Flow state on demand

Forget all that, and just wail.

Welcome back!

Your dreams were your ticket out.

Welcome back!

To that same old place that you laughed about.

With apologies to John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful, who wrote the theme song to Welcome Back Kotter in 1976 and who is still touring and making music at 80 years old in 2024, we're back!

Yes, Understandably is back!

In a way we never left, as I think about 95% of readers have been following and reading Understandably on THE OTHER PLATFORM (just seems impolite to name it here).

But as I've turned “THE OTHER PLATFORM edition” into a new and different amazing kind of daily newsletter called The Big Optimism Project (which has a fantastic entry today, by the way, and that measurably improves my happiness each day just by writing it), it made sense to come back to our roots here as well.

Function follows form, and I built Understandably originally (more than 1,000 daily editions between 2019 and 2023!) to thrive in the quirky world of Substack. Thus, there have historically been two kinds of posts on Understandably:

1. The very practical, "here's what science says" posts (like here and here) and "here's how to do X better" posts (like here and here), and

2. The "here's a personal story I hope will help you" posts (like here and here) and the "hey I bet you might not know this cool story from history" posts (like here and here).

So, I thought maybe the thing to do today would be to go back to basics, and combine the two genres. Fusion, if you will.

The story starts with this: I went to a dinner for newsletter operators in New York City last week.

Besides being the oldest person there by at least 10 years (I'm 53) and besides being the one who was the most eager to eat the delicious dinner without restraint, and to say "yes, thank you!" every time they offered to refill my drink, I was perhaps also the most eager to learn.

There was a lot of knowledge to gain, because this was a group of highly successful newsletter-runners, who are all about process, growth, and scalability.

Try as I might, my friends, I am different. I have only ever succeeded at this game by applying a 21st century version of the famous Hemingway quote:

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

There are moments, however, when I feel like I've cracked the code, and turned on the faucet, gotten into the groove—and the words come out right.

Sometimes I look back afterward and think: "Whoa, how on earth did I write that? I'd like to meet that guy."

I've wondered if this experience gives me some minor insight into the state that some artists and athletes and even scientists sometimes describe:

• Kobe Bryant: "When you get in that zone, it's just a supreme confidence. Things just slow down. You really do not try to focus on what's going on, because you can lose it in a second. You have to really try to stay in the present, and not let anything break that rhythm."

• Roger Ebert: "When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note."

• Dr. Dre: "I’ve gone seventy-nine hours without sleep, creating. When that flow is going, it’s almost like a high. You don’t want it to stop. You don’t want to go to sleep for fear of missing something."

In 1990, a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published a book in which he started the popular conversation about this phenomenon—flow state—describing it as a state of mind in which people can focus their brains, shut out distractions, and become much more productive.

Since then, people have built entire careers trying to explain, analyze, and ultimately teach others how to achieve it. Among them, apparently, John Kounios of Drexel University:

"Csikszentmihalyi... defined [flow] as 'a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter,'" said . "'[T]he experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.'"

Writing in the journal Neuropsychologia, recently, Kounios described an experiment that used neuroimaging technology to track flow state in people's brains in real time. They were trying to test two theories:

1. Theory 1 is that flow state might simply be, "a state of highly focused concentration or hyperfocus that shuts out extraneous thoughts and other distractions to enable superior performance on a task."

2. Theory 2 suggests something more active: The idea that through years of intense practice, people can develop "a specialized network or circuit to automatically produce a specific type of ideas ... with little conscious effort."

Spoiler alert: we're rooting for Theory 2 here. That would mean that people who develop expertise in any creative discipline might be able to go on autopilot, exploring and creating without active control—”flow state on demand,” in other words.

The Drexel experiment involved recruiting 32 jazz guitarists, both highly experienced and less so, and recording high-density electroencephalograms (EEGs) while they each improvised six jazz sessions.

Afterward, their performances were assessed both by (a) asking the guitarists to rate how intensely they felt they achieved a "flow state" while playing, and (b) asking four jazz experts to listen individually to each of the 192 total recorded improv sessions, rating them for creativity. Findings:

1. More experienced musicians reached flow state "more often and more intensely" than their less experienced colleagues.

2. EEGs mapping the brain activity of "flow state" musicians showed that they had higher brain activity in the left hemisphere (areas associated with "hearing and playing music"), and decreased activity in the superior frontal gyri (which is associated with executive control).

As Kounios summarized it all:

"Jazz great Charlie Parker said, 'You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.'"

I am very curious to learn if this also works for newsletter writers. Stay tuned, and I’ll keep trying to wail.

• Editor’s Note #1: A few readers reached out to me recently asking what today’s newsletter would be about, and I told them something completely different. If that describes you—I’m saving the thing I told you about for another “hook" coming up before too long. It will be better then, trust me.

• Editor's Note #2: Next edition will be Friday, and it's a Free-for-All Friday, which means I pull together a bunch of interesting links that might normally be hidden behind paywalls, but put them in front of you for free. It's even legal! I think you’ll like it.

OK. The first one back is always the hardest, but I hope this one worked. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for reading! Photo by Molly Blackbird on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. Please: If you’re not already on Big Optimism, please sign up!