Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience

One of the really incredible things about being human is we're all built for peak performance

Flow is often described as a state of kind of effortless effort. We feel like we're propelled through the activity

Everything else just seems to disappear. You hear the word anxiety, you think, oh God, this thing I want to kick out the door

I want to get rid of it, I wanted to flip the script. Anxiety is a normal human emotion

We all have it. We can use neuroscience and tools from psychology to learn how to take advantage of anxiety

We tell ourselves so many stories about who we are and who we're supposed to be

Once we realize that everything is always changing, it helps us let a lot of that go

The largest lesson the 30 years in Studying Peak Performance has taught me is

we're all capable of so much more than we know. Hey big thinkers, this is the DSO-1 Daily Symbiotic from Seed Health, a microbiological science

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My name is Stephen Kotler. I'm a writer and a researcher, and my latest book is The Art of Impossible

Flow is often described as a state of kind of effortless effort. We feel like we're propelled through the activity

Everything else just seems to disappear. Time is going to dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it's going to pass strangely

Five hours go by in like five minutes. Occasionally, it'll slow down

You get a freeze frame effect. I mean, anybody who's been in a car crash, for example

Intuition tends to get turned up a lot. This is a basketball player in the zone seeing the hoop

and suddenly it's as big as a hula hoop. And our frown muscles tend to be paralyzed

And what that frowning is, is a sign that the brain is doing work

This is a constant issue in my marriage where my wife thinks I'm mad at her or somebody

And I'm like, no, no, I'm just thinking. This is just me thinking. I'm in robot mode

Flow itself, actually, the term is coined by Goethe, who uses the German word Rausch, which means overflowing with joy

Nietzsche actually wrote about flow. William James worked on the topic, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is often referred to as the godfather of flow psychology

He was very interested in sort of well-being, meaning of life, and he went around the world talking to people about the times in their lives

when they felt their best and they performed their best. Everywhere he went, people said the same thing

I'm in this altered state of consciousness where every action, every decision I make seems to flow effortlessly, perfectly, seamlessly from the last

Flow actually feels flowy. More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption

You're so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, everything else just seems to disappear

But one of the things that athletes talk about a lot is what they call the voice

Often when I'm skiing in flow, I will get directions, right, left, do this, do that, and it's very quick

You either do what the voice is telling you to do or you tend to crash

The challenge-skills balance is often called the golden rule to flow, and the idea here is pretty simple

We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set

So to do this work and to get good at it, you have to get good at being comfortable with being uncomfortable

So you want to stretch but not snap. So there are a number of different things you can do to sort of prepare yourself and prepare the environment to drop into flow

The flow triggers are your toolkit. 22 of them have been discovered

There are probably way, way more, but so far researchers have identified 22

The most basic of flows triggers, complete concentration. You really want to sort of start your work session, if you can, in relationship to your physiology

I like to wake up at 3.30, 4 o'clock in the morning. That's when I'm most awake, most alert

I am married to a night owl. My wife doesn't wake up till 5, 6, 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock at night

That's when her brain comes alive. And then you want to try to block out 90 to 120 minutes for uninterrupted concentration

Practice distraction management ahead of time. So you want to turn off your phone, turn off email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc

All your messages, all your alerts. There was a study where they found that coders in flow, if they get knocked out by distraction

a knock at the door a text alert or whatever it can take them 15 minutes to get back into flow If they can get back in at all flow only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here right now One way to kind of explore flow triggers is a cluster of them that are predominantly dopamine triggers

They drive focus, they drive attention, they drive alertness and excitement. And there's a lot of different ways to get dopamine

Novelty produces dopamine. We see the same thing with unpredictability, complexity, the experience of awe

You look up at the night sky and you see stars everywhere and you know those stars are actually universes and you get sort of perceptual vastness

If you've ever done a crossword puzzle or Sudoku, you get an answer right

That little rush of pleasure you get, that's dopamine. And then you usually get a couple of answers right in a row

That's because the dopamine that is now in your system is amplifying pattern recognition

We get that same dopamine from risk taking. And this could be physical risks, emotional risks, social risks, intellectual risks, possibly spiritual risks

We get the dopamine not as a reward for taking the risk, which is what some people used to believe

But now we know it's to kind of drive motivation. Now, there are lots of different intrinsic motivators

But from a motivation standpoint, there are five. And they're all designed to be built into one another and work in a sort of specific order in a specific sequence

The most basic human motivator is curiosity. One of the things we get from curiosity is focus for free

When we're curious about something, we don't have to struggle. We don't have to burn a lot of calories trying to pay attention to it

Curiosity is designed, biologically again, to be built into passion. And think about we've all fallen in love, how much attention you pay to the person you're falling in love with

You can't stop thinking about them, can't stop staring at them. That's a tremendous amount of focus for free

Now, passion is incredibly useful, but as a motivator, you can go one better, which is purpose

Everybody wants to talk about, oh, I have a purpose, and it's this big altruistic thing

and it's good for the world, and all those things may be true. But from a peak performance perspective, it's very, very selfish

Once you have purpose, the system demands autonomy. I want the freedom to pursue my purpose

And once you have that freedom, the system wants the last of the big motivators, mastery

Mastery is the skills to pursue that purpose well. One of the really incredible things about being human is we're all built for peak performance

Flow is universal, and humans are actually universal in most mammals and definitely all social mammals

There's a shared collective version of a flow state, a team performing at their best, a group performing at their best

This is called group flow. In fact, studies have shown that the people who score off the charts for these characteristics

who score off the charts for overall well-being and life satisfaction, are the people with the most flow in their lives

We're all capable of so much more than we know. That is a commonality across the board

It's the largest lesson that 30 years in studying peak performance has taught me. And the way I sort of like to think about it is motivation is what gets us into the game

Learning allows us to continue to play. creativity is how we steer and flow which is optimal performance is how we amplify all

the results beyond all reasonable expectation. Hi my name is Wendy Suzuki. I am the dean of the College of Arts and Science at New York University

and my most recent book is called Good Anxiety, Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

Anxiety is the feeling of fear or worry, typically associated with situations of uncertainty

Brain plasticity is the brain's extraordinary ability to change and rewire itself

In response to the external environment, I've tried to use and explore the boundaries of brain plasticity

elasticity to address some very challenging issues, particularly our high anxiety levels

You hear the word anxiety, you think, oh God, this is the thing I want to kick out the door

It's a disease. I have it. I don't know how to get rid of it. Anxiety is a normal human emotion

We all have it. Okay, so you're never going to get rid of it. It evolved to protect us

And so my whole book, Good Anxiety, is teaching us to look at anxiety in a different way

The amygdala is a brain structure that is automatically activated when you hear that bump in the night that launches your anxiety

And the brain area that can help that calming in that situation is the prefrontal cortex

the area that's involved in executive function. It helps you order your day

But unfortunately, in situations of high stress, high anxiety, what happens is not only is your amygdala activated

but your prefrontal cortex gets shut down too. So that makes the situation even worse

One thing that trips essentially all of us up is something called the negativity bias

which says that we are more prone to see the negative sides of things than the positive

What happens is if you're tired, if you're stressed, if lots of problems are coming up

you will tend to see the world in, oh my God, this person hates me

I'm never going to get the job. I'm never going to lose the weight that I want to lose

All these things become part of the big stone of anxiety dragging along with you

Cognitive flexibility is the idea that we are able to look at and approach situations in lots of different ways

We are habit-forming animals, and sometimes, without even knowing it, you are approaching the same situation the same way that you approached it when you were six years old

Cognitive flexibility says that if there a realization there are other ways to approach it you have the ability to do just that I dove into trying to find gifts from all the different kinds of anxiety

and that's how I came up with the six gifts or superpowers of anxiety. Let me mention my top

three. The first one is a superpower of productivity, that what-if list. What if you

didn't do that or what if you did that and you didn't do it right? That anxiety is focused on

things that are important to you in life. That is the key. Evolutionarily, anxiety evolved to have

us put an action on it. 2.5 million years ago, it was either you fight the danger that was causing

anxiety or you run away from it. That is the fight or flight response. The way to transform it is to

turn that what if list into a to-do list. Put an action on each one of them, whether it's asking a

friend for help doing something, Googling something, and go tick through them one by one

Superpower number two is the superpower of flow. Flow is a psychological state. It's those moments that you're doing something that you're really

good at. Time stands still. It's like you're moving in slow motion and everything is just

going beautifully. All the data out there says that anxiety can eliminate flow. I knew I wanted

to talk about flow, but I couldn't just say, well, sorry, if you have anxiety, no flow for you

Okay, maybe it's not classic flow. Maybe it's micro flow. Your own anxiety can make your own

moments of micro flow, which we all have during the day, even if you don't realize you do be even

flowier. Superpower number three. Think about that anxiety that is most familiar to you

your most common form of anxiety. You know what it feels like. You know what it looks like

All you have to do is notice when others might be suffering from that same form of anxiety

And here's your superpower. All you have to do is give a kind word, a simple helping hand in that

situation. And I love this superpower because I can't think of anything that we need more

in the world today than higher levels of empathy. An activist mindset is one that is flexible, that can look at a situation and see lots of

different possibilities. Everything from that negativity bias all the way to, oh, actually

maybe this is going to teach me something really interesting, really new. To have an activist

mindset requires cognitive flexibility. You're going to try something new. Sometimes it's hard

but if you practice it in different ways every single day, it can be something that becomes a

very powerful tool. This is a really important part of my book, and I think it was emphasized

because of this situation that really shaped the book, which is the difficult passing of two of my

family members, and really coming out of that with a beautiful example of an activist mindset

Everybody's going to experience loss of a loved one during their lifetime. My activist mindset was

knowing that all of that pain and that loss and that sadness was undergirded by love for

these people. And that was my activist mindset. I brought that beautiful, helpful, almost

life-saving example of activist mindset to my addressing anxiety. What is it about my anxiety

that is difficult. Can I bring a superpower or a gift from that as an opportunity to learn

to grow, and to learn more about yourself? I'm Robert Waldinger. I am a psychiatrist

and I'm professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. I direct the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital

Zen emphasizes community. It's called Sangha in the Buddhist language, and it's really the idea that we practice learning about ourselves and each other

by being in relationships with each other, both during meditation sessions and out there in the world

I am a Zen practitioner. I'm actually a Roshi, a Zen master

It's a big part of my life. And it is an enormous benefit in terms of how I think about my own life, other people's lives

how I think about my research, and how I think about working with patients. I would rate the concept of impermanence as number one, as the greatest hit of Zen Buddhism

basically the idea of everything constantly changing means that there's nothing fixed

there's nothing to hold on to in the deepest sense and that on the one hand that can be scary

on the other hand it can be an enormous relief because we tell ourselves so many stories about

who we are and who we're supposed to be and how the world is supposed to be and when we really

know the truth of impermanence, we let a lot of that go

Once we realize that everything is always changing, it helps us be more compassionate to other people

because we realize that they are also dealing with all the complexities

of a self and a world that constantly changing The Four Noble Truths are perhaps the most iconic teachings of the Buddha They start

with the Buddha's statement that life is suffering or life is unsatisfactory. Now, it's often said

that the Buddha was teaching that you could get to a point where you never suffer anymore. Zen does

not teach that. Rather, what we can do is learn to be with what's unsatisfactory in life, learn to

be with unhappiness, even be with pain in a way that makes it more bearable, in a way that doesn't

layer on optional suffering. The optional suffering being the stories we tell about

how unfair it all is, for example, that I have back pain or how unfair it is that I've got a

cold today, that all of these things are workable. It makes me a little less likely to blame other

people for what's going on in me. And that can be hugely helpful when we talk about harmony in

relationships. The best definition I know of mindfulness is simple. It's paying attention

in the present moment without judgment. So right now for me, that's talking with you

That's the feel of the chair on my back. It's the feel of the air on my skin

You can work on your mindfulness right this moment by simply paying attention to whatever

stimuli are reaching you. It might be your heartbeat. It might be your breath

It might be the sound of the fan in the room, anything

And simply letting yourself be open and receive whatever is here right now

And you can do that in any moment. Buddhism talks about the idea of attachment

It's really about holding on tightly to a fixed view of something

Zen teaches that unsatisfactoriness is always there in life. And that we do have preferences

But that what we can do is learn to cling less tightly to our preferences

In other words, to insist less that the world be a certain way

I mean, think about in relationships how much we try to insist that someone else be a certain way that we want them to be

And how much less we suffer if we let that go and just assume that that person is allowed to show up in the world as they are

And we're allowed to show up in the world as we are. So this idea of relieving suffering is in Zen the idea of being able to face towards suffering, looking at it, and living with it in a way that hurts less

There's a concept of metta loving kindness in Buddhism, and there are a couple of different ways that it's talked about

One is an explicit skill that we can cultivate. You can do a loving kindness meditation where you think about another person and you say

to yourself, may you be happy, may you be at peace. And you do that over and over again and you come to feel differently about the other person

including about people you don't like very much or you're angry at. So there's that way of actively cultivating a skill

There's another way, which is simply by becoming more and more aware of your own pain, your own anxious, angry thoughts, your own difficulties

Because what happens when we become more aware of that through meditation, for example, is that we become much more empathic toward other people

And naturally, that kind of loving kindness arises where we see an angry person and say, oh, I wonder if that person is having a terrible day, rather than immediately reacting with our own anger

And so that's a different way to cultivate loving kindness, but it happens pretty reliably through meditation

and finally there's a wonderful teaching in zen about beginner's mind the idea that we let go

of all the stories we tell ourselves that we're so sure of having a beginner's mind really helps

in relationships because it allows us to be curious it allows us to say okay there's so

much I don't know about this person. Let me watch closely. Let me notice what I haven't seen before

about this person. Let me find new ways to interact with this person. And that brings a kind of

freshness and openness to relationships that can otherwise easily get stale. Shunryu Suzuki was a

Zen master who had a saying that I love. He said, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities

In the expert's mind, there are few. And what he meant by that is when we can remain open to

many possibilities, rather than being so sure that we know what's what, that we become open to

surprise, open to new ways of experiencing ourselves and the world that make us suffer

a great deal less than when we are so-called experts. And the older I get, and the more people

call me an expert, the more aware I am of how little I know

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