Spreadsheets, surfing and finding flow
(10 minute read)
Wellbeing. If one word, maybe more than any, has come to describe post-pandemic life in a professional and educational context it is wellbeing. Whether it’s the reduction of it, or the search for it, people feel that work has impacted wellbeing.
The crisis of wellbeing
If we consider an absence of wellbeing we could see it as stress, distress, unfair demands, lack of control, lack of engagement and ultimately burnout.
Companies and organisations have attempted to address this crisis in a variety of ways. Still, there is a dichotomy at the heart of any organisation’s desire to deliver wellbeing, in that individuals are there to ‘do work’. Hence, a reduction in expectation for ‘work to be done’ is not in the organization's interests and, in an educational context, not in the long-term best interests of the individual.
The result is that workplace ‘wellbeing initiatives’ tend to be met with the scepticism that most, frankly, deserve. Workplace yoga, and the conference in x interesting location, are yet another thing to do. The work is still there when you get back with less time to do it in.
Moreover, the paradox of making employers responsible for reducing our work is like expecting our gym instructor to be responsible for our having a lie down; but with Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace Survey reporting that nearly 90% of UK workers are disengaged, there is clearly an issue.
However, there are steps we and our employers can take and, strangely, there is a reason to look to adrenaline sport for inspiration.
The state of peak performance
In his book ‘The Rise of Superman’, Steven Kotler notes the extraordinary advances in high-adrenaline sports through the first 15 years of this century. Whether it’s TJ Schiller landing a freestyle ski jump with a total of 2,340 degrees of rotation or Laird Hamilton redefining big wave riding after being towed into the Millennium Wave at Teahupoo, achievements were being made that confounded human potential. (i)
Now although these challenges are very different, more interesting and certainly more deadly than approaching the creation of a spreadsheet at 11.15am on a wet Monday – the ways of doing of them in such a way as supports our wellbeing have surprising similarities and to understand those we need to look to the work of a psychologist with a very long name.
You see, what Kotler noticed and described in detail in ‘The Rise of Superman’ (and went on to codify in ‘The Art of Impossible’) was that these superhuman feats were being performed in a state of flow, a state first brought to mainstream awareness by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mee-hy Cheek-sent-mee-hah-yee).
‘Flow’ was a book that, first published in 1992, brought to public attention revolutionary work Csikszentmihalyi and his research colleagues had done into human fulfilment, and he described flow as “a time when ‘a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.” (ii)
Taking back control
Interestingly Csikszentmihalyi himself has a solution for the paradox we considered earlier of asking employers to be responsible for wellbeing: “There is no way out of this predicament except for an individual to take things in hand personally. If values and institutions no longer provide as supportive a framework as they once did, each person must use whatever tools are possible to carve out a meaningful enjoyable life”.
And, in ‘Flow’ he outlines the elements we need to put together to create a flow state including; a challenging activity that requires skills, the merging of action and awareness, clear goals and feedback along with concentration of the task at hand. (iii)
This combination of factors leads us to what we might consider today to be a strange place; that work could bring us more flow than leisure. As Cal Newport points out in ‘Deep Work’ “At the time this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy”. (iv)
But listen to what Csikszentmihalyi himself has to say about that:
“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules and challenges all of which encourage one to become more involved in one’s work, to concentrate and to lose oneself in it. Free time on the other hand is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed”.(v)
So, the issue for our wellbeing might not be work per se, but the ‘way’ we are doing our work and if we could work in flow, we could actually enjoy it!
Barriers to success
But there are significant barriers to flow in the modern workplace and for the purposes of this short piece let’s look at two: the absence of deep work, (flow requires concentration of the task at hand) and dopamine.
Today's workplace sees most of us flitting between tasks, some work, some email an interruption, a DM, a call, a text. But although we think we can multi-task, we can’t. In ‘Stolen Focus’ Johann Hari speaks to Professor Earl Miller of MIT who points out that the idea that humans can multi-task is a myth and humans have “very limited cognitive capacity”. (vi) So while there is an ability to ‘task switch’ there is a ‘switch cost effect’ because “your brain has to reconfigure as you go from one task to another”. What Sophie Leroy of the University of Minnesota calls ‘attention residue’. (vii)
Given that flow is produced from single minded concentration on one task and as Cal Newport points out “the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work”, why don’t we all just work more deeply? Well, we should, and we could. Employers can take some responsibility here as most workplaces are set up to reward task switching and busy work, as in ‘x is great, they’re so responsive’. So, people worry about batch responding to emails and switching off their Teams notifications (although they should nonetheless).
However, mostly we task switch because every time we check our phones, send an email or reply to a DM we get a little squirt of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that acts on areas of the brain giving us feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation.
And this brings us back to flow, because the problem is we’re getting the dopamine in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
The flow cycle
In ‘The Art of Impossible’ Kotler breaks down and decodes the elements and stages of flow in significant detail as well as looking at the neurochemistry of each stage. (viii)
By taking only a cursory look at these stages we can see why a) most people do not get into flow at work and b) why work feels so consistently hard.
The four phases of the flow cycle are struggle, release, flow and recovery.
All meaningful activity starts with a struggle phase. Consider an essay, or blog post (!) faced with a blank page, a stack of books there is a feeling of frustration and the brain releases cortisol and norepinephrine. Now, in an ideal world, we push through the struggle phase, get a plan written, make a start of the project and see a way forward.
Then we should move to release, which Kotler describes as “an incubation period, allowing the brain’s pattern recognition system to chew on the problem”. He describes the best release as “low grade physical activity” in the office it may simply be going to make a cup of tea, at home, we might unload the dishwasher or wander round the garden. Watching TV is not a good release as it takes us into the beta brain wave of struggle not the alpha wave of release. (ix)
Now we return to the task at hand, post cup of coffee and light relaxation and can drop into flow and, before we know it, we are lost in concentration and the bulk of the work is done. The flow state meanwhile rewards us with dopamine, endorphins and anandamide.
Finally and critically, we need to recover, flow is a resource-heavy state and recovery allows the release of serotonin and oxytocin. Again, TV is not good for recovery, think of active recovery like yoga, sauna or a walk.
So that, in brief is the flow cycle, and associated brain chemistry and if you’re reading carefully, you may have spotted where it tends to go wrong and why work seems so hard.
Locked in struggle
Let’s go back to 11.15am on a wet Monday and that spreadsheet. You settle down at the desk, stare at the blank screen and the flashing cursor, and force yourself to make a start, your brain is flooded with cortisol and norepinephrine, it’s frustrating and feels hard but you get 10 or 15 mins work done and are making progress. Then a DM pops in from your boss asking an easy question. You drop out of focus on your work, the chance to reply to the DM is strangely a relief from the work and your brain gives you a shot of dopamine as a reward for replying to your boss. Then you try and get back to the spreadsheet which now seems even more tedious but eventually you do, until a notification pings on your phone…
Simply put, most people at work are trapped in the struggle phase which is constantly re-setting and dopamine is coming not from the flow of the work but the artificial reward of distraction. Making us stressed, distressed and feeling like we have no control.
Choose flow
But there is a better way, we can embrace the principles of deep work, focus on the task in hand, enjoy periods of release and periods of flow that combine huge productivity gains with the added boost of work feeling, well, incredibly rewarding.
Some of the responsibility lies with us being very disciplined about distraction management and realising the very real risks of dopamine addiction and taking steps to mitigate them.
Some of the responsibility rests with employers taking steps to enable deep work with changing working culture and response time expectations.
Both are possible and both will lead to a profound change in wellbeing for everyone. So next time you’re struggling at work, think of Laird Hamilton being towed into a 50-foot wave and remember the importance of single-minded concentration. Push through 30 mins of struggle, stop when you’re making progress, make a cup of tea and rest your brain (it will be working for you in the background so do not look at your phone or email and the dopamine needs to be the reward of the work) get back at it and do 90 mins of straight work. You will amaze yourself.
References.
(i) Kotler, S. (2014). The rise of superman : decoding the science of ultimate human performance. Boston ; New York: New Harvest.
(ii) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002). Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London: Rider.
(iii) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002). Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London: Rider.
(iv) Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: rules for focused success in a distracted world. London: Piatkus.
(v) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002). Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. London: Rider.
(vi) Hari, J. (2022). Stolen Focus. Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.
(vii) Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: rules for focused success in a distracted world. London: Piatkus.
(viii) Kotler, S. (2021). The art of impossible : a peak performance primer. New York: Harper Wave, An Imprint Of Harpercollins Publishing.
(ix) Kotler, S. (2021). The art of impossible : a peak performance primer. New York: Harper Wave, An Imprint Of Harpercollins Publishing.
