You can be for­giv­en for think­ing the con­cept of “flow” was cooked up and pop­u­lar­ized by yoga teach­ers. That word gets a lot of play when one is mov­ing from Down­ward-Fac­ing Dog on through War­rior One and Two.

Actu­al­ly, flow — the state of  “effort­less effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the Ger­man “rausch”, a dizzy­ing sort of ecsta­sy.

Friedrich Niet­zsche and psy­chol­o­gist William James both con­sid­ered the flow state in depth, but social the­o­rist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi, author of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Flow and the Psy­chol­o­gy of Dis­cov­ery and Inven­tion, is the true giant in the field. Here’s one of his def­i­n­i­tions of flow:

Being com­plete­ly involved in an activ­i­ty for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, move­ment, and thought fol­lows inevitably from the pre­vi­ous one, like play­ing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Author Steven Kotler, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Flow Research Col­lec­tive, not only seems to spend a lot of time think­ing about flow, as a lead­ing expert on human per­for­mance, he inhab­its the state on a fair­ly reg­u­lar basis, too.

Chalk it up to good luck?

Good genes? (Some researchers, includ­ing retired NIH geneti­cist Dean Hamer and psy­chol­o­gist C. Robert Cloninger, think genet­ics play a part…)

As Kotler points out above, any­one can hedge their bets by clear­ing away dis­trac­tions — all the usu­al bad­dies that inter­fere with sleep, per­for­mance, or pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

It’s also impor­tant to know thy­self. Kotler’s an ear­ly bird, who gets crackin’ well before sun­rise:

I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn every­thing off at the end of the day includ­ing unplug­ging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morn­ing there’s nobody jump­ing into my inbox or assault­ing me emo­tion­al­ly with some­thing, you know what I mean?… I real­ly pro­tect that ear­ly morn­ing time.

By con­trast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clear­ing the cob­webs ’til ear­ly evening.

In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow trig­gers have been dis­cov­ered, pre-con­di­tions that keep atten­tion focused in the present moment.

His web­site lists many of those trig­gers:

• Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion in the Present Moment
• Imme­di­ate Feed­back
• Clear Goals
• The Chal­lenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the chal­lenge should seem slight­ly out of reach
• High con­se­quences 
• Deep Embod­i­ment 
• Rich Envi­ron­ment 
• Cre­ativ­i­ty (specif­i­cal­ly, pat­tern recog­ni­tion, or the link­ing togeth­er of new ideas)

Kotler also shares Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na psy­chol­o­gist Kei­th Sawyer’s trig­ger list for groups hop­ing to flow like a well-oiled machine:

• Shared Goals
• Close Lis­ten­ing 
• “Yes And” (addi­tive, rather than com­bat­ive con­ver­sa­tions)
• Com­plete Con­cen­tra­tion (total focus in the right here, right now)
• A sense of con­trol (each mem­ber of the group feels in con­trol, but still)
• Blend­ing Egos (each per­son can sub­merge their ego needs into the group’s)
• Equal Par­tic­i­pa­tion (skills lev­els are rough­ly and equal every­one is involved)
• Famil­iar­i­ty (peo­ple know one anoth­er and under­stand their tics and ten­den­cies)
• Con­stant Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (a group ver­sion of imme­di­ate feed­back)
• Shared, Group Risk

One might think peo­ple in the flow state would be float­ing around with an expres­sion of ecsta­t­ic bliss on their faces. Not so, accord­ing to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slight­ly. Good news for any­one with rest­ing bitch face!

(We’ll thank you to refer to it as rest­ing flow state face from here on out.)

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

How to Enter Flow State, Increase Your Abil­i­ty to Con­cen­trate, and Let Your Ego Fall Away : An Ani­mat­ed Primer

How to Get into a Cre­ative “Flow State”: A Short Mas­ter­class

David Lynch Explains How Sim­ple Dai­ly Habits Enhance His Cre­ativ­i­ty

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.