When you stop trying, it happens | The psychology of the flow state

We often hear of remarkable people who, through dedication and practice, seem to become one with their craft. An example of such a person is Tsao-fu, a character from Taoist literature who wished to become a skilled charioteer. So, he seized the opportunity to apprentice under an expert widely known for his exceptional mastery. Years passed, and Tsao-fu served his master without receiving any instruction or lesson; he just worked and followed commands.

But rather than becoming disheartened, he displayed commitment, convincing the charioteer that he was worthy of his teachings. One day, the master finally offered him a lesson. But it wasn’t what Tsao-fu expected. Instead of jumping straight into charioteering, the master put a couple of wooden posts into the ground and had Tsao-fu jump from one post to another repeatedly. After much practice, he could glide effortlessly across the wooden posts. And so, the master revealed the essence of the practice: it wasn’t just about strength or skill but about the union of intention and action.

With the reins, hands, body, and mind in harmony, the chariot felt like an extension of Tsao-fu himself. The action was effortless as he found himself in a flow state. The master stated: “When your mind is clear and your body is relaxed, you can control six bridles without confusion, and twenty-four hooves will step where you want them. Then the wheels of your chariot will move forward and in reverse, and turn left and right with precision and control. You can drive on mountain roads with the same ease as you would on the plains. Your driving will not be different whether your horses are stepping close to the edge of a cliff or running on flat grassland. That is all I have to teach, so remember it well!” End quote.

The flow state, or ‘being in the zone,’ is a mysterious thing. It’s an optimal state of performance, an idea our minds are fond of but, ironically, aren’t able to create at will. We can’t will ourselves into the flow state. On the contrary: the more you force it, the less likely you’ll get it. And the more frustrated you become by not getting it, the farther it gets out of reach until you’re so done with trying that you give up entirely and focus on something else.

But precisely in those moments, it appears like a fish approaching the fisherman’s hook, just after he gave up trying. The flow state is unreachable but not outside of reach. You can’t grasp it. It grasps you. But only if you let it. I’ve been dedicating quite some words to the flow state on this channel, mainly from a Taoistic philosophical viewpoint, including a concept named ‘Wu Wei,’ which translates to ‘effortless action.’ With this video, I want to revisit the flow state, but this time, I focus on the psychological dimension.

What’s happening in our brain when we’re in the flow state? What does academic research say about it? Why is it so elusive? And, perhaps most interestingly, what can we do to achieve it? This video explores the psychology of flow. By the way, if you enjoy reading, check out my two anthologies, where ancient thought meets the musings of a modern mind.

Let’s begin with a personal story. As far as I remember, I’ve been an overthinker and overanalyzer. A significant part of my life I’ve spent in my head analyzing, daydreaming, contemplating the past and future, not paying attention to the present moment. Now, I only recently learned how to drive a car, which was probably one of the most challenging things I ever had to learn.

My driving instructor [@Mariyana: I attached a photo of him; he follows the channel, so it would be fun to show him this 🙂] told me that my ‘thinking’ is my greatest enemy when learning this skill: I overthink and analyze a lot, which interferes with my driving. After much practice, I finally got my license. As I’ve been driving for a while now, I noticed that when I’m too much in my head, I get a bit anxious when it’s busy on the road, and I drive more nervously.

But often, all of a sudden, it’s like I’m one with my car, the road, and other traffic, as if the crowded highway is one giant organism I’m part of. In those moments, I experience the flow state. When contemplating the flow state during driving, I immediately think about a recent trip with my mom and sister to the Ardennes, a forest region in Belgium and Luxembourg, extending into France and Germany, with hills, ridges, and rivers, only a few hours away from the flatlands I come from.

When you’re used to everything being as flat as a pancake, because that’s what’s happening in most of the Netherlands, driving in the hills is a slightly different ballgame. The first thing I noticed is that my car responds differently to going up a mountain compared to descending one, which is the most basic physics. However, for some reason, it startled the Dutch operating system in my brain, which has no software installed dealing with elevations in its environment. This was my baptism of fire. My first time driving abroad on a different terrain.

At the beginning of the trip, I felt slightly anxious. I was about to expand my comfort zone. I tried to plan, analyze, and sort out all possible scenarios in my head. I wanted to impress my mother and sister with my driving skills. I was a bit worried about the Belgian roads that are notoriously bad and about not understanding the traffic rules of our Southern neighbors.

So, I was driving and driving, passing the city of Eindhoven, crossing the Limburg province, toward the border when dark clouds, thunder, and lightning began to appear all around us. It was raining cats, dogs, Democrats, Republicans, and Eurosceptics. I could barely see the driver before me, let alone check what was happening a hundred meters ahead. My baptism of fire became a baptism of lousy weather and a ridiculously chaotic highway.

I remember that that moment pushed me into the present. I had no choice other than to ignore all discursive thoughts and drive. I stopped trying to drive well and just drove well without even intending to drive well. This sounds paradoxical because it is. When my desire to drive well ceased, I actually began to drive well. What started as this overanalyzing galore of desperation became an effortless and unexpectedly delightful experience.

Mountain sights and curling highways came and went; cars and trucks overtook me, and I overtook them as if we were bees, a swarm sharing a common conscience, almost as if something greater than ourselves diligently orchestrated the spectacle of traffic driving between Liège and Namur. Oh, and the Belgian roads were pretty good, especially in the Ardennes. What baffled me was how euphoric it all felt. Just being there, one with the highway, the traffic, the car.

And the deeper I fell into this state, the more that anxiety became something alien, something far away, unable to touch me. Looking back on my experience, I couldn’t believe that it went so well. It was weird, considering how dangerous driving is, to have felt as comfortable behind the wheel as sitting on the couch watching Netflix while continually paying attention to the highly unpredictable and fast-changing.

But any attempt to analyze and sort out what constituted my effortless driving and how I did it didn’t generate any satisfying answers. I remember my driving instructor saying before my exam: “You can drive. You learned it.” It’s a simple statement but profound. When we practice something and practice well and long enough, the things we learn reside within us; they become part of us.

So, most of the time, it’s not a matter of consciously applying what we’ve learned. It’s more about removing the intellectual blockages, getting out of our own ways, so to speak, to allow these abilities to arise. The flow state is elusive, an enigma of the mind or, perhaps, from beyond the mind. Yet, there have been people who attempted to unveil its mysteries, to find out how it works and what triggers it.

So, how does it work? The remainder of this video touches upon research and literature, exploring the psychology behind the flow state and how we can arouse it. One of the leading experts on the flow state is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and university professor who wrote a book named ‘flow,’ which became a bestseller. To maintain the flow of this video, I’ll just call him Mihaly.

Mihaly reveals that what makes an experience “genuinely satisfying” is “a state of consciousness called flow.” Mihaly defines the flow state as being engaged in an activity that is both challenging to one’s skill level and intrinsically rewarding. In the flow state, we tend to experience intense and focused concentration on the present moment, loss of reflective self-consciousness, a merging of action and awareness, and even an altered sense of time.

It’s what constitutes an optimal experience, as he describes in his book: “It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt – sails, hull, wind, and sea humming in a harmony that vibrates in the sailor’s vain. It is what the painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form takes shape in front of the astonished creator.” End quote.

He also noticed that such events of optimal experience do not depend on external circumstances. People in horrible conditions, such as imprisonment in concentration camps, have reported these optimal experiences, or flow states, as well. In fact, according to Mihaly, the flow state occurs when someone voluntarily stretches his body or mind to its limits to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

So, these moments aren’t necessarily pleasurable or comfortable; think about running a marathon or being at the height of a battle in a computer game, wholly immersed in it; these moments take a toll on one’s body and mind, yet embody the optimal experience or flow state. But we often hijack the flow state by what Mihaly calls ‘psychic entropy,’ a state of inner disorder and chaos in the mind; it’s the opposite of the flow state.

Instead of being focused, our attention is scattered; instead of operating in the present moment, we’re all over the place, lingering in the past, worrying about the future. Instead of action and awareness being merged, they’re apart from each other, separated by an information overload. In a state of psychic entropy, generally, not much gets done, and what gets done goes less than smoothly.

Mihaly stated: “Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.” End quote. Psychic entropy can have different causes.

There could be too many distractions; for example, you’re working on an essay while your WhatsApp web application runs in the same browser, and Instagram messages are coming in while listening to a podcast with the television on in the background. These are constant interruptions of information that create a sense of chaos in the mind. Similarly, multitasking can also cause psychic entropy, as doing too many things at once scatters one’s attention.

Another cause is interpersonal conflict, as it generally occupies the mind: we tend to repeat arguments and imagine confrontations, which takes our focus away from engaging in constructive and enjoyable tasks. Whatever the cause is, it always comes down to excessive information flooding one’s consciousness. A prevalent example of this is worrying. When we worry, we try to impose order onto chaos and the unknown—the moments before I drove to the Ardennes, worrying about the unfamiliar terrain, Belgian traffic rules, impressing my mom and sister, and the weather conditions caused my psychic entropy.

Essentially, I only had one task: driving from point A to point B. But an overload of information overflowing my mind interfered with that one task, leading to anxiety and scattered attention. And amid the psychic entropy behind the wheel, I tried hard to drive well, forcing that smooth and effortless experience on the road, something that initially didn’t happen, causing me frustration, which added another layer to my psychic entropy.

All this ‘trying’ to drive as well as possible through analysis ironically led to paralysis. I was standing in my own way. The action was taking place on the road. My awareness was taking place in my thoughts. Something needed to happen, some kind of sudden awakening, some kind of proverbial slap with a stick shocking me out of my head into the midst of action. The satisfying challenge of navigating my car through the storm and the unfamiliar Belgian roads did that pretty well.

The problem with the flow state is that it’s impossible to force it; you can’t will yourself into a flow state using effort. It’s as if the more we try to be in a flow state, the less likely we enter it. And that only when we stop trying to conceptualize the flow state, using the intellect to attain it, it may grasp us by surprise without us even realizing it.

So, it seems, as from my driving experiences, it’s not something to attain but rather something to allow. But does that make the flow state something consciously unattainable, purely elusive: a random experience that may occur when we’re lucky? According to Mihaly, the emergence of the flow state isn’t entirely random. He noticed that there are conditions for the optimal experience or flow state.

The conditions become apparent when we engage in what he calls ‘flow activities’ such as sports, rituals, art, and, I’d say, gaming as well. These activities are designed to make flow experiences easier to achieve, according to Mihaly, as they facilitate the conditions that trigger the flow state. Flow activities have rules and clear goals to attain, and they provide immediate feedback. We have a sense of control over these activities and can track our progress.

But all flow activities have one thing in common: a transformation of the self takes place by making it more complex. With ‘complex’ Mihaly means the development of skills, experiences, and knowledge, for example, mastering rock climbing or painting. Flow happens when such transformation takes place. When engaging in a flow activity, Mihaly distinguishes two non-optimal states in this diagram: anxiety and boredom.

Anxiety occurs when one’s skill level is too low for the activity in question. Boredom occurs when the activity is too easy for one’s skill level. Hence, there’s hardly any fun in playing Age of Empires 4 against a complete noob as a Gold-rank player (which is an average skill level). So, the match will very likely be a boring one: no transformation takes place, as there’s no challenge and no opportunity for growth.

But playing against a level 2 Conqueror isn’t fun either because there’s such a discrepancy in regards to ‘skill level’ that the average player doesn’t stand a chance. When the activity means just being repeatedly obliterated by a vastly superior opponent, a flow state won’t likely occur. Therefore, playing against players of around the same skill level (preferably slightly above) is optimal.

However, when one’s skill increases, it’s important to keep playing with matching opponents to prevent boredom. So, there should be a balance between challenge and skill level. A caveat is that the experience of challenges, competition, and progress is subjective; some people need more ‘challenge’ than others, and different people experience the flow state in different activities.

My sister, for example, finds her flow state during rock climbing but not in writing essays, which is where I experience it. So, for a significant part, where one’s flow state lies is personal. So, after all, the flow state doesn’t seem so mysterious; it’s actually quite logical: it’s a consequence of certain conditions, as a dish is the consequence of a recipe.

The flow state while driving was a fortunate coincidence of external and internal ingredients. Now, the question remains: what can we consciously do to achieve the flow state? When the poet becomes the poem, the driver the drive, and the painter the painting, that’s the flow state. It’s when trying has ceased and the conscious desire for optimal performance or outcome has waned.

It’s when the mind has stopped telling you what if, why, when, and even how. It’s when, as Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi stated: “Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants.” It happens when you stop trying, and when you stop trying, it happens. Crave for it painfully, and it will elude you. Forget it and enjoy what you’re doing, and it appears.

There’s no direct way of catching it. But when the conditions are there, it may actually come. So… how can we create these conditions? Here are some practical tips derived from Mihaly’s work: do something you enjoy, find your challenge-skill balance, set clear goals, make sure you get immediate feedback, focus on the task at hand and, thus, let go of planning, worrying, or ruminating about the past; go all the way, into whatever you’re doing.

When it comes to the focus part, there are several things we can do to enhance that, such as mindfulness and meditation. Rituals and warm-up routines can help, too: they make the mind ready to engage in the task, which becomes more effective when they become habitual and when they include an activity that reduces discursive thinking.

Near the end of his book, Mihaly says that the forms of psychic entropy that currently invade the mind and cause us so much anguish are likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They’re products of a vastly increased complexity in society, culture, and our minds. In simpler times, humans were closer to animals in terms of flow; there was the occasional psychic entropy in times of danger, hunger, or pain, but overall, we were free from the worries brought about by the complex societies of today.

Is there a way back to such a simple mode of existing? It would be very difficult (and almost impossible) to operate in today’s world. Thus, the challenge we face is to return to what is, in essence, a more primordial, harmonious mind state in the face of our highly complex, modern environment. Solitude, therefore, can help achieve flow, according to Mihaly.

I mean, let’s face it. Solitude allows us to turn away from the world, at least for a while, especially if we disconnect from certain media outlets. The constant flow of information, the noise of catastrophizing media, the warped showcasing of people’s lives, and the consumeristic ideals of what you should own and do with your time are significant birthplaces of distraction.

Hence, for some activities and some individuals, solitude is essential. So, what do you think? What triggers the flow state within you? And what prevents you from having it? Please let us know in the comments; this often leads to interesting discussions. If you're interested in a more philosophical view on the flow state I recommend that you watch my older video 'The philosophy of flow' which explores the flow state from a Taoistic point of view.

Thank you for watching.