How to plug the power drains that hinder flow
Flow
If you are devoted to activities that require creativity and self-improvement, you may have heard about flow and want to achieve it.
Flow was defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best” (Kotler et al., 2022).
Perhaps a better definition of flow is as a mental state of focused attention on a task—which can be an art, a mental activity or a sport—without apparent effort (“effortless effort”).
Csikszentmihalyi gave flow these six characteristics:
Focused attention on a task.
Merging of action and awareness.
Decreased self-awareness.
Altered perception of time, which either speeds up or slows down.
Feeling of complete control.
Positive emotions like joy, pleasure, euphoria, meaning and purpose.
In another article, I explored the neuronal circuits in the brain activated during flow.
The Neuroscience of Flow (Medium, Substack, Sex, Science & Spirit).
This article gives some practical advice about how to maintain flow. I found this valuable information in the book The Rock Warrior’s Way, by Arno Ilgner. The book is about how to achieve the optimal mental state for rock climbing, which is a sport often cited as an example of flow. However, this advice can be easily translated into any activity that improves with flow, like sports, writing, playing music, dancing or any art.
The advice also applies to living in general. Arno Ilgner based his book on a life philosophy called the Way of the Warrior. I have written about it in another article:
The Way of the Warrior: A Philosophy of Life Based on Egoless Action (Medium, Sex, Science & Spirit).
Acting impeccably
In the Way of the Warrior, achieving flow is called acting impeccably. This should not be confused with perfectionism.
Impeccable action is not flawless, but acting in a way in which we are completely focused on what we are doing. We do not hold back, but became totally committed to our endeavor.
Perfectionism, on the other hand, seeks perfection and leads to internal criticism when the inevitable mistakes are made. It is goal-oriented. Our ego wants to be rewarded with pride for achieving our goal. It fears the shame that comes with failure. If we don’t get the gold medal, if there are flaws in the final result, the ego will not be satisfied.
Impeccable action centers on the process, not on the final result. Complete focus on a task involves experimenting and creativity, which may lead to some failures. This is not bad, because trial and error increases our learning and keeps us focused on our engagement with the world, not on our ego.
“Decreased self-awareness” is characteristic number 3 of flow, and it is driven by the deactivation of the medial prefrontal cortex, which mediates self-awareness.
Personal power
When we repeatedly enter flow it becomes a mental habit, so it is easier to achieve. The neuronal circuits that mediate flow becomes strengthened by repetition, so our brain switches them on more readily.
In the parlance of the Way of the Warrior, this is called collecting personal power. This power is not power over others or over the world. Is a form of soft control over ourselves that allows us to do things with the entirety of our being, with less apparent effort. It is the habit of entering flow.
What are power drains?
Power drains are things that make us lose personal power, taking us back to ego-centered behavior. In other words, power drains are the things that take us out of flow.
Flow is not muscle memory. It is not doing something that we have done so many times that it has become easy for us. We achieve flow when we engage in a challenging task that we can only do by giving it our best.
Challenges are inherently frustrating. We may try and fail. We may fall while climbing or skiing. We may write something and realize that it is not very good and requires a lot of editing, if not a full rewrite. We may have to paint over what we have already painted.
When we let that frustration take us out of flow, we are facing a power drain.
Power drains are emotional reactions that take our focus away from the task into ego-centered thoughts. The ego tries to defend itself from the shame of failure by putting the focus on something that is not us.
Three examples of power drains are blaming, wishing and hoping. This may sound surprising because these are things that are encouraged by our culture. Sadly, even more so by the culture of political correctness that today is associated with the Left.
No blaming
A couple of weeks ago, I was climbing a difficult crack in Yosemite—rated 5.10d on a scale from 5.0 to 5.15, with lowercase letters indicating further subdivisions in difficulty. My climbing limit is 5.10a, so I was pushing myself. The fact that a nine-year-old boy had just completed the route was no balm for my ego. I was managing to get good grips by inserting my fingertips in the thin crack, by my feet found no purchase and kept slipping. I kept falling and dangling from the rope, which ran through carabiners at the top of the route and then into the hands of the climber belaying me.
“The soles of your shoes are no good,” said my belayer, trying to encourage me.
“Yeah, I should have resoled those shoes,” I thought, “they are not as good as the shoes of the other climbers.”
Fortunately, I identified that thought as a power drain. I was blaming my shoes, instead of focusing on working with what I had and giving that route my best. It was a great opportunity to learn how to climb thin cracks and take my game to the next level.
I managed to finish the route with some falls.
Often, what we blame is not other people, but some less-than-perfect condition that supposedly explains why we are not performing as well as our ego expects. You can see how perfectionism sneaks itself in here: we won’t perform our task unless conditions are perfect. I needed perfect soles in my shoes to climb that route. The trick is to always blame something external, something that is not us.
Blaming is finding excuses.
Of course, we may blame other people, too. For example, when we are part of a team.
Creating a habit of personal accountability is a good way to keep away our tendency to blame. However, this should not lead us to beat upon ourselves. Self-shaming comes from the ego and is just another power drain.
Blaming is not an ethical issue. It is not morally wrong. It could be in some instances, but that is not the issue here. The issue is that it breaks our focus by distracting us and sapping the emotional strength that we need to perform our task.
No wishing
“If you wish upon a star…”
It’s funny how Disney and other elements of our culture have glamorized wishing. They have implanted in us the superstition that if we wish for something strongly enough, it will come true. This could be rationalized as the idea that wishing increases our motivation, and that makes us work harder towards achieving our goal.
The problem with this reasoning is that when we focus on the goal and not on the action, we become less effective. The neuroscience of flow shows that achieving it requires turning off the ego—the medial frontal cortex—, while wishing is inherently ego-based.
Of course, this is also connected to a religion that teaches us that we can achieve things by praying. When you stop to think about it, a God that acts like a dispensing machine is a rather odd idea: “Insert prayer here, get your wish over there.” Who is serving whom?
Another form of wishing works hand-in-hand with blaming. Climbing that crack in Yosemite, I thought that the footholds should be better. It wasn’t fair that the crack was so demanding on my upper body and didn’t offer more support for my feet. But rocks are not fair. They are what they are. They are created by natural phenomena, not so we could climb them easier.
Likewise, the entire world is not fair. It doesn’t fold to our wishes. Wishing that things were differently lead us nowhere. It just makes us leak power, the focus that we should devote to what we are doing.
“By wishing, you try to decrease your discomfort by escaping into a fantasy.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way.
No hoping
Hope is another religious idea. It’s one of the three theological virtues in Catholicism: faith, hope and charity.
“Hope is a combination of the desire for something and expectation of receiving it. The Christian virtue is hoping specifically for Divine union and so eternal happiness. While faith is a function of the intellect, hope is an act of the will.” Hope, Wikipedia.
Therefore, hope is linked to wishing: we wish something and we expect to receive it. It has an element of superstition. We believe that, somehow, the world will bend to our wishes and give us what we want. If we are religious, we hope that God will step in and save us from our problems.
Unfortunately, this magical thinking has seeped into our psyche and made us weak. Which may be the hidden agenda of religion: to make us dependent on the Church or whatever priestly class any particular religion has, instead of being able to find our own power.
In any case, we find it shocking that hope could be a bad thing. At least, I did, perhaps due to my Catholic upbringing.
The secular rationalization of hope is that believing in a better future makes us happy and incentivizes us to fight for a better world. There is some true in that.
“According to Snyder, psychological hope consists of three fundamental components: goals, pathways, and agency. This implies that hope necessitates, firstly, an individual having a goal that is deemed desirable, feasible, yet not currently fulfilled (belief); secondly, envisioning a pathway to attain that goal; and thirdly, possessing the capability to act on that pathway toward the defined goal. A lack of agency results in mere ‘wishful hope,’ whereas elevated levels of conviction or commitment lead to an ‘aspirational hope.’” Act of Hope, Wikipedia.
The key is to realize that a better world will not happen automatically, but only if we work hard to achieve it. Hoping that the world will become better because of the work of others is inherently exploitative. It’s a free-rider mentality.
How does hope become a power drain during flow?
“If you hope a situation will turn out the way you want, you’re passively waiting for external influences to determine the outcome. You aren’t thinking actively about what you need to do to achieve what you want.” Arno Ilgner, The Rock Warrior’s Way.
By hoping, you place the source of control outside yourself. You hope that the world will change according to your wishes, that somebody else will do the work that you need to do. This is disempowering. You need all your mental resources to respond to the challenge by acting impeccably—by staying in the state of flow. Instead, you waste them by engaging in fantasies that distract you and take you out of flow.
Unbendable intention
When we refuse to engage in blaming, wishing and hoping and stay focused on the task, we achieve the first two characteristics of flow: focused attention and merging of action and awareness. This leads to a feeling of control, because the outcome depends on what we are doing and not some random events in the world.
This ability to avoid distractions and fantasies and stay on task is called unbendable intention. We are driven by our determination to focus on what we are doing. This intention is unbendable because it won’t be derailed by distractions and daydreaming about how the difficulty of what we are doing will change magically.
Personal power versus willpower
We have been taught the wrong way to do hard stuff. It’s based on a model of the mind in which one part of the mind—the will—controls the other parts. The will has to be strong to avoid being overpowered by the weaker parts of the mind, which are intrinsically lazy, driven by instinct, and inclined to seek pleasure and instant rewards. Therefore, the will has to be strong: we need to have willpower.
The neuroscience of flow contradicts this model of the mind. When we enter flow, all parts of the mind work harmoniously to complete our task. There is no sense that one part of the mind controls the others. Instead of a feeling of internal struggle, we experience the ‘effortless effort’ characteristic of flow. And all this is accompanied by feelings of joy, euphoria and pleasure (characteristic number 6 of flow). We do not need to seek pleasure. We already have it.
Willpower is driven by the ego. It shows the basic characteristics of ego-based action: it is goal oriented, scared of failure, and driven by pride. In contrast, flow erases the self by turning off the medial prefrontal cortex, which drives concerns about the self. Without a self that tries to achieve something for itself, all the energy goes into acting impeccably.
Acting with detachment to the profits of our action is central in many Eastern mystical traditions. It forms the core of the teachings that the god avatar Krishna gives king Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.
In Zen Buddhism is expressed by the ideal of mushotoku:
“In Zen, the concept of Mushotoku represents a state of mind where the spirit does not seek to obtain anything.” What is Mushotoku?
Not wanting to achieve anything for one-self is key to the practice of zazen, or Zen meditation. It is also essential to practice mindfulness. If we keep wondering if we are doing mindfulness correctly or what benefits are we going to get from it, this would be antithetical to being non-judgmental, which is essential for mindfulness.
Therefore, the Way of the Warrior is based on a form of soft self-control that is more effective and happiness-inducing than the willpower of Christianity and Western philosophies.
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