In Pursuit of Flow

You are concentrating on performing a challenging task or activity. Then something wonderful happens: you enter a state where your full attention is completely absorbed in the task, and the outside world fades away. You sense that the task is easy, even effortless, and your performance soars beyond your perceived limits. You may even ‘detach’ from the activity, where it seems that you are no longer consciously performing it, you are just observing a superb performance that is happening on its own.

You have entered the mental state psychologists label as Flow. Athletes call it being “in the zone”. You may also see it described as a “peak experience”. ¹

Unfortunately, Flow never seems to last very long - it can slip away after just a few minutes, though the state itself feels timeless while you are experiencing it. After it is over, instead of feeling exhausted by the effort, you feel deeply satisfied and exhilarated. You want more.

What is Flow?

Flow is a state of intense, effortless focus in which the individual is fully immersed in an activity, feeling both challenged and highly capable. This summary at EBSCO provides a nice overview. In Flow, action and awareness merge. You’re not just doing an activity - you are becoming one with it. In Flow, people often lose their self-awareness, and the passage of time may seem altered. The word Flow is attached to this mental state because it is a word commonly used by people describing how it felt to be in top form, “I was carried along by the flow”. Flow produces not only better performance but also deep psychological reward.

According to many sources, Flow can be experienced in practically any activity, from surgeons performing brain surgery to ordinary people doing mundane things like household chores. By way of examples, I will comment on the few areas where I think I have experienced Flow:

Coding : By far the most common Flow experience for me was writing code, usually while at work. I would say that I was really “in the zone” while writing code at least a few times per week. Having Flow experiences at work is common generally, so much so that many Flow studies make a distinction between ‘work’ and ’leisure’ Flow.

Academics: Several times I have had the happy experience of just ’nailing’ problems in physics or math, sometimes even on entire tests where I ‘blew the curve’. This happened much less frequently for me, unfortunately. It is possible that I have had more Flow or near-Flow experiences in academic pursuits, when I suddenly understood a concept or had a flash of insight and saw how to solve a problem - the “it just clicked” experience. I personally wouldn’t call that Flow, but I suppose it is related.

Athletics: I believe that I have experienced Flow in martial arts in my younger days. These experiences were particularly vivid for me, because normally if I’m doing anything remotely athletic, my body protests. Loudly. But when I entered ’the zone’, I felt great, totally in control, and yet on autopilot - I could see what my opponent was going to do before it happened, and easily counter it. It really felt like I was just an observer and my body was reacting on its own.

If I really lower the bar for categorizing an experience as Flow, I perhaps had near-Flow experiences a couple of times with golf, where I managed to string together some of my very occasional good shots into a decent round. But I can’t really count that as Flow in good conscience, they were probably just “everybody gets lucky once in a while” experiences.

Music: My personal favorite Flow experiences have been musical. I have always had great desire to play music, on multiple different instruments, but I don’t have much real natural talent for it. But I enjoy playing, and very occasionally while I’m playing I enter a Flow state that gives me a brief taste of what it must be like to have true musical talent.

Video games: I am not a huge gamer, but I have experienced Flow quite often while playing video games. This is perhaps the second or third most common Flow experience for me, I think because video games almost seem to be designed to elicit Flow.

Like many concepts and principles in psychology, it is difficult to define Flow with the kind of scientific rigor expected in say, physics. It is after all a very subjective thing - research into Flow generally has to rely on test subjects self-reporting Flow episodes. Nevertheless, I was a bit surprised at the richness of published research on the Flow phenomenon, in areas ranging from sports performance to aging to mental health to hardcore neuroscience. I found the article The Neuroscience of the Flow State particularly interesting from a scientific viewpoint. It mentions fMRI studies that examine how different brain regions behave during Flow experiences, even potentially pinpointing a specific area of the brain (called the locus coeruleus) that may be involved in the Flow phenomenon.

What Does it Take to Experience Flow?

According to Wikipedia, Performance Magazine, and many other sources, certain conditions reliably make Flow more likely:

1. Challenge-Skill Balance: Tasks must stretch your abilities without overwhelming you. Too easy leads to boredom; too difficult leads to anxiety.

2. Having a Clear Goal: To get to a state of intense concentration, you need have to have a clear, particular goal in mind.

3. Immediate Feedback: You need to know how well you are doing at the task immediately while you are doing it.

4. Concentration Without Interruptions: Anything that destroys concentration destroys Flow. Silence your phone!

5. Intrinsic Motivation: Flow is strongest when the activity itself is rewarding.

From this list, you can perhaps see why I claim that video games can be a great conduit for experiencing Flow:

1. You can usually adjust difficulty settings on video games to match your skill level.

2. The goal in video games is usually very clear, or it wouldn’t be a game. E.g. blow away as many enemies as you can.

3. Action games in particular are all about immediate feedback, often measured in milliseconds. Even strategy games can produce feedback that is immediate enough to be conducive to Flow. Additionally, games keep score, so you have a direct measure of your performance. Contrast this with e.g. playing a musical instrument, where you usually have only subjective measures of how well you are playing.

4. Any decent video game should be engaging enough to get you to concentrate on it, or find a different game.

5. You are presumably playing a game that you enjoy playing - if not, find a different game.

It is not just me claiming a strong association between Flow and video games - see Flow and Immersion in Video Games, which says “Video games offer highly positive experiences and it has been argued that the experience of flow alone may be responsible for the positive emotions during video game playing”.

I might add a few more requirements for entering Flow that seem obvious to me, but that I haven’t seen mentioned very often in other sources:

a) Base Skill Level

Certain activities have requirements to even participate in the activity. E.g. it would be hard to enter a Flow state for coding if you don’t understand the basics of computer programming. Or while playing chess if you don’t know the rules. Beyond that, I think that you need to have at least some base level of proficiency at an activity before you can hope to experience Flow in that activity. While some would say that even complete novices can enter a Flow state, I think it would be hard to experience Flow while playing a video game if you haven’t fully figured out the game’s controls yet. Or while playing guitar if your fingers are not calloused enough to reliably hold down strings to play notes. Or in any athletic pursuit if you are entirely out of shape. And I think there is yet another skill level beyond the basics that can make Flow easier to achieve, covered in the next section.

b) Room to Improve

At the other end of the skill spectrum, if you are already expert at something, it may be hard to even notice when you are in a high-performance Flow state - high performance is perhaps just the norm for you.

Flow and Muscle Memory

Muscle memory is the phenomenon where you have practiced an activity enough that you don’t have to consciously think about every step or movement involved in the activity. Of course, muscle memory has little to do with your muscles, it takes place in your brain, as neural pathways that have been activated frequently through practice and repetition become reinforced such that it takes little mental effort to activate those pathways again.

Building on the a) Base Skill Level add-on, if you have practiced an activity enough to commit some of the actions required for that activity to muscle memory, Flow may be easier to achieve. If you don’t have to concentrate on every detail of mechanically performing the activity, it frees the conscious mind to focus on higher-level aspects that often make for outstanding performances. In that sense, practice enables Flow, or at least allows Flow to happen at higher performance levels that you are more likely to label as being Flow.

It is here that a lack of rigorous definitions and the subjectivity of Flow muddy the waters a bit. As alluded to above, I think there is an aspect of the Flow phenomenon that requires it to be somewhat rare and special. To mentally classify an experience as Flow, I believe that your performance needs to stand out in your mind as being significantly above what is normal for you, while taking significantly less effort. So if you have practiced an activity enough that you have committed it completely to muscle memory, such that practically every time you perform, you are performing at a high level, are you really experiencing Flow? That is, I think it is legitimate to ask: during Tiger Woods’ peak career years, was he experiencing Flow during his wins? Or had he just honed his skills and muscle memory to the point where his performance was outstanding relative to everyone else, but it was just a normal Sunday for him?

To the extent that muscle memory facilitates Flow, there may be ’tricks’ that can encourage activating those practiced muscle memory neural pathways, to get you closer to Flow. Though it is considered to be pseudoscience by many, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a self-help approach that claims your brain can learn to associate certain behaviors that you can easily consciously control with entering a mental state that facilitates higher performance, when that mental state would be hard to ‘call up’ consistently otherwise. Examples might include a pre-shot routine for a golfer, or a pre-pitch ritual for a MLB pitcher. While I hesitate to promote something that could be pseudoscience, I don’t really see the harm if you think that e.g. waggling the club exactly 2 times sets you up for making a great golf shot, or not stepping on the chalked foul lines on the way to the mound prepares you to pitch a great inning.

Flow as you Age

It’s true that certain aspects of aging, like slower processing speeds or physical limitations, work against being able to experience Flow in some areas. But that doesn’t mean that Flow is just for the young. Flow Experiences Across Adulthood suggests that Flow can still be experienced well into advanced ages. While retired folks report fewer work-related Flow experiences (naturally, with less work), Flow experiences in leisure pursuits (hobbies, music, crafts, etc) may increase in retirement. This is likely because retirees are more likely to be pursuing things that they find enjoyable during retirement. The result may even be a net increase in Flow experiences during retirement relative to working years.

The article In The Zone: Flow State and Cognition in Older Adults suggests that if you are an intellectually active older adult (which you probably are if you are reading this), you may have an easier time attaining Flow for cognitively demanding activities.

Pursuing Flow

I personally find Flow to be such a rewarding experience that I actively seek it out. While there is no magic that allows you to enter a Flow state on demand (NLP claims aside), you can set yourself up to increase your chances of experiencing Flow. As an example, I have invested quite a bit in setting up a home studio where I hope to experience Flow while playing musical instruments. I built an environment where I can play comfortably without fatigue, uninterrupted, with musical instruments and gear that will not limit my abilities. This enables 4. Concentration without Interruption.

I have leaned heavily on computer technology to create my studio environment and put me in a position to experience Flow. Essentially any sound produced in my studio has been either created or processed by my M4 Mac Mini computer, which gives me a great deal of flexibility. If I’m trying to learn a guitar part of a song that I like (addressing 2. Clear Goal and 5. Intrinsic Motivation), I have arranged it so that I can play that song through my headphones mixed with my own playing, so I can immediately hear when I am playing the part correctly (3. Immediate Feedback). I can easily rewind and replay that part without even taking my hands off of my guitar, and I can even play the part at reduced speed (but computer-corrected to be at the original pitch) while I’m learning it. If I’m trying to improvise a solo, I can loop a high-quality backing track that will help make what I play sound more musical. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that I have turned learning to play music into a computer video game in an effort to elicit Flow.

The thing most often preventing me from experiencing musical Flow is picking an appropriate musical piece or skill that provides the necessary 1. Skill - Challenge Balance. Many of the pieces that I would love to be able to play are beyond my skills, and I end up getting frustrated before I can experience Flow. Or, there is the possibility that I am not achieving Flow as often as I might like because I may be lacking in a) Base Skill Level from my add-on requirements. This motivates me to practice my scales and rudiments to improve my technique and muscle memory.

That was obviously a very particular example of setting yourself up for Flow experiences. But I think it is fairly clear how to apply the same ideas in many other areas. Upgrade your garage craft shop, your painting studio equipment, your gardening tools, or your golf clubs (within reason) if you think it will facilitate achieving Flow. Video games aren’t for everyone, but I think they can be a direct route to experiencing Flow, with relatively low barriers to entry. But mostly, devote time to pursuing your chosen activity, whatever it is. As long as your chosen activity is one that you find to be intrinsically motivating, pursuing it is still enjoyable and worthwhile even if you don’t achieve Flow - Flow is a bonus.

Summary

Research links Flow to higher levels of creativity, productivity, and emotional well-being. People who regularly experience Flow report greater life satisfaction, a stronger sense of meaning, and better mood regulation. This study finds that Flow experiences in older folks leads to more positive views on aging. In short, Flow is something worth pursuing, during retirement or at any stage of life.