Flow

We all have a limited amount of energy to give in this life, and how we choose to spend it determines the quality of our existence. If we don’t consciously decide how we want to utilize this precious resource, our minds will take the easiest option available and keep us in a state of reactivity. To take charge of our energy is to take charge of everything else. With enough effort, any obstacle can be overcome, and any potential future realized. The most focused manifestation of our energy comes in the form of attention. How we make use of this tool will shape our experiences on a day to day basis, and also on the grand scale. I just finished a fantastic book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, titled “flow” and wanted to share some of my key takeaways. This book was packed full of insights, and gave me a structure that caused a lot of prior knowledge to fall into place. It has given me a better framework within which to understand some of the aspects of psychology that I teach here, and I want to share that with you today.

Everything we experience - joy or pain, interest or boredom - is represented as information. If we are able to control this information, we can decide what our lives will be like.

Csikszentmihalyi

His work was based in learning to optimize the human experience. If you have ever been curious about why some people thrive in miserable conditions, but fall into a depression in the comfort of their own homes, this area of study may be of interest to you. Early on in my career I noticed something that I thought to be quite strange. Back when I was in the Marine Corps infantry I was exposed to adversity on a daily basis. Challenge, hardship, and suffering were just a fact of life in those days. The teenage enthusiasm I showed up with quickly dissipated under the harsh demands of a cold and unforgiving reality. I quickly regretted my decision to join and sank into a deep depression. Every second felt like torture. The early mornings in the cold, and long days in blistering heat became a living hell that I desperately wanted to escape from. I was not alone in my feelings either. Many of my peers were equally depressed, and a culture of destructive alcoholism and socially validated depression became the norm. Suicide rates were high, and it was not uncommon to return to the barracks at the end of the weekend only to hear that another friend had taken his own life.

I spent so much time bitterly raging against my situation. In my mind my enlistment couldn’t be over fast enough, and each breath drew me that much closer to freedom. Those first two years were hell, with only brief glimpses of sanity. But the thing is that eventually I started to notice something. I began to realize that there were always individuals and small groups of Marines who seemed to be completely unphased by whatever came our way. Bad news was met with laughter, and the bitter elements of nature greeted with an almost childlike playfulness. I became curious about these people. I wanted to understand how it was that we could be in the same situation and yet exist in totally different worlds. I wanted to understand why I could be huddled up shivering in the near freezing rain, internally broken while men to my left and right laughed and jumped in the nearby puddles.

I decided that I could no longer live such a pathetic and miserable life. I decided that somehow, someway I would find a way to change. I wanted to respect myself and I wanted to stop thinking about merely escaping. Since I had no idea what to do, I chose to fake it until I made it. I started laughing at the pain even though I wanted to be numb. I started smiling first thing in the morning even though it felt like waking up to a nightmare. I started hanging out with the most resilient people I could find instead of my loser friends, because I wanted them to toughen me up.

It was not long before I started to notice a difference. Instead of trying to escape the struggle I was embracing it. With nothing to run from, I no longer felt overtaken.

The lesson here is in the mindset. If your attention is focused outward on a situation you can’t control then you’re setting yourself up for misery. Learning to change that focus and keep it in the present is a life saving tool. You cannot optimize your experience of life when you are focused solely on what is wrong in your situation. You cannot find happiness when you assign it to the future.

To gain personal control over the quality of experience, however, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.

Once you learn to maintain your inner state of experience nothing in the outside world can phase you any longer. Ten people can face the exact same challenge and experience it in ten different ways. We have no idea what the cold hard objective truth is, so we’re left to interpret how we think best. Knowing this liberates us to consciously choose how we wish to experience life. Controlling our inner sate gives us the freedom to design whatever existence we please. There is no one to tell us we are wrong as none of us knows the ultimate truth of reality.

While goals are important for growth and fulfillment, they can not satisfy us in and of themselves. Constantly seeking after the next big thing may keep us from becoming complacent, but without certain stipulations it will leave us chasing our tails. It is equally important (if not more so) to learn to enjoy the process. Finding pleasure in the act of practice itself not only ensures that we will persist through the hard times, but dramatically improves our quality of life along the way.

Marcus Aurelius said “choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.”

The filters you choose to view life through will dictate how you see everything. Unfortunately, most of the time we never choose these filters intentionally. We tend to just take it for granted that things are the way they are, never questioning whether or not our subjective reality could stand an upgrade.

Csikszentmihalyi writes about how important it is to begin seeing yourself as being in harmony with the environment, instead of in opposition to it. Viewing life as a struggle creates the feeling that we are out of place and don’t belong.

Stress exists only if we experience it; it takes the most extreme objective conditions to cause it directly. The same amount of pressure will wilt one person and be a welcome challenge to another.

The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot enter.

So what happens when we begin developing our powers of attention and create a laser focus? Well, when we begin to change the quality of our subjective experience, we take ourselves out of a solely reactive state and start learning to create changes in the environment. Harnessing our attention places us in a meditative state of mind while we perform a task. With all of our mental resources channeled into one activity we optimize our brain.

The real “hack” is learning to change the entire quality of experience. As amazing as our nervous system is, there is a limited amount of information we can process at any given time. We are not physically capable of giving high levels of attention to multiple things at once. The more deeply we engage with any one task, the more everything else gets crowded out.

This is a both blessing and a curse. It means that the more we have on our plate the less productive we will be. Any attempts at multitasking are doomed to failure, or at best to mediocre results. On the other hand however, knowing this gives us a leg up on the competition. The ability to focus on one thing at a time gives us an edge over anyone whose attention is divided. In fact the more we can intentionally divide our opponents attention the more of an advantage we have. Overload their mental capacities with as many distractions and problems as you can. Keep them fighting fires all over the map and they will never be able to get ahead.

In the meantime one of the most valuable skills you can develop is a laser like focus. Giving your full attention to one thing at a time is almost like a super power. Everything else falls away from awareness and all of your mental resources are brought to the task at hand. This enables you to learn faster, be more creative and engage much more deeply. The interesting side effect of this is a state of experience called “flow.” The flow state is something we have likely all experienced at one time or another. It is when time ceases to exist, where problems seem to dissipate, and our full cognitive ability is flexed in a productive way. The flow state is the psychological hack that we are looking for. It is a state of mind that makes us infinitely more productive, but also comes with a zen like quality of enjoyment. Spending more of our time in this state will help us to be much more successful, and to enjoy a much higher quality of life.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, the flow state requires several components. My biggest takeaway from his book (besides attention) is the idea of constant improvement. To create a flow state you must constantly challenge and push the limits of your abilities. The challenges need to fall into a happy medium between being too easy and too difficult. If you are consistently up against challenges that are well outside of your abilities, you will quickly become discouraged. On the other hand problems well within your capacity to solves are not challenges at all, and provide no satisfaction of growth. Break your problems down into manageable steps and tackle them one at a time. Fixate on each step so intensely that everything else just falls away. It’s good to take a step back every now and again to look at the big picture and adjust course, but during practice you want to be as involved as possible.

This state of absolute focus is what athletes often refer to as “the zone.” Growing up I was always familiar with this term. Being heavily involved in martial arts, long distance running and preparing for a military career, I was no stranger to the flow state that often occurs during intense training sessions. It was always a goal to achieve because in this state of mind everything seems to get easier. Time starts to speed up or slow down, minute details stand out, the unconscious mind begins to take over and react with a speed that the rational brain can only dream of. Little did I know at the time that the flow state was available to access at any time, given the right knowledge.

By the gradual focusing of attention on the opportunities for action in ones environment , which results in a perfection of skills that with time becomes so thoroughly automatic as to seem spontaneous and otherworldly

Besides the fact that entering a flow state can make us more productive, there is another major reason to learn to access this state. The simple fact that living in flow is a much more satisfying experience than the average sate of mind. In the flow state we are taking control of our experiences and deciding how we wish to perceive life. Learning to find enjoyment in suffering is a priceless skill that most people never develop. In my experience there are four main components to this. They are:

1. Laughter; If you can laugh at an unpleasant situation, you immediately change your state of mind. Laughter releases endorphins into your blood stream and puts you into a more positive state. Since how you feel about a situation is your subjective reality, it pays to have a strategy for painting undesirable circumstances in a positive light.

2. Hyper-focus; Next you want to really get as involved in the second to second process as possible. If you’re running a marathon you don’t want to be worried about how you’re going to feel in 16 miles. A much better strategy is to not only focus on each step, but to try and enjoy each one. This enjoyment comes from accepting the moment as it is, and not letting your mental energy get pulled away thinking of a future which you cannot control.

3. Competition; Always trying to do just a little bit better than yourself and others is a great way to get through difficult times. Remember that challenge is one of the requirements to get into a flow state. Competition makes things fun. It turns challenge into a game, and pulls you into a more positive mindset.

4. Camaraderie; Lastly, always remember that misery loves company. Developing strong social ties with those around you will provide a support structure that can get you through the worst of times. This may not always be an option of course, but there is almost always some form of community you can embrace. The trick here is not to rely on these people but to try and build them up. Sacrifice your own energy for the greater good and you will find that in a strange way this makes things easier. It also has the added benefit of establishing you as a leader.

Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment by moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.

Taking charge of your life can be a daunting task at first. You may try out one of these techniques, get excited at the possibilities ahead, then feel overwhelmed by the idea of having to constantly do these things for the rest of your life. It can seem so much easier to just relax and stick with old habits. However if you’re familiar with what I teach by now you should know that there is no reason to stress about this. It may seem difficult to change our mindset to the point where we are always in a flow state, but we don’t have to do it all at once. We can start out by just utilizing these techniques as frequently as possible, and gradually improving as we go. It isn’t a race. If we struggle to commit our undivided attention to the task at hand for more than a few minutes at a time, then that’s ok. Do the best you can, but make sure that it becomes a habit. Work on developing your focus every single day, and soon enough you will be doing it for longer and longer without having to even think about it. Creating a habit of living in a flow state will not only boost your productivity exponentially, but also give you an incredible quality of life. It is up to you to decide whether or not you will take control of your subjective experience, and therefore your reality.

Embrace the struggle.