The Why of Flow
Grit, fortitude, courage, creativity, resilience, cooperation, critical thinking, pattern recognition, high-speed “hot” decision making. Researchers recently coined the phrase “Twenty-First-Century Skills” to describe those myriad abilities our children need to thrive in this century — abilities not currently taught in school, but desperately needed in society. Action and adventure sports demand them all.
In flow, every action, each decision, leads effortlessly, fluidly, seamlessly to the next. It’s high-speed problem solving; it’s being swept away by the river of ultimate performance.
A recent Gallup survey found that 71 percent of American workers were “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Two out of three of us hate what we do with the majority of our time.
The great civil rights leader Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.”
Before the Flow
According to Dictionary.com, genius is defined as “an exceptional natural capacity of intellect, especially as shown in creative and original work in science, art, music, etc.”
We all seem to agree genius begins with feats of mental greatness. The thinking needs to be novel, so the results need to be beyond what most can envision.
Because an athlete’s canvas is nothing more than his body moving through space and time, then an act of genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition — redefining what is possible for the human body.
Why, at the tail end of the twentieth century and the early portion of the twenty-first, are we seeing such a multisport assault on reality? Did we somehow slip through a wormhole to another universe where the laws of physics don’t apply? Where gravity is optional and common sense obsolete?
The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill.
The theory of evolution says we exist to pass along our genes. Fundamental biology tells us that survival is the name of the game.
These days, scientists consider the fear of death the fundamental human motivator, the most primary of our primary drives.
He Is This Frenzy
The Way of Flow
Danny Way attempted to jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.
Danny Way, considered by many to be the greatest skateboarder of all time, first introduced the world to the MegaRamp in the 2003 skate flick The DC Video.
“Skateboarding is a game of failure,” says Way. “That’s what makes this sport so different. Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment.
Way trained in the desert, where the air was thin. In China, with the humidity, it is far too thick. The denser atmosphere slows him down and Way under-jumps the gap, pancakes hard, and rag-dolls for more than fifty feet. His ankle is fractured, his ACL torn, his steering foot swollen beyond belief. Of course, he tries again. Twenty-four hours later and barely able to walk, Way climbs those ten flights of stairs a second time.
Danny Way, under ridiculously adverse conditions and with considerable aplomb, just became the first person to leap the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.
One G is the force of Earth’s gravity — the force that determines how much we weigh. Formula One drivers, when cornering, pull two. Astronauts, on takeoff, suffer three. Most people black out at five. The four Gs that Way experienced equate to more than 800 pounds of added pressure — all supported by a shattered limb.
How is any of this possible? Well, to start where most start, the psychological: the undisputable fact that the ghosts that hunt for Danny Way are unremitting. They are legion. The ghosts of his injured brother, his alcoholic mother, his dead father, his dead stepfather, his first coach, the man who saved him from himself, T-boned at a stoplight and dead also, his best friend in jail for murder, his broken neck, his broken back, his umpteen surgeries, his anger, his pride — a relentless roar only truly silenced by the salvation of the edge. The edge is the one place these ghosts can’t follow.
This is our mystery: a rare and radical state of consciousness where the impossible becomes possible. This is the secret that action and adventure athletes like Way have plumbed, the real reason ultimate human performance has advanced nearly exponentially these past few decades. The zone, quite literally, is the shortest path toward superman.
While the first recorded climb in history was Roman emperor Hadrian’s 121 CE scamper up Mount Etna (to watch the sun rise), historians date the sport to Sir Alfred Wills’s 1854 summiting of the Wetterhorn. Wills’s conquest marked the birth of “systematic mountaineering” and the start of the “Golden Age of Alpinism,” a decade-long stretch wherein most of the first ascents in the Alps were completed.
Albert Heim, meanwhile, arrived a few years too late for the Golden Age. He’s not remembered for his contribution to mountaineering history. Rather, he’s remembered as the point when that history took a turn for the weird.
Heim fell sideways, flipped upside down, and spun around backward. Heim’s actual flight covered sixty-six feet and lasted no more than a few seconds, but that wasn’t his experience. Heim survived the impact, but the mystery never left him. Panoramic vision? Time dilation? Heavenly music? None of this made any sense.
Heim conducted a survey of thirty-two others who had all survived near-fatal falls. A staggering 95 percent reported similar anomalous events. Heim wrote this all up in a long essay entitled “Remarks on Fatal Falls,” which was published in 1892. Historians consider it the first written account of a “near-death experience”.
“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”
“Great emergencies and crisis show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
The work of Heim and James laid the foundation for a deeper inquiry into human potential, but it was the discovery of one of James’s students, Walter Bradford Cannon, that truly changed the nature of the game.
Around 1916, Cannon decided these disparate reactions were actually a global response by the nervous system to extreme stress, a response with a purpose: increase strength and stamina. Cannon had discovered the “fight-or-flight response” and this rewrote the rule book.
The trail of Heim to James to Cannon went from psychology into physiology. It was a trail of mechanism: mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance.
“Every good athlete can find the flow,” continues Pastrana, “but it’s what you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible. You begin to expect it. That’s why we’re seeing so much progression in action sports today. It’s the natural result of a whole lot of people starting to expect the impossible.”
To borrow Daniel Gilbert’s phrase, Csikszentmihalyi had merely stumbled upon happiness. What he’d really been searching for was the meaning of life.
After Freud’s unconscious had been dethroned by Skinner’s behaviorism, psychologists began having a hard time explaining why people did the things they did. The behaviorists said it all came down to need and reward. We do X to get Y. This is known as “extrinsic motivation,” but the conclusion never sat right with Abraham Maslow.
High achievers, he came to see, were intrinsically motivated. They were deeply committed to testing limits and stretching potential, frequently using intensely focused activity for exactly this purpose. But this focused activity, Maslow also noticed, produced a significant reward of its own: altering consciousness, creating experiences very similar to those James had dubbed “mystical.” Except, the key difference: few of Maslow’s subjects were even religious.
The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often, as Csikszentmihalyi explained in his 1996 book Creativity.
A ten-year study done by McKinsey found top executives reported being up to five times more productive when in flow.
Flow is the only way to survive in the fluid, life-threatening conditions of big waves, big rivers, and big mountains.
Or, as Danny Way explains: “It’s either find the zone or suffer the consequences — there’s no other choice available.”
The Wave of Flow
In the annals of find the zone or suffer the consequences, there is little that can compare to Teahupoo (pronounced cho-poo).
Surfers describe Teahupoo as “hideous,” “deadly,” “a war zone,” “liquid napalm,” “the grinding eye of doom,” and, of course, “up there with anything for tons of brutality per square inch of skin.”
Teahupoo sits a quarter mile off the southwestern coast of Tahiti. It is not a cold-water wave like California’s Maverick’s, nor a tall wave like Hawaii’s Jaws. Instead of exploding vertically, Teahupoo detonates laterally.
Flow tends to be the psychic signature of world-class performance and paradigm-shifting breakthroughs.
Flow cartography begins in the brain. Of course it does. To paraphrase author Diane Ackerman: That little huddle of neurons calls all the plays. But how it calls a play like flow is a complicated affair.
What is flow exactly? Scientists describe it either as a “state of consciousness” or an “altered state of consciousness,” though neither phrase completely satisfies.
The zone requires attention, but of a very specific kind. When it comes to the task at hand, concentration is nearly total.
Flow, on the other hand, is always a positive experience. No one ever has a bad time in a flow state. So while the zone provides a qualitative shift in mental functioning, it’s a far more consistent shift than can be found in other altered states of consciousness.
“When you’re in that moment, there’s no beginning and no end. It starts off where it left off. When you go to that place, there’s no time, and there’s definitely no thought. It’s just pure.
Three of the more curious and basic properties of flow:
- the profound mental clarity provided by the state,
- the emotional detachment that tends to accompany this clarity,
- and a hint of its automatic nature — how one right decision always leads to the next right decision.
Csikszentmihalyi was able to sift through the data and isolate ten core components which demarcate the state.
- Clear goals.
- Concentration.
- A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness.
- Distorted sense of time.
- Direct and immediate feedback.
- Balance between ability level and challenge.
- A sense of personal control over the situation.
- The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so action is effortlessness.
- A lack of awareness of bodily needs.
- Absorption: narrowing of awareness down to the activity itself.
Three of the components — clear goals, immediate feedback, and the challenge/skill ratio are considered “conditions for flow.” They do not actually describe the state itself.
Csikszentmihalyi uses the terms microflow and macroflow. In microflow, only a few of his categories are fulfilled. Macroflow, on the other hand, is what occurs when all of Csikszentmihalyi’s conditions arrive at once.
Leslie Sherlin is focusing on qualitative electroencephalography (EEG) — which had the benefits of being cheap, easy, reliable, and the exact right tool for the job. “Whenever you encounter stimuli or have a thought,” explains Sherlin, “the brain has an electrical response. EEG measures those responses down to the 1/1000 of a second range, which allows us to track how the brain changes across time. When someone is decision making — and this can be an athlete solving a physical problem or an artist solving an aesthetic one — we can see everything that leads up to a decision, the decision itself, and everything that happens as a result. No other technology can do that.”
There are five major brain-wave types, each correlating to a different state of consciousness.
- “Delta,” the slowest brain wave (meaning the one with the longest pauses between bursts of electricity), is found between 1 Hz and 3.9 Hz.
- Next up, between 4 Hz and 7.9 Hz, is “theta,” which correlates to REM sleep, meditation, insight.
- Between 8 Hz and 13.9 Hz hovers “alpha,” the brain’s basic resting state.
- Beta sits between 14 Hz and 30 Hz, and signifies learning and concentration at the low end, fear and stress at the high.
- Above 30 Hz there’s a fast-moving wave known as “gamma,” which only shows up during “binding,” when different parts of the brain are combining disparate thoughts into a single idea.
Human beings have evolved two distinct systems for processing information The first, the explicit system, is rule-based, can be expressed verbally, and is tied to conscious awareness. When the prefrontal cortex is fired up, the explicit system is usually turned on. But when the cold calculus of logic is swapped out for the gut sense of intuition, this is the implicit system at work.
While he runs a number of different companies and holds four different academic appointments, Sherlin also serves as chief science officer for Neurotopia, a leader in the research and use of EEG for improving athlete performance. In 2009, he got a call from Red Bull’s director of athletic high performance, Dr. Andy Walshe.
Together, Red Bull and Neurotopia established a neuroscience skunk works. Their goal was straightforward: use EEG to figure out what the brains of top action and adventure athletes were doing and help them do more of it.
When any of us make decisions, our brains go through a six-stage cycle. Before the novel stimuli shows up (which is what starts the whole process), we’re in a baseline state. Then we move to problem-solving analysis, pre-action readiness, action, post-action evaluation, and back to baseline.
Elite performers can produce the right brain wave at the right time, vary its intensity as needed, then smoothly transition to the next step.
Instead of producing all these other brain waves, really great athletes can transition smoothly into the zone, creating that low alpha/high theta wave, and then hold themselves there, sort of in suspended animation, shutting out the conscious mind and letting the implicit system do its stuff.
A moment of sudden, creative insight. Often these moments are important enough to make history. Isaac Newton sees an apple fall and BAMMO: the theory of gravity arrives fully formed in his brain; Archimedes climbs into the bathtub and SHAZAM: the solution to the mathematical puzzle of volume pops into his head.
When the explicit system (mostly on the left side of the brain) handles a problem, the neurons involved are very close to one another. This much proximity leads to linear connections, logical deductions, and all the other keystones of standard reasoning. When the implicit system is at work, its reach is much broader — far-flung corners of the brain are talking to one another. This is known to experts as “lateral thinking” or, to the business executives who so crave this talent: “thinking outside the box.”
Exactly thirty milliseconds before the breakthrough intuition arrives, EEG shows a burst of gamma waves. These ultrafast brain waves appear when a bunch of widely distributed cells — i.e., novel stimuli, random thoughts, and obscure memories — bind themselves together into a brand-new network.
“But the interesting thing about a gamma spike,” explains Leslie Sherlin, “is that it always happens inside of theta oscillations”.
Theta processes novel incoming stimuli; gamma is what happens when those stimuli snap together into new ideas.
Flow packs a double punch: it doesn’t just increase our decisionmaking abilities — it increases our creative decision-making abilities.
The Where of Flow
On the list of the world’s most dangerous climbs, Fitz Roy always ranks in the top twenty, often in the top ten.
A climber by the name of Dean Potter.
Free soloing is the mother of all death sports. The equation is simple: you fall, you die.
Being exhausted made it easier to quiet the mind and get to the zone.
The Voice — the voice of intuition — the center of the zone’s mystery. Everybody who has ever been in a flow state has heard it — a voice very different from the mind’s normal chatter. Neuroscientist David Eagleman likes to quote Pink Floyd when describing this facet: “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me,” while the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti refers to this someone as “the Tyrant”.
It’s not always a voice. Some people see images; others get strong feelings.
The experiences that Potter craves — the disappearance of self, the distortion of time, and that “psychic connection” to the universe — are among flow’s more famous qualities, also its most peculiar.
Trying to understand how the brain produces this peculiarity has been a longtime goal of flow researchers.
Arne Dietrich early work was on learning and memory, his later work on creativity and consciousness. Dietrich stopped globetrotting and returned to graduate school in the late 1990s, around the same time that high-powered imaging devices like fMRI were revolutionizing the field. For the first time in history, scientists had a concrete picture of neurological structure and function. But Dietrich had more than that. As a lifelong athlete, he had actual knowledge of the zone.
For most of the past half century, in the “which part of the brain produces flow” sweepstakes, the prevailing wisdom has centered on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). But this didn’t track with Dietrich’s experience. “The prefrontal cortex is where thinking happens,” he explains. “It’s where we take simple ideas and add all kind of layers of complexity to them.
So Dietrich started to wonder how the brain was eliminating this complexity — which is when it dawned on him: the brain wasn’t eliminating complexity, it was eliminating the very structures that created this complexity.
We’re trading energy usually used for higher cognitive functions for heightened attention and awareness. The technical term for this exchange is transient hypofrontality.
In 2006, for example, a team of Israeli scientists discovered that when people lose themselves in a task — be it playing cards or having sex or climbing a mountain — a part of the brain called the superior frontal gyrus starts to deactivate.
Another breakthrough occurred in 2008, when Johns Hopkins found the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is also deactivated in the state.
Vladimir Zatsiorsky uses the terms maximal strengh and absolute strength to distinguish between the amount of force one can generate through acts of will and the amount of force our muscles can theoretically produce. Normally, people can access about 65 percent of their absolute strength.
Flow changes this entire dynamic. Time dilation. Normally, in the zone, after self-awareness starts to fade, temporal awareness tends to follow.
Why this happens, as Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman discovered, also comes down to hypofrontality. The same events that erase our sense of self also distort our sense of time. In moments of intense concentration, the same efficiency exchange that erases our sense of self and distorts our sense of time begins to impact our relationship to space. Instead of taking place in the prefrontal lobes, this hypofrontality occurs farther back in the cortex, in the superior parietal lobe.
Since flow is a fluid action state, making better decisions isn’t enough: we also have to act on those decisions.
Our fears are grounded in self, time, and space. With our sense of self out of the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity.
The What of Flow
The earliest attempts at “human-powered flight” date to the sixth century CE, when Chinese emperor Kao Yang got curious about the potential for large kites to lift human bodies. Yang strapped a number of variations onto prisoners and pushed them off tall towers. One design actually worked. A convict named Yuan Huang-t’ou floated safely to the ground.
Frenchman Patrick de Gayardon copied the wing design of flying squirrels, stretching pliable, nonporous fabric into three triangular wings: two running wrist to armpit, a third forming a giant inverted V between the legs.
In 1999, Finnish company Birdman International brought a safer version of this design to market, then established the world’s first wingsuit flying school to train potential customers.
JT Holmes is both a professional big-mountain skier and a member of the Red Bull Air Force, arguably the greatest assembly of skydivers, BASE jumpers, wingsuit flyers, and paraglider pilots in the world.
Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have discovered that the main job of the neocortex is to predict the future. This was a radical revelation. The old idea was interpretation: the senses gather data and then decide what’s actually happening in the world. The new idea means the senses gather data and the brain uses that information to make predictions about what’s happening in the world before it’s happened.
Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention.
So important is prediction to survival, that when the brain guesses correctly — i.e., when the brain’s pattern-recognition system identifies a correct pattern — we get a reward, a tiny squirt of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine.
Once we do the hard work of identifying that first pattern, the dopamine dumped in our system primes us to pick out the next.
Neurons that fire together wire together. The more times a particular pattern fires, the stronger the connection between neurons becomes, and the faster information flows along this route.
Sports usually involve making calculations about approaching objects and reaction times. The athletes already had these patterns down.
At a very simple level, neurochemicals are “information molecules” used by the brain to transmit messages. Mostly, these messages are either excitatory or inhibitory.
Flow is an extremely potent response to external events and requires an extraordinary set of signals.
- The process includes dopamine.
- Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control.
- Endorphins, our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high.
- The next neurotransmitter is anandamide. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana.
- Lastly, at the tail end of a flow state, it also appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin.
These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail.
Norepinephrine tightens focus (data acquisition); dopamine jacks pattern recognition (data processing); anandamide accelerates lateral thinking (widens the database searched by the pattern recognition system).
Despite the frequency with which many dismiss these athletes as “adrenaline junkies,” the term is actually one of the greatest misnomers in sport.
But they are all flow junkies — the difference is critical.
Risk heightens focus and flow follows focus. This means that the fight-or-flight response primes the body — chemically and psychologically — for the flow state. Athletes report moving through one to get to the other.
Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call “situational awareness.” Defined as the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose.
Flow is the rush of possibility: a product of radical neurochemical, neuroelectrical, and neuroanatomical function triggering whole-body transformation.
Or, to put it another way: flow is the telephone booth where Clark Kent changes clothes, the place from where Superman emerges.
The Flow Shortcut
In our quest to map flow and see how it amps up performance, there is still one component missing: performance over time.
The question here isn’t about how flow helps these athletes do the impossible once; it’s about them doing the impossible over and over and over again. It’s about long-term mastery, not short-term success, and a question most certainly raised by the ascension of Shane McConkey.
Located a short hike away from the top of Squaw Valley’s Siberia chair, the Palisades are one of skiing’s most iconic proving grounds.
Before the X Games came along, these guys were ski bums and surf burnouts and for good reason. The party never stopped. Forget about drug testing; drug-taking was almost mandatory.
Yet in less than two decades, these same rebel misfits would push the boundary of human performance to astounding heights. Hell, by the time McConkey was done, his chosen sport was barely recognizable as the same game.
Over the past century, the science of expert performance has gotten rigorous and codified. Thousands and thousands of experiments have been run; plenty of conclusions reached. Three dominate. Call them: mothers, musicians, and marshmallows.
First, the mothers. In the early 1980s, University of Chicago educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom launched the Talent Project, one of the larger and more thorough “retrospective” studies of expert performance ever undertaken.
The one commonality was encouragement, a lot of encouragement. In each case, there was a parent or close relative who rewarded any display of talent, and ignored or punished the opposite. Prodigies, it seemed, were made, not born.
Provided the right environment and the proper encouragement, it meant that everyone had a shot at perfection.
Bloom wasn’t wrong — “mothers” matter — but too many of these super athletes came up sideways, backward, and feral for this to be the single deciding factor. Something else is going on. And that something else is where the musicians come into play.
Anders Ericsson found that while one’s early environment was helpful, what truly distinguished excellent players from good players from average players was hours of practice. Put differently, deliberate well-structure practice is a rigorous, compliance-based approach to mastery. It means you crawl before you walk.
Finally, the trouble with marshmallows. In 1972, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a fairly straightforward study in delayed gratification: he offered four-year-old children a marshmallow. The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.
So what gives? How do a bunch of impulsive hedonists raised far from the storied incubators of athletic excellence end up rewriting the rule book on human potential? The short answer, of course, is flow. The long answer is where Philip Zimbardo comes back into our story.
Zimbardo noticed two competing “time perspectives” at work in Mischel’s experiment. A time perspective is the technical name for the “permanent filter” Zimbardo described. It’s essentially our attitude toward time. For example, in Mischel’s experiment, the kids who ate the marshmallow immediately were present hedonists. They lived for the now and not the later.
This strategy has an upside. As individuals, Presents are creative, spontaneous, open-minded, high-energy risk takers who play sports, have hobbies, make friends easily, and find lovers often. Their lives are fun-filled and fast-paced. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost. While Presents are often the life of the party, that’s often the end of the line.
On the other hand, kids who didn’t eat the marshmallow are future oriented, thus able to resist temptation today for a chance at a greater reward tomorrow. They get better grades and more education, are healthier and more optimistic, make more money, solve problems more consistently, are more mindful of morality, and can make the best of failure. They are the movers and shakers in this world. Futures are more likely to achieve the 10,000 hours needed for mastery, but here too are unintentional consequences. Futures burn out. They become stressed-out workaholics.
Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.
Time perspective is possibly genetic, probably cultural, and definitely hard to shake. It is shaped by geography, religion, socioeconomic status, education, and a host of other powerful forces.
Psychologists describe flow as “autotelic,” from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal). When something is autotelic — i.e., produces the flow high — it is its own reward.
When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.
On the other side of this coin, flow pulls Futures into the present. Because there is no time in the zone, there’s no way to worry about tomorrow.
The flow path presents an alternative to the standard Futures’ mothers-marshmallows-musicians approach to mastery. For starters, mothers aren’t required on the flow path.
Once the sensation seekers jump on the flow path, they don’t need to delay gratification to achieve success — gratification becomes their path to success.
Both flow and high-risk situations produce extremely powerful emotional experiences. As a result, says high-performance sports psychologist Michael Gervais, athletes in flow in death-facing situations likely gather more relevant data and code it more efficiently.
This means that flow doesn’t just provide a joyful, self-directed path toward mastery — it literally shortens the path.
When Philip Zimbardo said that the success of Western civilization has been based upon a future-orientated time perspective, he was describing the “struggle now, salvation later” hypothesis of the Protestant work ethic. This ethic is among the reasons the mothers, marshmallows, and musicians ideas have become so wildly popular: they confirm what we already want to believe.
So how far can we take this? It’s a good question, with the “we” being the most important part. Flow, as Csikszentmihalyi discovered, is ubiquitous. This means that all the superpowers detailed in this first section of the book — the fluid brain-wave control exhibited by Laird Hamilton, the deep relationship to the Voice enjoyed by Dean Potter, the near-telepathic prowess of the Red Bull Air Force, and the accelerated path to mastery trod by Shane McConkey — are available to any and all. This is who we are and how we’re wired. Flow is our birthright. But what do we do with that knowledge?
Flow Hacker Nation
Outer Flow
Doug Ammons wanted to transform himself into a drop of water. He was betting his life on the possibility.
In 2000, Outside made a list of the ten greatest adventurers since 1900, with their major criterion being “their achievements permanently altered the landscape of adventure.” Ammons is number seven.
When you paddle, well, there is the feeling that you are pouring yourself right into and through the river, with no distractions at all, you can weave yourself right into the current.
It was this desire for primal participation that first drew Ammons to the wilds of upper British Columbia, to one of the last great secrets, to the Grand Canyon of the Stikine.
It was paddler Rob Lesser who first spotted the Stikine on a trip up to Alaska. This was 1977.
Four years later, Lesser returned with a team of exceptionally skilled kayakers and a helicopter for support. They managed about 60 percent of the canyon.
Lesser came back in 1985, this time with legendary boaters Bob Mc-Dougall and Lars Holbeck, and another helicopter. The trio pulled it off, completing a milestone first descent down the whole of the Stikine.
In 1989, Lesser and McDougall returned, with Doug Ammons as their third. The team was attempting the first self-supported expedition through the canyon.
Ammons. The following year, he came back to the Stikine with a different crew. Despite the difficulties, the second time turned out to be the charm. Top to bottom in three days. The first self-supported trip down the Stikine.
There are a great number of on-ramps into flow, with action and adventure sports being only one of them. For writers, poets, painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians, composers, etc., creativity is their frequent gateway. Scientists and engineers often feel the same. Endurance athletes, meanwhile, can ride pain and exhaustion into the zone.
In the world of philanthropy, helper’s high is the term for an altruism-triggered flow state.
Video-game players get into flow so frequently that Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas have become the most widely accepted theoretical framework for explaining the lure of the joystick.
What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at your full potential.
In all these other domains flow is a luxury; in extreme sports, it is a core requirement.
Ken Ravizza: “The peak experience in sport is a rare personal moment that remains etched in the athlete’s consciousness. It serves as reminder of the great intrinsic satisfaction that sport participation can provide. Peak experiences during an athlete’s career are relatively rare but their intensity acts as a standard, or qualitative reference point, for subjectively evaluating future performance.”[1]
If we want more flow in our lives, the best place to start that investigation is with the people with the most flow in their lives.
Conditions for flow — the circumstances that speed entrance into the state. Flow triggers is the term we’ll be using to describe these circumstances. There are four varieties: external triggers, internal triggers, social triggers, and creative triggers.
How have these athletes managed to produce flow so consistently?
It wasn’t intentional, that’s the first thing to know. Certainly, action and adventure athletes have found flow more frequently than most, but much of their success has been accidental.
We’ll be using flow hack and flow hacker to refer to any action that helps propel people into flow, and anyone performing such an action, respectively. In these terms, extreme athletes use risk as a “flow hack” because flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention.
Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward. To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to.
We also know a bit about hacking the “high consequence” flow trigger.
Certainly, risk is needed for flow, but if you don’t want to take physical risks, take mental risks. Take social risks. Emotional risks. Creative risks.
It’s not easy to get to the Stikine. Ammons didn’t care. He’d come for the consequences. He knew how to leverage risk to access flow and — critical for this mission — believed he could remain in the state for a very long time.
He could place this bet with confidence because he wasn’t only relying on risk to trigger flow. He was also depending on two other external triggers — “rich environment” and “deep embodiment” — to keep him in the state. A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity — three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk.
Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next. Complexity, when there’s lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.
The last external flow trigger, “deep embodiment,” is a kind of fullbody awareness. Humans have sensory inputs all over the place; 50 percent of our nerve endings are in our hands, feet, and face.
If we want to pull the deep embodiment trigger in less extreme environments, then we simply have to learn to pay attention to all these input streams.
It’s been over two decades — but no one has yet to repeat Ammon’s solo.
Inner Flow
A technique for triggering the mammalian diving reflex, a reflex that optimizes respiration and, like dolphins, whales, and some birds, allows us to operate underwater for extended periods of time. Here’s how it works: When the nerves of the human face come in contact with water, our heartbeat begins to slow (10 to 30 percent in amateurs; up to 50 percent in professionals). A slower heart rate requires less oxygen, leaving more left over for other organs. Next, as pressure from depth increases, blood leaves our extremities — first fingers and toes, next hands and feet, finally arms and legs — and surrounds the heart and brain. Lastly, during deeper dives, organs and circulatory walls allow blood plasma and water to pass through them, preventing the chest cavity from collapsing inward with the massive pressure increase.
Peak inhalations (filling all pulmonary airspaces) and packing (taking in tiny sips of air after the lungs have been filled, which, if done wrong, can lead to broken ribs, punctured tracheas, and quick blackouts) and breath-ups (a way to lower heart rate, increase blood oxygen, and dispel carbon dioxide).
The question raised by Mandy-Rae Cruickshank is fairly straightforward: How did she learn she was capable of extraordinary? Turns out, she didn’t learn how to do anything. Mandy-Rae learned when — when she was capable of extraordinary. This made all the difference.
Just as flow states have external triggers, conditions in the outer environment that create more flow, they also have internal triggers, conditions in our inner environment that create more flow. Internal triggers are psychological strategies that drive attention into the now.
If creating more flow is our aim, then the emphasis falls on “clear” and not “goals.” Clarity gives us certainty. We know what to do and we know where to focus our attention while doing it. When goals are clear, metacognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.
Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly.
Immediate feedback, our next internal trigger, is another shortcut into the now. The term refers to a direct, in-the-moment coupling between cause and effect. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input.
Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel — the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap. If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be 4 percent greater than the skills. In technical terms, the sweet spot is the end result of what’s known as the Yerkes-Dobson law — the fact that increased stress leads to increased performance up to a certain intensity, beyond which performance levels off or declines.
This is why the challenge/skill ratio is so important. If we want to achieve the kinds of accelerated performance we’re seeing in action and adventure sports, then it’s 4 percent plus 4 percent plus 4 percent, day after day, week after week, months into years into careers. This is the road to real magic.
Mindset refers to our feelings toward basic qualities like intelligence and athletic talent. After more than thirty years of research, Dweck found that most of us have one of two basic mindsets.
To find 4 percent, you need accurate selfknowledge — and this is tricky for fixed mindsetters.
If you’re oriented toward learning, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively.
The absence of self-knowledge makes it harder to tune the challenge/skill ratio.
There are two common misconceptions about flow. The first is that the state works like a light switch — on or off. You’re either in flow or out. Yet flow is not binary. The state is just one step in a four-part flow cycle.
- The first step in the flow cycle is known as “struggle.” Struggle is a loading phase: we are overloading the brain with information. A profound chemical change takes place during struggle. To amp up focus and alertness, stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine are pumped into the system.
- The next stage in the cycle is “release.” Release means to take your mind off the problem. The moment this occurs, another chemical change follows: nitric oxide floods the system.
- The zone, the flow state itself, is the third stage in this cycle. Struggle gives way to release gives way to flow — hallelujah.
- Afterward, we move into the fourth and final step in the cycle: “recovery.”
The We of Flow
Sawyer also discovered that flow states have social triggers — ten in particular — which are ways to alter social conditions to produce more group flow.
- The first three — serious concentration; shared, clear goals; good communication (i.e., lots of immediate feedback) — are the collective versions of individual preconditions identified by Csikszentmihalyi. Two more — equal participation and an element of risk (mental, physical, whatever) — are self-explanatory.
The remaining five require a little more information. Familiarity, our next trigger, means the group has a common language, a shared knowledge base, and a communication style based on unspoken understandings.
- Then there’s blending egos.
- A sense of control combines autonomy (being free to do what you want) and competence (being good at what you do).
- Close listening occurs when we’re fully engaged in the here and now.
- Always say yes, our final trigger, means interactions should be additive more than argumentative.
- Turns out there’s hidden leverage available, both a secret balm to make you braver and one of the best flow hacks yet discovered: community.
The lonewolf maverick is a myth. When it comes to becoming Superman, we really are in this together.
The Flow of Imagination
The greatest athletes aren’t interested in the greatest risks. I mean, sometimes they’re taken, sometimes not, but those physical risks are a by-product of a much deeper desire to take creative risks. Don’t be fooled by the danger. In action and adventure sports, creativity is always the point.
Every time we have a creative insight and share it with the world, we come up against some very primal terrors: fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of social ridicule, fear of loss of resources (time, money, access, etc.).
The flow state itself acts like a force multiplier for creativity.
Neuroelectrically, flow’s baseline brain-wave pattern of low alpha/high theta also boosts creativity. Alpha means we’re calm, confident, and content. Theta, meanwhile, is a relaxed state where the brain can move from notion to notion without much internal resistance.
The “freeride movement.” The movement dates back to the 1980s, when snowboarding was still a banned sport.
Shane McConkey borrowed the term free to apply to skiing. He coined the term ‘freeskiing.’
Shane McConkey and JT Holmes arrived in Italy for their shot at the double ski-BASE on March 25, 2009.
McConkey died on impact. He left behind a wife, a three-year-old daughter, and a fifteen-year legacy that, despite the startling rate of progression in these sports, will most likely remain unmatched for some time. As former Powder magazine managing editor Leslie Anthony wrote in White Planet, “The ski world’s superman was gone.” The double ski-BASE remains, though, the chapter yet unwritten.
Time to Rise
We are the ones that we’ve been waiting for. — ALICE WALKER
The Dark Side of Flow
Most people are so afraid of dying they never live. Shane lived his life to the fullest. He lived thousands of lifetimes and changed thousands of lives. The world needs more people like Shane.
The state of flow, like the path that bears its name, is volatile, unpredictable, and all-consuming. Flow feels like the meaning of life for good reason. The neurochemicals that underpin the state are among the most addictive drugs on earth.
Combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers — the three things that motivate us most.
Flow makes you feel invincible, right up to the moment you’re not. Flow forces you to evaluate life through a different lens. It gives you reason to live — but live this way long enough and those reasons become more important than dying.
The dark night of the flow happens when people glimpse the state and can’t get back there, but another issue arises when people are getting into flow, yet misinterpreting its meaning.
“Bliss junkies are people who think the magical ease of the flow state is the goal,” says Wheal. When they confront the difficulty of the day to day, they’d rather reach for a pill or a new lover or another meditation retreat than get down to hard work.
Society likes to pay for performance and flow definitely improves performance.
Even in less extreme work lives, once we start accessing flow with regularity, performance will dramatically improve and new expectations will follow.
The second issue here is whether flow can be controlled.
Flow is also a very disruptive technology.
Flow, like all technologies, remains morally neutral. It can be used for good or ill or both at the same time.
Life is long and we’re all scared and, in flow, at least for a little while, we’re not.
For most people, flow hacking is an esoteric pursuit. But these days, in action and adventure sports, it’s become standard operating procedure.
The Flow of Next
We are now at the front edge of a high-tech, high-performance revolution. While the athletes of the last generation had to make up their training regimens as they went along, today’s practitioners are benefiting from an inrush of techniques and technologies that make accessing flow and using the state to accelerate progression far easier than ever before.
It comes down to cultural learning. Danny Way, Laird Hamilton, Dean Potter, Shane McConkey, Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, Jeremy Jones, Doug Ammons — these athletes were pioneers. Trailblazers into the impossible. Tom Schaar and his fellow youngsters are the children of this revolution.
Flow is a creation engine: it helps us pluck an idea out of imagination and bring it fully formed into the world.
Our limits are governed by flow’s ability to amplify performance as much as by imagination’s ability to dream up that performance.
Every athlete interviewed for this book agrees: after something has been done once, it becomes considerably easier to repeat. Yet why is this so?
It’s a two-part question. The first part concerns the relationship between imagination and physical possibility, what could be called the “Roger Bannister effect.” The second part concerns, and especially when discussing this younger generation of extreme athletes, all the other forces amplifying this relationship.
There is an extremely tight link between our visual system and our physiology: once we can actually see ourselves doing the impossible, our chances of pulling it off increase significantly.
It was Harvard physiologist Edmund Jacobson who first discovered this link. Back in the 1930s.
Visualization impacts a slew of cognitive processes — motor control, memory, attention, perception, planning — essentially accelerating chunking by shortening the time it takes us to learn new patterns. Visualization also firms up aims and objectives, further amplifying flow.
As we learned earlier, one of the causes of flow is transient hypofrontality — the shutting down of large swatches of the prefrontal cortex. Children, as Sherlin pointed out, are developmentally hypofrontal — meaning portions of their neocortex are not fully formed (the brain keeps developing until age twenty-five) and this makes them even more flow prone.
Putting flow-prone kids into high-flow environments means a lot of flow. Arming them with advanced flow-hacking techniques means even more.
If flow underpins optimal performance, then knowing the causes of flow — both where it comes from and why it comes — can help us achieve optimal performance more frequently.
A revolution in sensors, batteries, and connectivity has led to a flood of “quantified self” devices such as Nike Fuel band, Jawbone’s UP, and the Basis Band. These wearable gadgets monitor an expansive array of biometrics, most of which can be used to hunt flow.
Biotechnology — the category that underpins exoskeletons and other enhancement technologies — is currently accelerating at five times the speed of Moore’s Law.
Isaac Newton wasn’t wrong. We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Flow to Abundance
In total, Baumgartner’s free fall lasted four minutes nineteen seconds; his complete air time approximately ten minutes; his top speed 833.9 miles per hour — Mach 1.24.
This is why Baumgartner’s jump is critical. We’re going to space. That’s what’s next. Within a few years, human beings will be routinely visiting low-Earth orbit.
The combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier.
Albert Heim fell off a mountain in the Swiss Alps in the late nineteenth century; Felix Baumgartner fell out of the stratosphere in the early twenty-first century, and in between an exceptional group of athletes and an extraordinary state of consciousness have teamed up to do the impossible — over and over again.
Danny Way jumped over the Great Wall of China on a shattered limb; Ian Walsh paddled into a wave the size of an apartment building; Dean Potter caught hold of a climbing rope while falling at terminal velocity into the Cellar of Swallows.
In slightly more than two decades, action and adventure sports have ballooned from barely a blip on our collective radar to the most popular sports in the world save football, soccer, and autoracing.
Arie de Geus. In the early 1980s, de Geus was the director of strategic planning for Royal Dutch Shell and deeply curious about corporate longevity.
He found a number of factors contribute to longevity, but one stood out far above the rest: the ability to learn faster.
As we already know, flow is the secret to learning faster. A lot faster.
McKinsey established that executives in flow are five times more effective than their steady-state peers.
Perhaps impossible is just the kind of challenge we’ve been waiting for. What the world needs most is Superman. What the world needs most is us.
[1] In the book on page 99
