What's your thrill quotient?

"Life is not about the number of breaths we take, but about the moments that take our breath away."

While researching on the topic of flow further, I came across some fascinating facts about adventure sports aficionados. Consider the sport of free soloing, which is technically climbing rocks without ropes or any form of safety equipment – all they have is climbing shoes and climbing chalk. It may be exhilarating for them, but one missed step is often all that separates them from a terrible accident and a high probability of death. And then the list is endless of sports like these that seem to only be 'pushing fate; to people like us who would naturally keep away. Look at this video on cliff jumping for instance.

What is it that keeps these people so addicted, that they are willing to risk terrible, and even fatal accidents, but not ready to give up? We may call it an adrenaline rush, or the allure of a near death experience, which creates in them the sense of flow. Interestingly, it is the same kind of experience that one may undergo during a creative endeavour, as we discussed last time. Or through a meditative experience as has been seen in the case of Tibetan monks. It is equally what an entrepreneur may feel when planning the progression of his/her idea from execution to reality.

So why go for such high-risk sports and not paint, write or cook instead? Well, like most things in life, there isn’t a right or wrong answer – it is a matter of personal choice.?Professor Marvin Zuckermann from McGill University created a sensation seeking scale, which identified four key characteristics of such people who seek such excitement – thrill/adventure seeking, experience seeking, disinhibition (more spontaneous and less thinking type) and finally boredom susceptibility (easily bored).

Noted author Steven Kotler has been studying adventure sports performers for years, and noticed another very interesting fact. Records in adventure sports are not broken in years, but months, as he discussed in his TED talk below.

An example he cites is of snowboarding, where the record for longest jump cleared was 40 feet (two buses) in the 1990s, and today, it’s over 250 feet (a skyscraper). And in the field of free soloing, he talks about Alex Honnold, who is well known for his ascents across big walls. In 2012, he climbed the 2,000-ft Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, a granite dome in California, in just an hour and 22 minutes, while it took upto 2 days for people. That is apparently equivalent to covering the '4-minute mile' in 38 seconds!

On closely monitoring the performances of such athletes as a sports journalist, Steven Kotler realized that they had become experts in regularly finding flow – a state that is timeless, effortless and selfless. This became the inspiration of his fascinating research into the subject. Kotler has co-authored a bestselling book on flow with Jamie Wheal, Founder & Director, Flow Genome Project that's titled Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work.

Applause for your lack of judgement!

The first core concept to understand, as we touched upon last time, is the loss of the inner critic, or Woody Allen – the nagging, defeatist voice that keeps drumming in your head. I have literally no knowledge of this correlation, since I know little about Woody Allen’s work and personality. A recent example that may be more relatable, for all those who watched Pathaan, would be Colonel Luthra to SRK’s character (to be fair he does have a change of heart in the end)!

This is known now, in technical terms as transient hypofrontality – or a temporary phase of downtime for the focused thinking part of your brain. The focused thinking part lies in your pre-frontal cortex.

Dr Arne Dietrich, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon explains from his research that a simple physical activity like jogging can make the mind let go of its pre-frontal cortex for a while, thereby giving you ‘runners high’ (another word for flow) or an alteration in consciousness.

This can bring up several kinds of emotions – experience of timelessness, living in here and now, reduced awareness of surroundings, peace, and even the feeling of oneness with all creation. This is because the brain’s ability to segregate, differentiate and analyse the environment has gone into sleep mode. Again, it could be a state of absorption you feel while gymming, meditation, cycling, listening to music, a dance form, painting, writing – depending on what drives you.

Albert Einstein was a passionate sailor, though as some argue, not a very good one. His friends said that sailing gave him immense joy, and possibly helped him understand space and time, thereby contributing immensely to his discoveries. The laws of physics and the order in the ‘chaos’ of nature were perhaps too evident to this brilliant mind during a sail.

“Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster.”?

The benefits of giving up a part of your brain are tremendous, as it preps you for peak performance and accelerates your path to mastery. In this TED talk, Jamie Wheal talks about a military exercise that was undertaken for snipers. Through transcranial mental stimulations, their neocortex was simply knocked out.

It was found that these snipers took 230% less time to progress from beginner to expert during their training. Such experiments have been conducted across professions with quite promising results.

How does the flow state come to us? Steven Kotler identifies the following triggers that are credited for individual flow, as they drive our attention to the present moment:

Understanding flow triggers

So as an individual, what do these triggers tell us? If you are not pursuing your current profession with passion and purpose, you will be unable to achieve peak performance or flow state. And if it is something you cannot be the best in the world at, is it still worth doing?

Secondly, this model flies in the face of the ‘safe harbour’ approach that many tend to adopt with their careers. They will tend to take up work that is more within their zone and where there is minimal or zero risk. But the fact is that true exhilaration in life comes from pushing the limits of your comfort zone. Take up challenges where you have to push your ‘perceived limits’, even if it is by 10-15%. Embrace the unpredictability and complexity of novel challenges that push you in a corner and compel you to undertake this journey of exploration. That will put you more in touch with the moment. ?

In tasks where your brain is so occupied by the rush of information from all around, you experience the state of deep embodiment or deep absorption in a task. I have often found this while executing a challenging project. An adrenaline rush tends to take over you, and nothing – literally nothing – seems to be beyond your control. But when the project is over, the obvious sense of relief and exhilaration is also accompanied by a certain emptiness or lack that is hard to explain. You are not actually missing that particular challenge anymore, rather you are missing the flow state that it brought. ?

Long term goals do not trigger immediate flow; they need to be broken down to smaller/immediate goals that give immediate clarity on what is to be achieved. This puts the brain in a flow state mode, as there is no need to spend your energy in contemplating what to do and making difficult choices on approaches to be followed. The same goes for immediate feedback. Short and sharp daily feedback enables people to finetune their efforts and refocus their energies/priorities for the next day.

Challenge/skill ratio is a very intriguing part of the equation that we discussed last time as well. You cannot push the comfort zone of teams so much that they are clueless about what they do next. Even worse, you could unnerve them to the point of indecision or making expensive mistakes. At the same time, if they are made to do the same ‘doable’ activities everyday, they are bound to feel depleted in a few days. A balance is essential.

The final is creativity or pattern recognition. Creativity is a very interesting state where people are able to combine existing ideas with novel information to create something new and exciting. In the flow state, when you are excited and engaged in this creative process, magic happens. Steven Kotler explains that when you are in the state, you take in more information per second, pay more attention to that information and find greater links between that information and closely related ideas (pattern recognition). Or you could even find linkages between that information and far flung/unrelated ideas, which we call lateral thinking. This creativity is seen to spike 400% in flow.

And when you re-examine the water analogy of flow that I covered earlier, you do not find flow in struggle, exhaustion or 'charging at the windmills'. You may have heard of the popular motivational quote on 'going against the current'. But it may often be misunderstood. It does not mean jumping into a challenge where you are absolutely unclear about both the assignment and your capabilities to meet it. Be brave to fight, but also to seek help when you genuinely need it. That kind of bravery is more rewarding in the long run.