Flow States to Improve Performance

In a previous post, I wrote about the stress cycle and how to avoid burnout. In this post, I wanted to talk about flow state, which I think of as the opposite side of the same coin.

For the sake of giving credit where it is due, most of the information herein is what I got from an interview I heard with Steven Kotler.

So, what is a flow state? It's a cognitive state where a person is fully immersed and focused. It's characterized by rapt attention so deep that a sense of time is lost. Some people refer to it as being 'in the zone', or having a runners high.

Most people have had some degree of experience with this. Those days in the office where, at the end of the day, you felt incredibly productive and satisfied? You were probably in a flow state. What I found fascinating about the interview was that Steven discussed the neurobiology of flow, what happens during flow, and even discussed triggers and ways we can get into it.

To lay the groundwork, the first thing to mention is that brainwaves are different during a flow state vs normal consciousness. There are four primary types of brainwaves:

• Beta: Normal mental state
• High Beta: A bit faster than beta. Typically seen when anxious
• Alpha: When the brain is at rest, and there is little resistance between ideas. Daydreaming
• Theta: Mostly when in REM sleep. No resistance between ideas.

So, starting from a known, normal position - we typically spend a large portion of our waking hours in beta, where we are fully conscious of time, our sense of self, and what is going on around us. The conscious mind is very fast and powerful, but it does have limitations - it can only hold on to a handful of threads at a time, and has limited RAM, so to speak.

When in flow, the brain processes in alpha waves, and we get a sense of time dilation and a sense of one-ness with the activity we are engaging in. The reason is because there are two changes that occur in the brain during a meditative state such as flow - portions of the prefrontal cortex (where our sense of time is) shut down, and the right frontal lobe (where we get our sense of self) deactivates.

In addition to the brainwave shift, the other thing is that flow results in the dumping of the most potent neurochemicals - dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins. All these chemicals are what allows for increased data acquisition abilities and creativity spikes.

A flow state has four primary phases that one has to move through:

• Struggle: This is either something quickly induced by something like a fight or flight response, or a long building time to spool up. During this phase, the prefrontal cortex is very active, various stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) build up, and the brain is in beta and high beta.
• Release: This is a distraction where you get your mind off the topic at hand. This is the phase where the brain shifts from beta to alpha. However, not all distractions are created equal - TV and social media are terrible, because they keep your brain in beta. Physical movement (running, walking - something repetitive where you can allow your attention to wander a bit) is a common practice to move into this phase.
• Flow: Where you are trying to get!
• Recovery: After the neurochemical dump, a recovery period is needed.

As I mentioned before, most people have had the experience of being in a flow state at some point. It's highly addictive - having a natural high induced by massive amounts of neurochemicals that are far more powerful than any synthetic version will do that.

So, then, how do we get into flow?

At its core, flow only happens when we are fully immersed in the present moment. This does take effort (see 'Struggle' phase above), but there are things we can do help us focus:

• Engage in activities that induce flow: Think of the activities you enjoy doing just for the heck of it. If you enjoy doing something for the experience itself, that is likely a flow activity for you. As adults, we tend to focus on our careers and family, and those flow inducing activities tend to take a back seat. Flow begets flow - so go back to doing what you enjoy doing.
• Clear goals: Think about what would make the day excellent. This usually requires a bit of planning - but the less time you spend in a state of trying to figure out what to do, where you are prone to distractions that keep you in alpha state, the higher chance you'll be able to get into a flow state. Flow redeems the hard work - a checklist without flow is burnout.

Finally - once you are in a flow state, you stay in a flow state by managing distractions and preventing the prefrontal cortex from getting involved. Dropping out of flow can be expensive, and can take up to 15 minutes to get back into it. Phone, email, looking at the clock, checking social media - all of these items distract and interrupt your productivity.

Four Common Ways We Miss the Mark When Listening

 We all know that the secret to great relationships - whether personal or professional - is communication. And we all know that a major component of communication is listening - but we rarely encounter any tips on how to actually listen, and what makes for effective listening. For many people, it's only in the realm of something like therapy do we ever hear terms like 'active listening', and we start being exposed to how to communicate effectively.

I was listening to an interview with author Oscar Trimboli recently, and he mentioned the four common mistakes made when listening, and it struck me as one of the first times I've heard effective listening being defined so clearly - albeit through the contrast of mistakes.

The first thing I'll point out - all of these mistakes come from a good place. They come from the listener wanting to help. I think that is a critical point to reinforce - although the mechanism may miss the mark, the intent and effort is genuine. The second thing to point out - these items are not mutually exclusive, and there are often aspects of more than one mistake being. The final thing I'll point out - no one is immune from making these mistakes, and listening is a continual practice.

1) Dramatic listener. This person listens (most likely unknowingly) for emotional cues, and uses that as a springboard to tell their own version of a story with a similar emotion. The intent is good and genuine, to establish a bond with the speaker by demonstrating they have been in a similar situation. However, the end result is that the original speaker usually feels their story is dismissed or diminished.

Years ago I saw this Dilbert comic, and it stuck with me. The dramatic listener is basically Topper.

I think that to avoid being Topper, it's important to remember that whatever the speaker is saying, it's not about you, the listener. It's about them. Retelling a bigger and better story isn't being empathetic, it's at best sympathetic (see this post to read about the difference), and at worst dismissive.

2) Interrupting listener. We process thoughts and words much faster than we can speak them. The interrupting listener hears the start of a story, and in their desire to save time, interrupts the speaker to move things along by completing sentences or phrases. This is especially true if the speaker pauses for a few moments to collect their next batch of thoughts. Again, this comes from a good place (saving time, or wanting to help the speaker find the words of phrase they may seemingly be struggling to find), but more often than not, it backfires. Blurting out the incorrect word or phrase can easily derail the speaker and cause them to backtrack. Ironically, the interrupting listener often ends up wasting, rather than saving, time because of this.

Oscar's suggestion in this case is to treat a pause as a word - it has a beginning, middle, and end; after the pause, wait to a count of three before attempting to speak. More often than not, the speaker will have had enough time to get their next thoughts out, and the conversation continues on smoothly.

3) The lost listener. This person disengages from the speaker and is usually thinking about their last, or next, thought. In some ways, this listener is not really listening, but waiting for their chance to speak. Other times, the lost listener doesn't know what their role in the conversation is. If someone starts rattling off a story, and you are questioning your involvement in hearing the story, you are probably the lost listener. A lot of times, simply asking 'So, what is it you are looking to me for?' Sometimes the speaker just wants someone to listen so they can vent. Other times they may want your opinion on something. Once it is established what your role in the conversation is, it's a lot easier to remain engaged and make it a productive exchange.

4) The shrewd listener. This is very prevalent in fields where people are looked upon for their expertise - such as doctors, lawyers, and consultants. These people tend to listen to the start of a story, and begin solving the problem before the person has finished speaking. Once again, the intent is good natured and genuine, as they often want to portray confidence that the speakers issue is common enough and there is a solid solution. However the shrewd listener can easily become susceptible to confirmation bias and misdiagnosis if the problem has been 'solved' before all pertinent details have been conveyed, as pieces of evidence that don't conform to the diagnosis are dismissed or their importance minimized.

The remedy here is to let the person finish speaking, and ask follow up questions to verify understanding before coming up with a diagnosis. As an IT consultant, I know the mistake of the shrewd listener well - having worked with people who make the mistake, and having made it myself. I've learned that more confidence is portrayed by being silent when I need to be silent, and not being afraid to ask follow up questions that may seem simple or stupid. It's not uncommon that those 'simple' questions end up resulting in an answer that was different than I was originally thinking they would, which clarifies understanding of the situation overall.

Once again - all of these mistakes are made from an honest and well meaning place, but the execution of that help happens to be flawed. I've made all of the mistakes above and continually try to improve my own listening skills, and knowing what the common mistakes are makes it easier to identify when I am committing one.

Finish the Stress Cycle to Avoid Burnout

Being an adult involves dealing with stress. Regardless of whether you are working a career job, or are a stay at home parent - there are cycles to adult life, and part of that cycle includes times of stress.

For years I've seen articles that discuss tactics of dealing with stressful situations - tactics such as sticking to a routine, setting limits and boundaries, taking breaks, and getting adequate sleep. Those suggestions are great for dealing with stress in the moment, but they don't always translate to completing the stress cycle. Recently, though, I've started to see information about completing the stress cycle in an appropriate way - meaning, in a way that helps avoid the physiological and mental effects of chronic stress.

Here's an example. Let's say you have a few major projects at work that require a large amount of your attention. Anything that requires a large amount of attention is going to have a draining effect, and therefore contribute to stress. This is not a bad thing - stress is, and always has been, a part of life - but it does have to be managed. So in our example, you do all the things to manage the day to day stress. You get outside, you have an exercise routine, you eat well, etc. Throughout the execution of your projects, you feel pretty good, you are rolling with the punches, and things are progressing. Then, one of the projects completes successfully. What do you do?

Too many times, people jump right back into the fray and continue working on the other projects - they are on a roll, and they don't want to lose momentum. While there is logic to this approach, there is also a hidden downside - by not completing the stress cycle, we carry stress from the previous incident over to the next one. In the short term, this is potentially manageable, but if this happens too often, it is very easy to end up in a scenario of chronic stress. Chances are, new projects are going to be added to your plate as the current batch winds down, and it is tempting to simply keep rolling from one project to the next.

Finishing a big project feels good - there is a sense of overcoming obstacles, and there is a sense of building camaraderie with your teammates. It is critical to allow time to celebrate and decompress after a major stressful event.

Here's a simple analogy to illustrate that point. An ancient hunter gather gets chased by a lion, and runs back to the village. This person obviously has the fight or flight response going on, their system is flooded with adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones. The village muscle comes out and kills the lion, and that evening the village holds a great feast and celebration for overcoming the threat. The moment the lion was killed, the person who was chased is relieved, but their body still has to process the hormones created during the chase. They may go into a state of shock, where their body shivers uncontrollably for a while, as their body processes what has happened. But it's the celebration with the rest of the village where that person fully completes the stress cycle - it now becomes a shared experience, and the celebration is a release of built up tension.

It's the same with modern stressors. Uncontrollable shivering is a common occurrence when coming out of general anesthesia. People celebrate after a political victory not because they want to stick it to the other side, but because they are going through the process of completing a cycle of stress. Soldiers form incredibly tight bonds with their brothers in arms because it provides an outlet for dealing with the stresses of war. Big projects at work demand a lot of cognitive cycles, where we are under stress to make a good impression and not fumble. Subsequent celebrations where the team goes out to dinner, or goes to the bar for a few drinks, are not just good for morale, but are also necessary to complete the stress cycle and avoid long term burnout for the team members.

We are humans, not machines. We can handle stress, but it is just as important to know how to complete the stress cycle as it is knowing how to handle stress in the moment.

Thinking - the Unheralded Productivity Secret

It seems counter-intuitive - if we look at someone's schedule and see it crammed full of meetings and appointments, we could be forgiven for automatically assuming that that person is productive. Somehow, we tend to associate 'busy' with 'highly productive' - but in my experience, that is not necessarily the case.

Instead, what I find happens with a busy schedule is that relatively few cognitive cycles are spent on any one thing. Moving from one topic to the next is not conducive to entering a productive state of concentration where we can think deeply about the most complex issues we are trying to resolve. If attention is a resource more valuable than time, then time dedicated to deep and productive thought is even more valuable.

This may seem to be a bit at odds with a previous post, where I made the argument that days filled with meetings and otherwise seemingly 'busy' tasks that do not feel productive are actually worthwhile. Yet this post and that previous post are actually two sides of the same coin. In that post, I mentioned that the time in between meetings can be highly effective when one takes the opportunity to step back and think (deeply) of the big picture, because it maximizes efficacy of days when there are large chunks of uninterrupted time.

What I'm trying to do in this post is to expand on that last point and highlight the fact that the most beneficial and internally rewarding work we do is often cerebral, and that it is OK to dedicate significant blocks of time on our schedule to deep thinking.

Here is an example that helps illustrate the point of how thinking is rewarding: as of the time I am writing this post, most people are working from home, and thus most people have gone through some sort of trial of learning to work from home effectively. Whether it's dedicating a room as an office to insulate ones' self from the kids running around in the living room, or working with a partner to give each other dedicated time and space for work - most people have, by now, gone through some sort of exercise in improving their ability to concentrate on their work. In the process, most people have inevitably had days filled with interruptions, leaving them feeling drained, demoralized, and/or frustrated at the end of the day. Now - compare how you felt at the end of one of those days vs a day when you were able to concentrate and make progress on resolving some sort of (reasonably complex) issue on your plate. The latter most likely left you with a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day.

Going back to my point above about how valuable time dedicated to deep and productive thought is - lets start with the assumption that everyone has 8 hours a day to dedicate to work. Lets also assume that you have two types of days on your schedule - a typical one at your desk where you have a handful of meetings and tasks to get to, and a day where you are going to some sort of professional training that: 1) you take seriously, and 2) are looking to expand your professional skillset in some meaningful way. Which of those two days leaves you more mentally worked, where at the end you say 'my brain is full' and need some sort of mental decompression? Chances are, it's the day of professional training. Both the day in the office and the day of training are 8 hours long, but the training required more deep and productive thought, and was more cognitively demanding. Yes, getting ones' attention during an 8 hour workday is challenging enough, but the number of hours we have available for concentration are even more scarce.

The reason I bring this up is that we all work 8-ish hour days, but are not at peak productivity during all of those 8 hours. There are times of the day when we are better able to engage in deep work then others, and thus we can be more productive by scheduling our most cognitively demanding tasks during those times. Lets say someone is most productive between 9-11am (which is actually pretty commonplace). If that person rolls into the office at 9, spends 30 minutes getting coffee and catching up with other coworkers to talk about the game last night, and then spends an hour going through their inbox - they've just gone through 90 minutes of their most productive hours of the day doing things that didn't demand high levels of attention. Then, at 10:30, they try to engage in a complex issue they are working on, and only get an hour in before they start to think about lunch. Then, after lunch, they try to re-engage, but are interrupted by emails and susceptible to post-lunch drowsiness. I think you get the idea - had they been effective at doing work that requires significant cognitive cycles during the hours they are most productive, and shifted more menial tasks to other times of the day, they could have been more productive overall.

This has been something that I've slowly discovered over the course of my career, and is something I am still working on - so I know it's not always the easiest thing to do. The allure of 'productivity' by having many items on a to-do list that can easily be crossed off is very strong. This is especially true in situations where I've had to report on a timesheet the things I've done over a period of time - having 12 things on that list vs 3 just looks more impressive. But over time, when I've allowed myself to be ok with just the 3 items, my ability to execute cleanly on complex job tasks has improved, yielding higher long term productivity.