Flow

HOW TO BECOME 500% MORE PRODUCTIVE

What does it take to do the what others call impossible? what does it take to achieve paradigm-shifting never seen before?

If you spend ten years chasing extreme athletes around mountains and across oceans without being an extreme athlete, you tend to break things. And I am not talking only about broken bones. I mean, you got to take a lot of time off but what would happen next is that after taking four or five months off,  when you come back the progress you will see in you will be astounding.

Let me explain. Surfing, for example, is a very old sport dates back to 400 AD and from 480 until 1996 its progress has being really slow.  25 feet was the biggest wave anybody ever surfed until then and above that everybody believed it was impossible. Two decades later, surfers are routinely pulling into waves a hundred feet tall. And it turns out that that has a lot to do with the flow. Now, flow science is actually quite old.  It dates back to the late 1880s which was the very first time somebody figured out that an altered state of consciousness, which is what flow is, had a radical impact on performance. 

Now, you may know flow by other names.  You may call it runner's high or being in the zone if you happen to play basketball you might call it being unconscious. Now, flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness when, we feel our best and we perform our best.  More specifically it refers to those moments of total attention and total absorption we get so focused on the task that everything else  seems to disappear. Action and awareness will start to merge.  Your sense of self will disappear and you will feel time passes faster. It is for that reason that people who do what they are passionate about tend to feel that time flies.

Flow has certain core characteristics:  Uninterrupted concentration, stay in the present  moment, vanishing of self, time dilation and so forth and because it is definable it is measurable. Validated psychometric instruments have been used to measure flow at this point. When you feel your best you perform your best, and the vast majority of people agree. You know when you are at your best when every idea, every action, every decision flows seamlessly, perfectly and  effortlessly so flow is actually a phenomenological description is how the state makes us feel. 

Flow is fundamental through well being and overall life satisfaction. in fact, in one study, scientists found that the people who score off the charts highest in the world for overall life satisfaction and well-being are the people with the most flow in their lives. Also, a ten-year study showed up  that top executives in flow are five times more productive than out of flow. 

Five times more productive is 500% more productive, meaning you could go to work on Monday, then take Tuesday through Friday off and, at the end,  you find yourself having done a lot more. Two days a week in a state of flow, you are a thousand percent more productive than the competition. Any company that is not doing this at this point, is making a big mistake.  If employees in flow are a thousand percent more productive that the ones who are not, then you can see the problem. 

A lot of our old ideas about ultimate human performance are very wrong. in fact the most well known of these old ideas is what's known as the 10% brain myth.  This is something you've probably heard of before. it's the idea that we're just using a small portion of our,  brain say 10%. Turns out it is actually the opposite.  In flow,  we're not using more of our brain, we're actually using less of the brain.  The technical term for this is transient meaning temporary hypofrontality. Hypo is the opposite of the hyper. 

This portion of the brain shuts down. it's actually an efficiency exchange.  the brain is trading energy it needs for attention and it's shutting down non-critical structures.  When it shuts down the prefrontal cortex all kinds of crazy things happen, that's why you become more creative. Why time pass so strangely in a flow state, for example,  is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex which no longer separate past from the present or from future.  We enter in what researchers call the deep now  which has a huge impact on performance.

If we think about most of our fears, most of our anxieties, very few of them are in the right here right now.  they're usually horrible things that happen in the past and we'd like to avoid;  they're scary things that might could happen in the future, or they are just part of our imagination. When we end up in the deep now, time gets shut down in a flow state. Anxiety disappears, your stress hormones decrease, and  your nervous system actually resets and the same thing happens to your sense of self.  So, self is really a bunch of different structures in the prefrontal cortex that are linked together, like any network,  start to wink out.  the network collapses and as a result, our sense of self disappears. Again, this has huge impact on performance. 

When your sense of self disappears, your inner critic voice in your head gets silent, so we experience this as liberation, as freedom, and as a result, risk-taking goes up, enhancing creativity because you're no longer doubting. every one of your ideas goes up. If you really want to understand why flow allows us to do the impossible, then, understanding the neural chemicals is key. Five of them amplify performance.  hey boost physical performance. They will do everything, from increase strength to amplify muscle reaction time. If you really want to understand how flow can help us do the impossible you need to understand how this state impacts the three sides of the high-performance triangle, and more specifically, how these five neural chemicals impact the three sides of the high-performance triangle which are motivation creativity and learning.

Flow this massive boost in motivation  and creativity is surrounded by flow. Studies show up that  flow can amplify creativity 400 to 700 percent. Learning rates in flow will increase four hundred and seventy percent. Now the really good news is that what we now know is that flow states are in fact hackable.  What we have discovered is that flow states have triggers.
flow follows focus: It can only show up when all of our attention is focused in the right here right now, so all 20 of these triggers drive attention into the now. for example the first of the individual triggers passion. We hear a lot about feeling passionate these days.  The only reason passion matters is because we pay more attention to those things we believe in which drives flow and flow drives performance.

Another one is risk. why did adventure sport athletes experienced just spike in the 1990s because risk levels in action adventure sports started going through the roof and risk drives focus drives flow.  Uninterrupted concentration in Montessori School built around 90 to 120 minute blocks of uninterrupted concentration and self-directed learning. Uninterrupted concentration is probably the foundational flow hack. Lastly deep embodiment which is just a fancy way of saying I'm paying attention to multiple sensory streams at once.  So, in education it emphasizes learning through doing right don't just read about the windmill, but go and build one. This will engage your hands and your eyes and all your 5 senses pay more attention to it.

A really important thing to know about these flow triggers is not only that they exist, they're actually really easy to work with.  But there are also some basic things that you can do to improve your state of flow . I mean absolute basics things like sleep, have good hygiene, get enough sleep at night seven and a half hours is usually what you need that sort of thing to start.
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