Understanding Flow State

Flow State

• Flow is the optimal state between boredom and anxiety, where skills match the challenge at hand.
• If feeling anxious, improve relevant skills to meet the challenge.
• If feeling bored, seek more challenging tasks to reach flow state.
• Flow state examples: creative activities, team sports, games, work that is exciting, playing musical instruments, gardening, and long-distance running.

Research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

• Work and active leisure are the most likely contexts for flow experiences, especially when doing things for their own sake.
• Active leisure includes skill-based hobbies like music, skill games, and learning languages.
• Passive leisure includes activities like watching TV, reading, or dining out.
• Active leisure requires skills and presents challenges, while passive leisure is for relaxation and doesn't facilitate experiencing flow.
• To regain flow: increase challenges if they're too low; develop new skills if challenges are too high.
• Experiencing flow: ego diminishes, time distorts, actions link effortlessly, full skill utilization, whole being involvement.

Benefits of Flow

• Improves emotional regulation.
• Heightens enjoyment, fulfillment, and happiness.
• Increases intrinsic motivation and engagement.
• Facilitates learning, skill development, and creativity.

Conditions for Flow

• Clear, attainable goals are present.
• Skills align with the challenge level.
• Constraints exist within the activity such as rules or deadlines.
• Timely feedback keeps you on track.
• Having a sense of personal control is key.

Impacts of Flow

• Intense concentration occurs.
• Self-consciousness diminishes.
• Awareness of physical needs fades.
• Sense of time distorts.
• Engaging in activities for their own sake leads to deep fulfillment.
• Doing your personal best leads to flow state.

Intrinsic Motivation and Positive Feedback Loop

• Doing things for your personal reasons leads to greater performance and positive experiences.
• It is also a characteristic of flow

Checklist for Flow

• Engage in rule-bound, goal-directed activities.
• Ensure the activity is meaningful to you.
• Seek feedback.
• Avoid distractions.
• Take creative control.

Exploring Flow Exercise

• Interview someone who is deeply engaged in their lives and experiences flow frequently.
• Consider their activities, insights and secrets.
• Draw wisdom and experience to help find your own flow,
• Reflect on the experience of being in the presence of someone in flow.

Three Questions to Consider

• When and where do you experience the flow state most often?
• What do you do on the outside in the flow state, and on the inside?
• What makes those experiences meaningful?

Creating Space for Flow

• Pursue a career you find fulfilling.
• Choose meaningful tasks.
• Ensure the task difficulty is well-matched to your skills.
• Find a time and place free of distractions.
• Stay focused.
• Enjoy the process, keep practicing, and embrace the rewards.

Two Types of Happiness

• Hedonic happiness comes from momentary pleasure such as excitement, great food etc.
• Eudaimonic happiness arises from pursuing deeply-rooted goals aligned with your values, providing a sense of purpose. One often experiences flow in these activities.

Synthesizing Happiness (Gilbert, 2012)

• The psychological immune system allows resilience following adversity, returning people to positive emotions after stress.
• People can feel happy despite disappointments, restrictions, or losses, through the stories they tell themselves. Synthesizing happiness is possible.

Three Theories of Humor, (Martin and Ford, 2018)

• Relief theory: laughter relieves built-up tension.
• Superiority theory: humor boosts self-esteem by putting others down.
• Incongruity theory: humor happens when you don't anticipate the punchline.

Humor Can Improve Well-being By

• Helping deal with medical issues.
• Improving coping with mental illness.
• Strengthening relationships in the workplace.
• Enhancing life satisfaction and engagement.
• Making learning easier by engaging students.
• Improving immune function in cancer patients.
• Strengthening character.

Resilience

• Micro-resilience: resets mood and energy after small setbacks.
• Five Factor Model: mindfulness, gratitude, optimism, self-compassion, and grit.
• Multisystemic Resilience: uses community resources.
• Post-Traumatic Growth: resilience 2.0 and antifragility.

Resilience: A Fundamental Skill

• It is a psychological capacity to adapt to and recover from stressful situations.
• Resilience is like a muscle that contracts in good times and expands in bad times.
• The downside is sticking to goals for too long and tolerating counterproductive situations.
• It is a term used to marginalize, oppress, or trivialize community suffering and ignore the needs of the community.

Micro-Resilience (St John and Haines)

• Simple and small everyday strategies cultivate resilience and recovery after stress.
• These utilize research in neuroscience, psychology, and physiology.
• This includes a 16-second cure, refocusing the brain, resetting alarms, reframing attitudes,refreshing their body and renewing their spirit.

Procrastination

• It is the voluntary delay of our goals without necessity.

Two Key Biases

• Affective forecasting: the present self's beliefs about the future self, assuming motivation will arise later.
• Protecting self-esteem: reducing effort or time, which explains performance.

Refocus Your Brain

• Win against procrastination.
• Follow plans over moods, and use the 15-minute rule to start.
• Invest in the future self by building willpower.
• Sleep for 7-9 hours.
• Do hard tasks earlier.
• Build optimism.
• Use "when, then" plans.
• Focus on values and goals.

Reset Primal Alarms

• Reset primal alarms via fight or flight response by understanding the survival mode, where the thinking brain goes offline and the limbic system takes over.

Reframing Is Key

• The Joy Kit reframe attitudes using items to spark positivity, gratitude, and creativity.

Refresh Your Body

• You should hydrate strategically and get enough sleep.

Learning, Memory, and Creativity

• Sleep is crucial for learning and creativity.
• Getting enough sleep enhances information absorption.
• During sleep, consolidation happens.
• The REM cycle fosters creative problem-solving and generates new ideas.

Renewing Your Spirit

• Renewing ones spirit can be done through spending time in nature, awe-inspiring videos, inspirational messages, mindful meditation, music, art, or value-based living.

Multisystemic Resilience (Michael Ungar)

• Navigating 12 dimensions of resilience is key.
• They function as protective factors against adversity.
• Dimensions include structure, relationships, identity, power, wellbeing, and positive thinking.
• Address these factors and improve access to critical resources.
• Ungar's research showed that the resilience project identified how youth thrive through access, relationships, identity, power, culture, justice, and cohesion.

Post-Traumatic Growth (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

• Antifragility entails thriving during shocks, not just resisting them.
• Difficult emotions can result in growth.
• Posttraumatic growth involves positive change after life crises.
• The areas that develop include personal strength, new possibilities, improved relationships, spiritual growth and life appreciation.

The Model of Life Crisis

• It involves factors like optimism, emotional regulation, and social support.

The Boulder Crest Foundation

• It creates treatment centers for first responders/military veterans to experience growth after trauma.

Tedeschi's research

• The program involved week-long stays, peer learning.
• It gave post-traumatic growth, reduced PTSD symptoms, less stress and more self-compassion.

SPIRE (Tal Ben Shahar)

• There are spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional factors.
• These can result in people leading meaningful lives and savoring the present; nurturing the body, learning deeply and working towards reaching resilience.

Lifting Your Spirit

• Lift your spirits by giving yourself permission to be human, simplifying your life, exercise, and focus on the positive.

High-Intensity Exercise

• Work at or above 90% capacity for a minute.
• Repeat this process to help improve aspects of life.

Inner Resourcing

• Pendulating can help regulate the nervous system through breathing and settling techniques.

Pendulation Approach

• Focus on the discomfort, then redirect to other body parts and back.

Deliberateness of Habits

• Creating mental shortcuts to repeat new behaviour.
• One needs to engage in these new behaviour and associate these actions and new contexts.
• After that the the new behaviors are repeated until they are more automatic.

Automatic Functions

• Introspection illusions prevent goals via willpower and determination.
• Achieving behaviour requires controlling contexts with friction and repetition.

Willpower Defined

• The essence of willpower resists short temper.
• Also to meet long term goals.
• Using depleted limited resources.

Components of Habit Formation

• Starting with the cues to action (or contexts) that can trigger an organized environment and or behavior.
• That includes anything around your environment, time, location, or motivation.
• Reward our incentives to act.

Habit Building Investment

• Rewards help drive, engage in, and then maintain specific routines that can prove beneficial.

Habit Routine

• Routine involves specific actions.
• Brains store this in the sensory motor system, and success happens next time.

Stacking Habits

• You should stack your habits to help with that process.
• This is by taking existing habit cues to use one start a new one.

Friction & Building New Habits

• Use it to your advantage to make building new habits easier, remove friction from desired behaviors.
• This is by taking away barriers.
• One may implement a cue using both existing and also more similar cues already integrated.

Keystone Habits:

• Examples being adhering to sleep schedules, advanced meal preparations and meditating.

Building New Automatic Habits

• Organize your context
• Invest in rewards
• Stack, and swap habits
• You should create or eliminate frictions to help with ease.
• Seek support along with accountability to more comfortably transition.

Decision Fatigue

• This can prove effortful and may diminish resources.
• Overwhelming selection process impacts people.

Energy Conservation

• Conserve energy by thinking of willpower as habits with mental short cuts by Wood.
• Change your day to reduce expendinture.

Scale Down Choices

• Use habits instead of reconsiderations to limit daily decisions.

Mental Energy Depletion Effects

• Mental energy depletion often leads to reckless decisions, impulsivity, and inaction, due to a state of unawareness.

Important Urgent Matrix

• Tasks listed as, urgent/important or not.
• This help to do the hardest test first

Decision Making Support

• By asking who, what, where, when you're stuck on a decision.
• Do this to start when faced with too many, too many choices in one's day.

Important Research on Decisions

• People making small choices exhaust mental resolve that leads to bad decisions for bigger choices.
• Glucose help, snack and meals help affect peoples' choices with food affecting them more positively.

Optimal Healthfulness & Sleep

• Sleeping, or the army knife of health leads to more wellness.
• Sleep deprivation contributes to sickness and disease, with excessive sleep, vitality.

Sleep Deprivation Impacts

• "Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain”

Sleep Quiz

• Take one of these quizzes, like the Carney Quiz, to analyze typical sleep patterns.

What to know about sleep

• It involves memory consolidation, muscle repair, attention restoration, metabolic and mood regulation.

Sleep Factors

• Regularity, continuity, quantity and quality.

Research: Drunk Driving

• Intocixated and sleep deprived showed impairment results driving tested.

Changes With Sleep

• Sleep quality and quantity decreases as people increase with age.

Best sleep Practices:

• Set time to stay in bed long.
• Do it during exercise, also limiting screen time.