. The flow really, the baseline of flow is at the border between alpha and theta. So it's a little bit deeper, though there are a lot of people, including some folks who work for me and coach for me Who have trained people to get into alpha as a kind of gateway towards flow because it's very useful There are also the problem with all the meditations and why it doesn't produce flow it again comes down to dopamine and while there's some new evidence that meditation techniques especially if you're really really really good

You've been doing focused or open senses for years and you're excellent at it. You can actually start producing dopamine that way. I think that has to do with the gold direct in system and a whole bunch of stuff there. We don't quite know. What we do know is that some of the more complicated, cobalistic meditation styles and or Tibetan, for example example white lineage Tontra Buddhism all what these styles have in common is it's not just focusing on your breath or one thing They there's visualizations. There's transformations and cobblistic

Meditation you'll visualize Hebrew letters and you'll transmit them into other letters and into other letters And there's a lot of visualization and it's a lot of pattern recognition and pattern recognition produces dopamine which can drive flow. So those styles are believed to actually be better if you really want to use a meditation drive yourself into flow but for training just for you know I'd like more flow in my life. I think open-senses or focus both will work depending on what you want to use flow for. How do I do? That makes total sense. So I'm actually writing my thesis and graduate school on exploring the overlap and intersection between creative problem solving and microdosing.

And weaving quite a lot of flow into there. So I just so appreciate you. So I'd love to actually get you on the podcast. I have this psychedeledelic Leadership podcast and this is such a huge topic. So I'd love to invite you to go deeper into this because it's just such an amazing conversation and I just appreciate your depth of knowledge.

Laura, why don't you just email the flow research collective, just email info at the flow research collective and tell them who you are and what you are. And I don't usually say yes to anything psychedelic because I'm really, it's not the work I do and it's not the work I want to do, but I'm happy to have the conversation every now and again. Cool, thank you so much, Laura, for your lovely question.

All right, so I want to be respectful of your time, Steven. I am going to let you go. I would love for you to let us understand. This is obviously a massive topic. And honestly, for a lot of people tuning in, I think we probably retained 10% of everything that you said and have to relisten to this to kind of absorb it. So I wanna understand like for people who

don't know much about this, like where do we get started? How can we learn more? I'd love for you to give that, let us know like how we can learn much about this. Where do we get started? How can we learn more? I'd love for you to give that. Let us know how we can learn more about this topic and start to get our feet wet when it comes to learning more about flow. Yeah, I would send you literally to the website for the Flow Research Collective. Go to the video page. There's so much free content there.

By the way, I gave a talk at Google. I've given a bunch of talks at Google. It's the most recent one. If you go to the website, it's the one with the weird colored curtain behind me, don't ask me, it was Google's choice. That breaks down the entire history of peak performance from the 1800s to the present. And I go through Psychedelics, from my start to finishing, how they weave together, and how they weave together and how they weave come apart, etc. etc. So for people who are interested in that particular topic, because there are a lot of questions there, go there. And the ardent, if you want to get your

feet wet, there's a bunch of free content, there's free diagnostics, there's, you know, take your pit. And if you want to take it the next step, I would suggest reading or listening to the Art Impossible. Shameless plug for my book, but it's the only book anybody's written on. It's actually a primer on how to work with flow. So. Yeah, I've started reading that book and I really, really like it. So I totally agree.

Make sure you guys go check out the Art of Impossible. It's his latest book and he's got a ton of amazing books. And check them out. He was on my podcast before. He's going to be coming on again. Steven, it was so wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. I always appreciate it and I hope you enjoyed your time here as well. Thank you for hosting the room. So hey, I hope I pronounced your name right and thank you for inviting me. Never do you stuck around all the time. Appreciate you as well.

Thank you guys so much for your interest all the time. Appreciate you as well. Thank you guys so much for your interest in my work. I really appreciate it. Thanks, guys. This is Hala and friends 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 tried-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.

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