Understanding Flow State

• Flow: Optimal Performance
  • Flow is the state of optimal performance, a midpoint between boredom and apathy, where skills adequately match the challenge.
  • Flow is frequently experienced during work and active leisure.
  • Active leisure involves skill-based hobbies, demanding skills and offering challenges.

Benefits of Flow

- Improved emotional regulation
- Greater enjoyment and fulfillment
- Increased happiness
- Greater intrinsic motivation
- Increased engagement
- Enhanced learning and skill development
- More creativity from engaging in an activity.

Conditions of Flow

- Clear and attainable goals
- Skills meeting the challenge
- Constraints like rules or deadlines
- Timely feedback
- Personal control.

Impacts of Flow

- Intense concentration
- Diminished self-consciousness
- Lack of awareness of physical needs
- Distorted sense of time
- Doing personal best
- Deep fulfillment.

Intrinsic Motivation

- Intrinsic motivation (doing something for its own sake) creates a positive feedback loop, enhancing performance and experiences.

• Joy
  • Hedonic happiness is momentary and fleeting.
  • Eudaimonic happiness arises from pursuing deep-rooted, value-based goals, providing purpose and meaning.
  • People synthesize happiness by reframing circumstances, even negative ones, through storytelling.
  • The psychological immune system fosters joy and resilience after adversity.

Theories of Humour

- Relief theory: laughter relieves tension
- Superiority theory: self-esteem increases by putting down others
- Incongruity theory: surprise from unexpected punchlines.

Benefits of Humour

- Improves ability to cope with medical problems for both patients and healthcare givers.
- Enhances coping with mental illness.
- Enhances relationships on the job.
- Increases life satisfaction and engagement.
- Aids language learning by fostering engagement.
- Associated with higher immune function in cancer patients.
- Is within the top eight character strengths linked to well-being.

• Recap

  • To achieve flow, organize the external environment by engaging in clear, goal-directed, rule-bound activities and making the activity meaningful.
  • It's important to attend to feedback, ignore distractions, focus on the task, and take creative control.
  • Regain flow by adjusting the balance between challenge and skill; increase skill if the challenge is too stressful or add challenge if tasks are too boring.
  • Cultivating joy relies on how experiences are framed, while synthesizing joy can yield as much happiness as achieving desired outcomes.
  • A large part of happiness stems from how we remember and narrate events.

• Two Models of Resilience: Micro-resilience & Multisystemic Resilience

Micro-Resilience - St. John & Haines

- The 16-second cure involves energy recovery, baseline reset, and positive focus.

Micro-Resilience Five Steps

- Refocus the brain on solutions
    - Overcome procrastination by following a plan, not mood, using a 15-minute break rule, and investing in the future self.
    - Reduce biases like affective forecasting, and preserve self-esteem
- Reset the primitive alarm (fight-flight-freeze-face response) with strategies like progressive muscle relaxation, music/sound, smell, posture, visualization, and breathing.
- Reset attitude using joy kits for an attitude shift.
- Refresh body with water and sleep.
    - Good sleep enhances learning, memory, and creativity; deep sleep consolidates learning, while REM sleep fosters creative solutions.
- Renew spirit by intentionally applying chosen strategies.

Multisystemic Resilience - Michael Ungar (85)

- Negotiate 12 dimensions of resilience to thrive; protective factors prevent severe impacts of adversity, addressing both personal context and access to resources.

12 Dimensions of Resilience

- Structure, accountability, intimate relationships, other relationships, identity, power and control, belonging and culture, rights and responsibilities, basic needs, physical wellbeing, financial wellbeing, and positive thinking.

Michael Ungar's Pathways to Resilience Project

- A study of youth ages 13 to 19, identified 7 components needed to thrive: access to material resources, relationships, identity, power and control, cultural adherence, social justice, and cohesion.

Reivich & Shatte Exercise

- Consists of contemplating the worst-case scenario, best-case scenario, most likely outcome, and an action plan.

• Post Traumatic Growth Bouncing Forward / Resilience 2.0
  • Antifragility- coined by Taleb

SPIRE - Shahar

- Explains how resilience can lead to growth after adversity
    - Encompases spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational, and emotional dimensions of happiness.
    - Key practices include: permission to be human, simplification, regular exercise, and a focus on the positive.
    - High Intensity Interval Training involves exerting self at 90% for 1 minute, followed by rest, repeated multiple times.

Tedeschi and Calhoun - PTG

- PTG involves positive change as a result of crises - gain from loss
- PTG encompasses: an appreciation for life, personal strength, new possibilities, improved relationships, and spiritual growth.
    - The model of crisis involves crisis leading to stress, then coping mechanisms, influenced by personal and external factors such as support networks.
- PATHH (Progressive and Alternative Training for Helping Heroes) offers peer support for first responders and military personnel to foster PTG and has shown a 56% increase in PTG after 18 months.

• Inner-Resourcing
  • The nervous system pendulates between sympathetic and parasympathetic states.
  • Pendulation activities: nostril breathing, hand clasp breath, and butterfly hug (tapping).