The Come Alive Project

Tag: flow

  • Energy Bite 339 – Fitness and Flow, Part 4

    So, you’ve read about flow and should be familiar with it. How does it apply to you? A Flow state is a natural high brought about under certain conditions where you are totally absorbed in an activity, outside distractions are gone, and time is no longer a factor.

    That’s great but I’m sixty years old, you say. I don’t do extreme sports. I may swim or play a little tennis but I don’t get into those types of situations.

    Studies have been done about Flow and Older Adults and reported here. For non-athletic seniors, it says simply:“Yes, older adults have the ability to experience flow.”  And if you go to the link, you’ll see that it doesn’t say much else.

    But Seniors can get in flow and feel truly alive with all sorts of activities. Often mentioned are activities like gardening, writing, walking, playing chess, performing or listening to music, playing golf, tennis or “pickleball”. Any activity can involve flow if you become deeply absorbed in that activity.

    We all know the benefits of exercise and fitness as it applies to seniors. You look better, you feel better, your muscles don’t atrophy, your circulation is improved, your lung capacity is improved, your joints are in better shape, and you are not as susceptible to long, lingering illness. But those are long term benefits. How do they affect those short term moments of intense focus on a singular activity? The answer is simple. The more fit you are, the easier it is to get into and stay in the flow state and the better you can perform whatever activity you are doing. It doesn’t have to be physical.

    All activities are done better when in the flow state. Often, we drift in and out of flow and have to re-focus. There are a number of “triggers” that will induce flow. Here are a few of my favorites:

    • Deep, focused breathing before you start an activity.


    • Intentional focus on the Purpose of your activity. Having a solid purpose for performing an activity is important to getting into flow. For flow, you can focus on only ONE THING AT A TIME. Everything else will disappear from conscious thought.


    • Set clear outcomes and goals. Set milestones to monitor your progress. A set goal is a feature of flow. Make sure the goal is actually within your skill level but challenging. Your skill level will improve each time.


    • Eliminate physical and mental distractions before you start.


    • Keep your energy level up. How? MOVE YOUR BODY before you start. You must have the physical and mental energy to FOCUS intently and stay on task. Time flies fast when you are in flow, but you need the physical energy to stay on task until completion.

    To summarize, I would suggest that exercise and fitness have long term lifestyle effects. Flow is associated with “one thing at a time”, individual activities. When you are fit, it is easier to find yourself in the flow state, the state is more intense, and you are able to perform at a higher level then when you are not fit.

    “Flow improves the quality of specific experiences. Fitness improves the experience of being alive!”  — Me

    Thank you for reading.

  • Energy Bite 338 – Fitness and Flow, Part 3

    “Our experience shows that by keeping your mind focused on what you are doing, you can greatly increase the intrinsic pleasure of vigorous movement as well as the benefits you receive.”   — George Leonard and Michael Murphy, The Life We Are Given.

    When you exercise with full awareness of what you are doing, without FitBits or other external and distracting accessories, you can easily discover yourself exercising in a Flow State, and getting far more benefit than you would get from the average exercise session. No watching TV or reading magazines while on the Treadmill, please.

    Remember that the Flow State is defined as:

    1. An optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best, and

    2. An altered state of consciousness whereby an individual performing an activity is immersed in a feeling of energized hyperfocus, full involvement, and enjoyment of the activity.

    It’s a temporary state brought about by focused engagement in an activity that you do for its own sake. It’s a mind-body “thing” that helps you perform at your best, that which you have mastered through long term practice.

    When you move into a Flow State, certain chemicals are released into your body and brain that provide you with feelings of euphoria, intense focus, sharpened sensory perception, and complete present moment awareness.

    Ironically, Exercise can produce these same chemicals, particularly exercises which increase your heart rate and cause you to breathe faster and more deeply. When you exercise, you produce most of those same chemicals and they have a similar effect on your brain and body. You feel alive and in the flow of life.

    Also ironically, some of the chemicals are the same chemicals found in certain mind altering substances, many of which are illegal.

    “To live is to move. Even when seemingly motionless in sleep, the body is incessantly moving. We share a silent pulsing of heart, blood vessels, glands, diaphragm, lungs — the busy intercourse among a hundred trillion cells — with many other organisms. When we consciously move through space, we can’t help but affirm what is both unique and universal about our species.”  — Leonard and Murphy, Ibid.

    Physical activity is not necessary to move into a Flow State. Artists, musicians and entrepreneurs often find themselves in Flow as a result of deep focus on their activities. This article is limited to the discussion to exercise and flow and how they merge together to form a powerful fitness experience.

    Mastery of a physical activity often precedes flow. When you have Mastered the activity through deep practice, you will find yourself feeling better and performing better because you are doing it for its own sake. The motivation comes from inside rather than from some external reward.

    All of the elements I have listed need not be present. The “runner’s high” is one of the first examples people use to describe Flow. The euphoria involved in running or rowing or other sports is the easiest way to describe flow to the novice. Yet the same state can occur when lifting weights, doing other exercises or even in children playing games.

    And the fitter you are, the more likely you are to encounter the Flow state in your own activities.

    “Every person, no matter how unfit or fit he or she is, can rise a little higher, go a little faster, and grow a little stronger. The joy of surpassing the limits of the body is open to all.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

    So, if you really want to feel good, and if you want to really improve your performance in all that you do in life, then — MOVE YOUR BODY!

    Thank you for reading. 

  • Energy Bite 337 – Beyond Fitness: Fitness and Flow, Part 2

    This week’s article is the second in the series, Beyond Fitness: Fitness and Flow. This week I’ll talk about the Elements and Attributes of the Flow State.

    Last week I defined Flow as:

    1. An optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best, and

    2. An altered state of consciousness whereby an individual performing an activity is immersed in a feeling of energized hyperfocus, full involvement, and enjoyment of the activity

    So what are some of the attributes that make being in a Flow State different from the everyday state of mind that we normally find ourselves in?

    To begin with, when you are in a Flow State, you are normally focused on a single task — ONE THING and one thing only. In his definitive book, Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experrience, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mihaly Cz from now on), says that you enter Flow by “changing the content of your consciousness”. He uses the term Psychic Energy to describe the ability to focus your attention on controlling that content and focusing on a single task.

    Another attribute of Flow is that the experience is the end in itself. Yes, there is a goal involved, but it is the actual experience that takes you there that determines your State. Last week I mentioned that Alex Honnald, a young rock climber, ascended the 3000 foot vertical side of the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park, without any ropes, or other safety equipment. Yes, his goal was to reach the top safely, but it was the experience of the climb itself that kept him in the Flow State and allowed him to safely complete the climb.

    I like the way George Leonard and Michael Murphy describe the Flow State (they didn’t call it that) in their excellent book, The Life We Are Given. They describe the experience this way:

    “Like hunting animals, many artists and athletes exhibit a trancelike focus of attention, an indifference to discomfort and pain, and a remarkable forgetting of difficulty. The deep concentration, analgesia, and selective amnesia is analogous to — and may be derived from — the freezing and stalking behaviors, freedom from pain, and blindness to adversity that is evident among hunting animals.

    Notice they included both artists and athletes. It’s not just athletes, and it’s not just physical. If you’ve ever watched jazz musicians who have never played together, get together for the first time and improvise off the cuff and come up with a terrific set of music, you are watching the Flow State in action. If you have ever watched a prima ballerina perform flawlessly, seemingly without any effort, you are watching someone in the Flow State. If you have ever watched a crew team rowing in perfectly coordinated form, you have watched Team Flow at its best.

    Mihaly Cz summarized the attributes and elements of Flow as follows:

    “The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer.” — Mihaly Cz, Flow, p.31.

    Next week, Part 3 will be about how and why the body and fitness combine to play such an important role in the Flow State, whether artist, athlete or day to day life. It will be followed in two weeks by how all this applies to you as seniors, how to get into Flow, and how to get the most out of your senior years and live a long and productive life filled with energy and flow — the feeling of living alive.

    Watch for Part 3 in your inbox next Tuesday. Thank you for reading.