The neuroscience of being in a flow state is not fully understood. Yet there are research-informed activities you can try to help to access and sustain flow states in the workplace.
What is a flow state?
A flow state is that feeling of being so mentally absorbed in a task that external distraction falls away. When you find your flow there is usually an ease and quiet joy at being so engaged with the work in hand, time flies and energy remains high.
It is a most enjoyable, intrinsically motivating, combination of feelings and often impressive outputs!
Early neuroscientific insights on flow states
The worldwide business environment is tough right now with the global economy under increasing pressure. As a result, many organisations are needing to do more with less resource, and restructuring for efficiency can mean employees taking on additional responsibilities.
This pressure can cause uncertainty and anxiety – feelings that inhibit a flow state. Yet accessing a highly productive mind state is just what is needed under these tough conditions. How can applied neuroscience help right now?
Neuroscience is at the very early stages of understanding what might be going on when we are in a flow state. We are beginning to connect some dots from science about how to get to and stay in flow.
Let’s take a closer look.
The bottom-up brain
It is helpful to understand a little about the evolutionary biology of the brain first. This will provide context into what supports and hinders a flow state.
The brain functions in a bottom-up fashion. The oldest part of the brain, inherited from our reptilian ancestors manages many of the autonomic functions of the body (breathing, heart rate, digestion and so forth). It is estimated to be approximately 360 million years old in bio-evolutionary terms.
Some 65 million years ago the first mammals began to appear giving birth to live young. For the offspring of mammals to survive there had to be a relationship with the parent.
Neuroscience suggests (Maclean,1973) that the limbic or colloquially known ‘emotional brain’ evolved so that parent/offspring relationships could protect the young. The limbic system reads and responds to signals from the five senses and processes them through emotion only – doing so in about 85 milliseconds.
The dominant emotions at this point would have supported survival out in the wilds, living in simple communities, tens of thousands of years ago: fear, anger, disgust, sadness and shame. These emotions are the enemies of a flow state!
Thrive versus survive states
When you are in flow these protective emotions, guided by the amygdala, are stood down to a sufficient extent to enable the cognitive part of the brain, described below, to do its best work. So, to find flow you have to feel safe enough to be in a thrive state of trust and joy – not a survive brain state.
The CEO of the brain is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This part of the brain makes rational sense of the world, adds meaning to your experience and enables complex flow-state thinking.
In bio-evolutionary terms the PFC is a toddler. It is about 220,000 years old. The PFC starts to make rational sense of your situation at about 250 milliseconds. This is three times slower than the emotionally led limbic system. This means you are emotional in your responses way before you are rational.
Now that you know a little more about the brain’s inner workings, let’s look at how to use this understanding to access and sustain a flow state at work.
Three potent activities that create a flow formula at work
Based on the current neuroscience, here are three ways you can find and foster flow.
1. Limber up
The brain needs to feel settled before you start the task where flow is required. The emotional brain mustn't dominate your efforts and distract attention away from the prefrontal cortex.
Find a lesser but related task that helps to limber up and settle your mind before you begin the main event. For instance, in the case of a scientist working on cutting-edge research, she may work on a cryptic crossword to warm her brain up to thinking laterally before tackling a tricky scientific challenge.
Allow yourself to feel when your brain is beginning to settle and focus. Research shows that the self-referential brain circuits (wondering how you are doing/what others might think about you and so forth) drop into a reduced state during flow (van der Linden, Topps, Bakker, 2021).
2. Level right
The same research demonstrates that flow occurs when there is the right level of match between the person’s skills and the challenge of the task at hand. This is really important for flow to occur.
In my practice, I have a young leader who has been promoted and knows that they will be able to do a great job but is facing too much, too soon, with too little support. Their limbic brain is dominating and not allowing them to think well as they feel thrown in at the deep end.
This is a dereliction of duty on the part of their leader. A little more support in the early days would have gone a long way to enabling a better level of match between this bright young person’s current experience and what is being demanded of them. Small changes in terms of mentoring, pre- and post-meeting preparation and debriefing would have made a huge difference to performance and confidence.
Set the level of skill and experience right with the task if you want to enable flow.
3. Keep it light and stay with it
Managing your brain is a very personal activity and can be like training an enthusiastic dog! Different situational management works for different brains – so know your own brain patterns as best you can.
Keep it light and don’t try to force flow or blame yourself when you don’t seem to be able to get into a flow state. You need to trust that your brain will take you there.
A client with ADHD knows that she needs to tease her brain into thinking about a topic by reading scholarly articles a few days before. She then does three or four limbering up sessions over a couple of days to keep her brain's requirement for many activities happy. Then she asks her brain a specific question about the task and leaves it so that she can sleep on it. The following day is when flow tends to occur for her and she makes sure her diary is clear.
Find flow, feel flow and foster flow
These three activities are supported by research from the latest neuroscience about the mysteries of flow. Combining these approaches in a way that tailors to your brain, will help you find flow, feel flow and foster flow.
For organisations wanting to enable employees and leaders to find their flow at work, this HRZone article explores how to cultivate a deep work culture.
