Building a High Flow Lifestyle

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably interested in spending all of your time in the flow state.

What we’re going to talk about today will get you as close to that as possible.

Because this is what it takes to build a high flow lifestyle.

I’ve been studying flow since John Vervaeke was my professor in university and I started to recognize the feelings of getting into flow and what activities were doing that for me. I also came to realize that flow, being a peak experience, brings a level of meaning and fulfillment to our lives that makes it worthwhile to spend more time hanging out in the state.

There are four pillars that flow stand upon.

They are what I’ve come to see as the formula for a high flow lifestyle.

Focus.

Mastery.

Flow.

Recovery.

Each of these are a domain of practices and skills that as you work on developing will help you to reach higher peak states of flow and carry it over from whatever is your primary flow activity to other areas of your life.

I have found that flow translates extraordinarily well once you dial your focus in and understand the triggers that work the most for getting you into flow.

Focus

Focus comes first.

We can’t have flow without focus and having a clear path towards the life we want to live and what we envision for ourselves.

Focus is made up of two sets of practices:

• Intention

• Attention

To live a high flow lifestyle means becoming more deliberate in your choices. You need to have a vision for your life. And part of the intention of a high flow lifestyle is deciding what you will focus on.

Maybe you already know what activities will get you into flow because you’re passionate or curious about them. This is a good place to start from. You don’t have to stick with this direction forever but choosing an activity to narrow your focus into in the beginning is necessary to level up your skills and start to learn the triggers and cycle of the flow state.

Attention is also a necessary component of the pillar of Focus. Learning to train your mind to focus better will always help you to experience more flow in your life and build it into your lifestyle.

Having a mindfulness practice is the way to hone your attention.

This doesn’t have to look like meditation, although it really helps.

You can go on walks without your phone and dive into practicing single-task work.

The work of training attention is about learning to refocus when you get distracted.

Recognize when your focus is pulled away from what you are doing and return again and again.

Allowing distractions into your life will prevent you from experiencing as much flow as you want to and your phone is the culprit in many of those scenarios.

I talk about reducing distractions from your phone in this video here which you may want to watch next: How To Break Your Phone Addiction

Mastery

Next up is mastery. Because skill is necessary for getting into flow, mastery is the path from which we practice so that we can continuously build upon the skill in whatever activity we’re spending the most time in flow, to keep spending time there and to keep growing.

While mastery is made up of a number of skills and actions while working on your craft, deliberate practice and having the grit to persevere are two of the main themes of mastery that will get you towards becoming a master and being able to spend more time in flow.

Deliberate practice is about having an intention for the work you are doing and making the challenge just hard enough so that skills develop and help you to attain mastery. It’s often an uncomfortable and agitated feeling to be doing deliberate practice which is why it sits just on the edge of where the practice becomes flow.

We will make more mistakes and get frustrated when practicing and face setbacks, which is why having grit is the other element of mastery that will lead you towards a high flow lifestyle.

Grit is about the passion and perseverance to keep going when things get hard. When you’re pursuing a life of high flow, it’s bound to get hard because you need to keep pushing against your edge constantly.

Having passion for what you are doing is a key here to knowing your why and purpose and being able to have that hold you up when things get hard. That’s why we start with intention and understanding what you value as part of Focus.

And perseverance is knowing that something you just have to keep going. Flow comes after the release from the struggle we face in deliberate practice. It’s at this point that we reap the reward of our hard work and I find this cycle compounds, allowing us to more readily reach the flow state the more we go through these practices.

Flow

When I first started to recognize the beginnings of getting into flow it was from learning about the state from my professors at school. This doesn’t mean that I hadn’t spent any time in flow before that but without the awareness of the state and knowing the triggers and conditions for flow, we don’t have as tight of a feedback loop to bring us into flow more often.

This is why I consider Flow - particularly understanding the inner workings of the state itself - to be one of the pillars in which a high flow lifestyle is built upon.

Flow recognize flow.

So when you master your craft and start spending more time in flow in that activity, it can be translated into other parts of your life as well. You will know the conditions and the triggers that work best for you.

Some people are adrenaline junkies and the risk and novelty and complexity of action or adventure sports works well for them to get into flow.

Others like the creative and concentrated path to flow, or working with others to trigger more group flow.

But as you learn about all the triggers for flow and test them out for yourself, you’ll start to build a map of what the state is going to look like for you.

Flow also really likes immediate feedback so a ritual I have developed for myself that has made a noticeable difference is to include as a reflection question each day, “what did I do today that I had a sense of flow in?”

“What did I do today that I had a sense of flow in?”

The more you reflect on this and the more that you train your focus to build self awareness the better you’ll get at knowing and predicting your flow states. This is when the effect of the lifestyle starts to compound because you can make more informed decisions on how you are going to spend your time based on when you know will effectively put you in a flow state.

But the more time that you spend in a really high flow state, the more recovery you’re going to need, which is why it’s the last element of building a high flow lifestyle.

Recovery

The recovery domain, like the phase of the flow cycle itself, is a necessary element to embrace in living a high flow lifestyle.

It’s sometimes thought of as the dark side of flow. Because it is a high performance state, flow is very energetically and neurochemically expensive, so when you spend more time in a peak state, you deplete more.

I call this The Flow Hangover because at the end of a high performance day and the following day, you can feel the depleted and lower energy mood that comes after a huge effort.

You need to learn what forms of recovery and what methods will get you back to baseline quicker.

Sleep is by far the most important in my experience. Having built Flow Spa as a wellness centre with all the best active recovery tools to get people back to baseline quicker so that they can perform their best again sooner, sleep is still needed first and foremost.

Whenever I am in a season of higher performance - this could be physical or it can also be high mental demands with work and focus - I find that my requir ed sleep demand each night is sometimes bumped up by an extra 30 minutes to an hour per night just to keep feeling the same through the day and being able to continue to focus and perform.

So while it’s nice to imagine being able to spend all day every day in flow because it brings us so much meaning and richness to our lives, I don’t see it as possible unless maybe you’re never really pushing the edge of the highest demands of the peak state and you’re content to just cruise along in a lower flow state all the time.

You’ll need to incorporate more recovery time throughout the day and between high demand activities to keep on flowing as much as you can. This is a great opportunity to also experience other peak states like awe, gratitude, love, and mindfulness.