The flow state: the science of the elusive creative mindset that can improve your life

As a professional ballet dancer, Julia Christensen knew the flow state well: a total absorption in her body’s movements, without the constant chatter that typically accompanies our waking lives. The hours could fly by without her even registering the time that had passed.

A back injury put an end to her career, and alongside the many other life changes that this brought on, she found herself missing the mental calm that had accompanied her practice and performances. “I became aware that I couldn’t control my thoughts,” she says. “And I’d never had to deal with that before.”

Christensen is now a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Mein, and her latest book The Pathway to Flow charts her attempts to regain that blissful feeling of being fully immersed in an activity. “It was a sort of quest.”

The outcome of her journey could be of huge benefit to many people. Studies suggest that entering the flow state can enhance our performance in activities such as sports or music, and improve our creativity and wellbeing . The late Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who first coined the term flow, went as far as to call it “ the secret to happiness ”. So what is it? And how can we enter this sometimes elusive brain state?

They say slow and steady wins the race – but if we are to feel flow, we need to avoid a sense of rivalry altogether

Csíkszentmihályi began his investigations in the 1970s, after interviewing hundreds of participants about the ups and downs of their lives. Contrary to the assumption that we are happiest while resting, he found that the peaks often involved very high levels of mental focus. The specific activity did not seem to matter – it could be swimming, playing the violin or performing brain surgery. What counted was the feeling of immersion and mastery. “The best moments,” he later wrote in his book Flow: The Psychology of Happiness , “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Based on further interviews, Csíkszentmihályi defined the core characteristics that seemed to mark these optimal experiences, leading to the concept of flow. Those elements included a high level of concentration, a sense of control, and decreased rumination or worry, with a clear goal and immediate feedback. It is also accompanied by an altered sense of time, as we fail to notice the minutes or hours flying by.

According to Csíkszentmihályi’s research, flow is most likely to occur when we find the perfect balance between our current abilities and the difficulty of the activity at hand. If a task is too easy, it fails to absorb our attention, so we become distracted, and our thoughts may wander to other preoccupations. If it is too hard, we start to feel stressed by the task itself. It is only when we meet the sweet spot in between that we find the optimum level of engagement – and all the pleasant feelings that come with it.

As one mountaineer told Csíkszentmihályi, “When you’re [climbing] you’re not aware of other problematic life situations. It becomes a world unto its own, significant only to itself.” Or in the words of a basketball player: “The court – that’s all that matters… You can think about a problem all day, but as soon as you get in the game, the hell with it!” In everyday life, we might describe this as being “in the zone” or “in the groove”. “It’s when you reach your personal peak,” says Prof Dimitri van der Linden of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

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Psychologists have since designed a “flow proneness” questionnaire that measures how frequently people experience this state of total absorption and compared that to factors such as personality. They have found that the more neurotic someone is, the less likely they are to experience flow, perhaps because they struggle to turn off the inner critic that could drive them from the state of heightened concentration. Our tendency to get “into the zone” can be influenced by our DNA, with a study comparing identical twins and nonidentical twins suggesting that genetic differences can explain roughly 30% of the variance between individuals . The rest can be explained by environmental factors, such as our upbringing.

Exactly which genes are involved, and the underlying neural activity associated with flow, is still a matter of scientific investigation. “That’s the holy grail at the moment,” says Christensen.

One theory has been that the flow state arises from reduced activity in the prefrontal regions of the brain , which are typically associated with “higher-order thinking” and self-awareness. The idea was that you go into a form of autopilot without deliberating over every decision. A recent review by Luis Ciria, Daniel Sanabria, and Clara Alameda at the University of Granada, however, concludes that evidence for this theory is distinctly lacking. While some experiments have reported lower prefrontal activity, others have suggested that these regions become more engaged during people’s experiences of flow.

The contradictory results may have arisen from the practical challenges of achieving the flow state while using brain scanners, which tend to be very loud and distracting. Most existing studies have also used small sample sizes, which can produce unreliable results. “The psychological construct of flow is well defined,” says Sanabria. “The problem is finding the neural pathway.”

Van der Linden’s research suggests we have been looking at the wrong parts of the nervous system. He proposes that the experience of flow may be linked to the locus coeruleus in the brain stem. The name means “blue spot” in Latin, and despite its diminutive size, it is widely connected to almost all other brain regions. It is also the main producer of the hormone and neurotransmitter noradrenaline, which helps to put us into a state of mental and physical arousal.

Van der Linden argues that the flow state may arise when the locus coeruleus has moderate baseline activity. This allows it to raise our alertness and attention, so that the brain can respond quickly to incoming information, without us feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated. “You have deeper and more engaged processing of the things that are relevant, which helps you to perform better.”

Rituals can help reinforce the correct mindset for your chosen activity, creating a sense of control

The role of the blue spot in the flow state is still very much a hypothesis. Earlier this year, however, Van der Linden published some tentative evidence for the idea in the journal Scientific Reports . Working with the PhD student Hairong Lu and Prof Arnold Bakker, he asked participants to play a complex memory game in the laboratory, while his team measured the dilation of their pupils, an automatic reaction that is known to reflect activity in the locus coeruleus . Sure enough, he found that people’s feeling of flow corresponded with the expected changes in pupil dilation. “When one is in a flow, average pupil dilation is intermediate, but every time something relevant happens, the pupil quickly and relatively strongly dilates to that event for a short period, and then goes back to baseline again,” Van der Linden says.

We may have to wait years for further evidence to accumulate and settle the debate. For concrete proof of flow’s neural basis, Ciria and his colleagues argue, we need many more studies of people performing their chosen activities in more natural settings, rather than artificially engineered tasks.

Such studies present some practical challenges, but they are by no means impossible to execute. You can fit athletes or musicians with EEG skullcaps, for example, that measure their brain’s electrical activity as they practice their sport or play their instrument. Scientists could also make use of people’s sedentary pastimes, such as video gaming, which are known to provoke a sense of flow. Sadly, these kinds of experiments, with sufficient data to draw reliable results, are few and far between. “We need a paradigm shift,” says Alameda.

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Fortunately, this hole in our knowledge need not prevent us from trying to find flow more often, since the benefits are already well established. People who regularly experience flow appear to be less susceptible to depression , for example, even after scientists have accounted for potentially confounding factors such as neuroticism.

There are many reasons why this might be. Engaging in an activity that activates the flow state can enhance our sense of growth and purpose in life, which is known to be beneficial for mental health. As Christensen had observed during her dance practice, it can also calm ruminative thinking, helping us to find greater mental peace long after we have finished the activity. Since her injury, she has found that producing visual art provided the necessary mental absorption. “Almost by chance, I discovered that drawing dancers could take me there,” she says.

In her book, Christensen offers many practical suggestions to enhance your chances of entering that brain state. Much of her advice involves the management of stress, which can push us out of the sweet spot of deep engagement and into hyperarousal. She advises finding rituals that help to reinforce the correct mindset for your chosen activity , since these can create a sense of control and reduce feelings of uncertainty. This might include ritual movements – a fixed pattern of stretches, for instance – or even a particular piece of clothing that you wear each time you practice your activity. “Those cues will set up new habit loops,” Christensen says.

Along the way, we should avoid becoming overambitious. As Csíkszentmihályi first noted, we should be careful to find exercises that roughly match our current skills but offer the opportunity for learning and growth. In today’s hustle culture, it may be tempting to push ourselves harder, but this is only likely to create frustration and stress, without necessarily improving our performance.

A sense of competition can be similarly disruptive. When we engage in social comparison and fear the judgment of others, Christensen says, we create a “really stressful state for the body and brain to be in, and that will not be conducive to flow”. Taking small steps – and celebrating our progress without looking for others’ validation – will be much more likely to increase our engagement over the long term. They say that slow and steady wins the race – but, if we are to feel flow, we need to avoid a sense of rivalry altogether. “The process is what matters,” says Christensen.

She is adamant that we can all build our ability to enter the flow state. “It’s a skill – you can learn it.” She believes that her own quest to find flow has led to something of a personal transformation. “I have photos from before and after, and I can see the difference,” she says. “I became a new me through this.”

• The Pathway to Flow: The New Science of Harnessing Creativity to Heal and Unwind the Body & Mind by Julia F Christensen is published by Square Peg. To support the Guardian and Observer , order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply
• David Robson is the author of The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life , published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer , order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply