Flow state: how to reach it
There is a mental state where you're both extremely focused, highly effective, and deeply satisfied with what you're doing.
That's flow.
You've experienced it without naming it. It's the moment when you're so absorbed by a task that you forget time, hunger, fatigue. Nothing matters except what you're doing right now.
It can happen when playing a video game, doing sports, dancing, coding, writing... and sometimes, when conditions are right, at work. That's the state we're trying to understand here.
Where the concept of flow comes from
The concept of flow was theorized in the 1970s by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
His starting point wasn't performance, but happiness.
He started with a simple observation. Past a certain threshold, higher income doesn't make people happier. So he asked what, independently of money or social status, creates a deep sense of satisfaction.
By interviewing thousands of people, artists, athletes, founders, he observed that intense happiness rarely came from external factors. It was linked to very specific internal states, experienced when someone was totally absorbed in an activity.
The word flow felt like the best metaphor. Everything seemed to happen smoothly, without conscious effort. Some people even described a feeling of writing or acting almost automatically.
This concept isn't entirely new. Csikszentmihalyi himself acknowledged that it echoed states described for centuries in meditative traditions, especially mindfulness meditation. Flow is, in a way, a way to leave the usual mental noise and enter a different quality of presence.
What happens in the brain during flow
More recent research has looked at what concretely happens in the brain during flow.
One observation is reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the area linked to self-consciousness, judgment, and time perception. That likely explains why time seems to stretch and why you forget your environment.
On the other hand, other brain areas show intense activity, which helps explain higher creativity, precision, and performance.
In other words: less mental noise, more effectiveness.
The key condition to enter flow
The most important condition for reaching flow is one simple idea.
The task needs the right difficulty level.
Not too easy, not too hard.
If a task is too simple, it's boring. Flow won't happen.
If it's too complex, it's discouraging. Again, flow is out of reach.
That's exactly what Csikszentmihalyi calls the stretch zone. A zone just above your current skill level, demanding enough to mobilize your full attention, but not so hard that you give up.
When a task is too easy
If you're bored by a task, it's too easy relative to your current skills.
In that case, the goal is to make it more stimulating.
Add a time constraint, look for a more elegant or faster way to do it, improve output quality, explore a new angle.
Even a repetitive task can become interesting if you introduce a small challenge. This connects to what we explained in Carlson's law: staying on one task and giving it depth is much more effective than constantly switching.
When a task is too hard
On the other hand, if a task feels impossible, it's too complex at this stage.
The solution is to break it into more accessible steps or temporarily lower the difficulty level. Learning new software, a new skill, or a new job always works better in progressive steps.
This logic is true for intellectual work as well as sports or music. It's what lets you progress without getting discouraged.
Create flow conditions at work
Reaching flow doesn't only depend on the task itself. The environment matters a lot.
Flow requires uninterrupted attention. Any interruption breaks this fragile state. That's why you need to remove sources of distraction.
That means removing notifications, learning to resist digital temptations, and creating a real focus bubble.
Communication also plays a central role. Favoring asynchronous communication lets you choose your deep work moments instead of suffering real-time interruptions.
Flow isn't limited to work
Finally, it's important not to look for flow only at work.
Flow can be fed by sports, music, hiking, artistic creation.
These experiences strengthen your general ability to focus and improve your quality of presence, including when you go back to professional tasks.
Treating your work like a game where you can tune the difficulty level is often a simple but powerful key.
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