One of the wildest thing about being human is we’re all built for peak performance. Flow is often described as state of effortless effort. We feel like we’re propelled through the activity. Everything else just seems to disappear. When You hear the word “anxiety”, you think, “ oh god, this thing I wanna kick out the door. I want to get rid of it.” 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. Because 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 away.

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 gonna dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it’s gonna pass strangely five hours, go by in like five minutes. Occasionally it’ll slow down. You get a freeze frame effect. Anybody who’s been in a car crash, for example, institution tends to get turned up a lot. NCHA actually wrote about flow. William james worked on the topic, often referred to as the Godfather of flow psychology. He was very keen to know about the meaning of life.

The altered state of consciousness where every action, every decision you make seems to flow effortlessly, perfectly seamlessly. More specifically, it refers to any of this moments of rad attention and total absorption. You’re so focused on the task at hand, that everything else just seems to disappear. We pay the most attention into the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skillset. So to do this work and get good at it, you have to get at being comfortable with being uncomfortable. There are a number of things you can do to prepare yourself and prepare the environment to drop, to flow.

There was a study where they found that when someone gets knocked out by distraction because of a knock at the door, a text alert or whatever. It can take them about 15 minutes to get back into flow. One way to explore a flow trigger is a cluster of them that are predominantly dopamine triggers. They drive focus. They drive attention that drive alertness and excitement. You’ve ever done a crossword puzzle, or a Sudoku , that little rush of pleasure that you get after getting the answer right is dopamine. And after that you usually get a couple of answers right in a row, that is because the dopamine that is in your system now is amplifying pattern recognition. We get that same dopamine from risk taking, these might be physical risks, emotional risks, social risks, and intellectual risk, possibly spiritual risks. We get the dopamine, not as a reward for taking the risk, which is what some people used to believe. But we get dopamine to drive motivation. Now, there are lots of different intrinsic motivators. The most basic human motivator is curiosity. One of the things that we get from curiosity is focus without struggle, we don’t have to burn a lot of calories trying to pay attention to pay attention to something. Curiosity is designed biologically to be built into passion and to think about how we’ve fallen in love with paying attention. Now, passion is incredibly useful, but as a motivator, you can go one better, which is purpose. Everybody talks about, oh I have a purpose, and it’s this big altruistic thing, and it’s good for the world. And all those things might be true but from a peak performance perspective, it’s very selfish. Once you have a 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 skill to pursue the purpose. Well, one of the really incredible things about being human is we’re all built for peak performance, and the flow is universal in humans. There’s a shared collective version of a flow data, this is called group flow. Studies have shown that the people who score off charts for overall well being and life satisfaction, are the people with most flow in their lives. 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.

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. When you hear the word “anxiety”, you think, “oh god, this thing I wanna kick out the door. It’s a disease that I have”. Anxiety is a normal human emotion. We all have it, so you’re never gonna get rid of it. It’s evolved to protect us. 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 could help that calming in that situation is prefrontal cortex, it is the area that’s involved in executive function, that helps you order your day. But unfortunately, in situations of high stress, high anxiety, what happens is not only your amygdala is activated but your prefrontal cortex gets shuts down too, so that makes the situation even worse. One thing that essentially trips 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 mu god, this person hates me. I’m never gonna 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 if you are approaching the same situation the same way that you have approached it when you were six years old. Cognitive flexibility says that if there is a realisation, there are other ways to approach it.

Zen emphasizes community. It’s called ‘Sangha’ in the Buddhist language, and it’s 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. Basically, the idea of everything constantly changing, there’s nothing to hold onto in the deepest sense. And that on one hand 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 to be more compassionate to other people ‘ cause we realize that they are also dealing with all the complexities of a self and a world that’s constantly changing. The four noble truths are perhaps the most iconic teachings of Buddha. 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. Buddhism talks about the idea of attachment. It’s really about holding on tightly to a fixed view of something. Zen teaches us that unsatisfaction is always there in life, but what we can do, is insist less that the world to be in a certain way. 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. 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. 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 are so sure of. Having a beginner’s mind really help us 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”. And that brings a kind of freshness and openness to relationships that can otherwise, easily get stake.