Flow States

Flow is something I've come to appreciate in movement. The quality of being able to link movements together, to feel myself get wrapped up in a movement practice and feel myself being coordinated is very enjoyable. I practiced Tai Chi as my primary movement practice for most of the 2010s, after all!

So I wanted to take a while to explore the idea of flow, physically and psychologically, and meander around the idea to see what is pleasurable about it, what is functional, and what I think makes it not only worthwhile, but even possibly essential to life.

In my opening paragraph I described flow as "linking movements together" and "feeling coordinated." This is, in essence, what encapsulates the concept of flow.

In fact, it's impossible to live at all without flow. Life itself is a series of movements linked together, a slideshow of moments interconnected by transitions, highlights, slow points, and no-points. 

From the moment we wake, there's is a certain flow to our life.

We get out of bed and then proceed to take a series of actions until we get back in bed to sleep, and then repeat that process day after day, season after season, year after year, with repeating themes, patterns, habits, and motifs.

But flow is, I think, more than just a sequential ordering of life. Flow is a quality of that experience.

Think about it like this:

Imagine you are driving on the highway.

It's rush hour and you're on your way home from work. There's so much traffic that every 15 feet you have to stop and sit, and then traffic crawls at a snail's pace for the next 15 miles. Then, oh joy of joys, the traffic breaks and you get to speed along, finally making progress... Before hitting that back up again.

Now imagine that it's 3 am (as it is during the time of my writing this!). You're on the interstate and there's nothing ahead of you except the streetlights and the curves of the road. You can sail along for miles and miles, hours even, before seeing another car. You can cruise the open road at your own, unobstructed pace.

Both experiences demonstrate different qualities of the same experience. One is turbulent- with stops and starts. It's choppy. Uncomfortable. The other is smooth, fluid, and uninterrupted.

In fluid dynamics, they qualify this difference as turbulent flow vs laminar flow. Turbulent flow is less efficient, indicating a loss of ease, whereas laminar flow is a description of the opposite phenomenon.

People, too, can experience flow in movement (or mentally, too; we'll touch on that in a bit). If you've ever been a runner, you'll recognize the point where you've got your stride, feeling "in the zone" where you feel like your body is moving on its own. There is effort, but it's equivalent to the task and equivalent for your goal and endpoint.

Obviously the experience of laminar flow is preferable, with no interruptions and getting to the point of being "in the zone". You would have experienced this in hobbies, playing music, playing sports, etc. These moments of being "in the zone" are highly rewarding.

Physically, they're also quite useful! The ability to be in the zone and flow sinuously indicates a development and level of mastery over components of physical abilities, as well as physiological adaptations. In basketball, the layup demonstrates an ability to jump, rotate through that highest point, land, and then continue moving in a very dynamic pattern. This pattern requires practice. Practice is repetition of component skills over many, many hours.

This kind of repetition of a plyometric skill generate adaptations in the neuromyofascial (nerves, muscles, fascia) system, leading to increased force-generative, force-absorbing, and quick reactive capacity. We'll ignore the mechanism for that, just suffice to say that it's easily observable in the perceived quality between a highly skilled vs a newly-learned layup.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author and psychologist, has spent a great deal of his career studying and explaining just this quality of flow. Flow in life. He describes the flow state as an intersection of high demand and high capability; when the requirements of an activity meet with the level of your ability. If it's too difficult for your ability, you get frustrated and the flow breaks down. If it's too easy, there's not an absorbative quality. You get bored or can think too much to reach that flow state. 

He says in his book "Finding Flow" that flow experience tends to happen at work more than in leisure. So that even experiences that don't FEEL as comfortable or enjoyable can still be very rewarding internally.

So let's recap briefly.

Flow is a descriptive quality of activity. It's laminar when it's observably continuous, coordinated, and has a level of ease. Flow is absorbative and fulfilling when a high level of demand meets a high level of skill, and through the repetition required to express that skill, there are physiological and neurological adaptations that occur to increase the body's capacity to express that flow.

This leads to some very tangible takeaways.

First, practicing the basics or fundamentals of a skill or process is imperative to achieve a functional ability to meet the demands of that skill or process. Looking at the example of the layup, you need to practice jumping, landing, changing direction after landing, performing the move from both sides in case your angle of approach needs to change, etc. This builds potential capabilities for unexpected contingencies.

Second, is the ability to shut out distractions. In our example of driving in heavy traffic, the experience of driving was marked by continuous starts and stops. In your basketball game if you're thinking about a project at work, for example, you might miss opportunities for that layup. The ability to harness your attention in the moment and avoid internal roadblocks is highly conducive to laminar flow.

And lastly, ensuring that your demand and skill levels are equivalent. If you aren't being pushed, you won't experience that flow. And if you aren't very skilled, some challenges will remain too difficult to experience flow for very long. So, focus on the fundamentals but look for ways to have meaningful challenges that can increase your capacity. 

I believe everyone can experience and benefit from pursuing flow states. In sport, in fitness, in life, and in leisure, flow and the capacity to flow brings about unique opportunities to feel oneness and the satisfaction of performance. I wouldn't call it peace, necessarily. Tranquility, perhaps.

I hope you are able to take some concepts of flow and practice them, have a meaningful time exploring them, and use them to get better at the things that are worthwhile to you.