EP #135- The Neurobiology of Flow and Emotional Regulation with Steven Kotler, Co-Founder of The Flow Research Collective and NY Times Bestselling Author

Welcome back to another episode of Everyday Endorphins, a mental health podcast focused on the importance of finding joy and happiness in daily living. I'm your host Stella Stefinopoulos. This week I am honored to be speaking with one of the leading researchers and experts in the science and psychology behind Flow. Steven Kotler is the co-founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective, which is the world leader in neuroscience-based peak performance research and training. The Flow Research Collective works with neuroscientists at institutions to explore the neurobiology of flow and related peak performance topics. They use this research to train individuals and organizations in peak performance, working in more than 130 countries with clients ranging from companies like Mehta to professional athletes, members of the US Special Forces, CEOs and founders, and also Accenture, which is where I work. Outside of his work in the Flow Research Collective, Steven is a New York Times best-selling author and an award-winning journalist. His work being featured in publications like The New York Times, Wired, Wall Street Journal, and the Harvard Business Review. That was a mouthful to say, but I really wanted to get across the point on how knowledgeable and informed Steven is around Flow and tapping into these extraordinary experiences. So what we really spend a bulk of this interview on is not only diving into Steven's path, so how he developed these passions for neuroscience, journalism, and writing, and what inspired the creation of the Flow Research Collective, but we really focus in on the neurobiology of Flow. How do tap into these experiences, what happens in our bodies and our brains, and the relationship between experiencing Flow, accessing greater joy in our lives, greater happiness, and how Steven defines happiness, well-being, and how he finds his endorphins every day. There is a lot to be gained from listening to this episode, so without further ado, let's dive right into it. Hi, Steven. Thank you so much for coming on to Everyday Endorphins. It is so great to have you here. I still have a really good view with you. So there's a lot of synergies and overlap, I think, in the work that you do, and in the mission of my podcasts, my interests, and also my career at Accenture. And I'm really, really excited to have you here today to talk more broadly about all these things, but more specifically your research and flow, and how flow impacts our happiness, our well-being. So I want to start off with having you share a little bit more about your career journey. So how did you develop passions for neuroscience, for journalism, for writing, kind of our left and right brain intersecting, and all the things that you do? What led to that interest? There's never one origin story. There's like 4,000 origin stories. So I'll try to streamline and sort of stay in the middle. I'm a stranger, I'm actually trying to as a poet. I have a graduate, or I have an undergraduate degree in poetry, and I became a fiction writer for graduate school. So my background is entirely in writing. I came out, and the true story is that I'm an old punk rocker, and I have really funny hair and earrings. I've worked in advertising a little bit, but nobody had ever seen me. I'd been freelance. And then when I actually got out of grad school and came into the office, they realized I had dreadlocks. It didn't fit what they thought. Advertising looked like in the early 1990s, that job wasn't mine, and nobody else would hire me in advertising. It was really clear, but there was through a punk rock takeover at that period of time of the magazine industry, or through the internet, before the internet, punks had learned how to use that software, because they had been making magazines back in the 70s, and when money ports are pouring into magazines, we all got jobs. I flowed very nicely into magazine journalism, and once you're in magazine journalism, it's a game of exploiting your curiosity. Anything you're interested in can become a topic. I had a couple of really sort of core interests. I had a longstanding interest in how humans work. I had explored that with philosophy and with spirituality and with psychology, didn't like any of those answers, but really like neuroscience. Neuroscience in the 90s, early 1990s, had gone from, "Hey, can we name this cluster of neurons and figure out what its function might be to, hey, we can actually start talking about consciousness. We can talk about what emotions were, which were not real topics until there. We could talk about passion and purpose, happiness and well-being. We could talk about states, alter states of consciousness, flow, psychedelic experience, all these things I was fascinated by, and we're hovering at the intersection of everything I was doing. Similarly, you could talk about, I like talking to neuroscientists. I found I'm talking to psychologists very frustrated, I found the answers. If you go into journalism and you like science, you like the truth at a really hard and fast level. It's not that science is a consensus opinion. Journalism is a consensus opinion, but those consensus is better than psychology. Simultaneously, while I was doing this, I was also involved in the birth of another punk rock activity, which was action sports. So, action sports were really deep subculture into the early 1990s, and then myself and a bunch of my friends started to change that. X-Games happened, the gravity games happened. It's something that, in F and E, wanted to be attention. And these were like, especially at the cutting edge of the extreme, skiing, snowboard, and surf, movements, whatever. This is a hardcore punk rock subculture. They wouldn't talk to it. New York Times shows up, and they're going to do their very best to kill the journalist and not answer any questions. That was the ammo. So, I was living with these communities. I needed these people. They were friends in line, and so I had access. And if you know anything about action sports in the 1990s, it's often referred to as the Arab Impossible. More impossible feats, things that had never been done before, never thought we're going to get done, got accomplished, over and over and over again. It was the most extreme version of innovation I've ever seen. Like, just astounding levels of performance, and the obvious question was, what the hell is going on? Why is this possible? Why now? Why these people? And I wanted to answer that question with neurobiology, not psychology, not any of the other tools that other people had tried to apply to there. I was sort of alone in that project. There were a couple of other people interested in it, but more specifically, what really caught my attention is, this is the last fact, and then I'll shut up. But you do your next question because it'll sort of solve all of it. He performance in the 1990s was about very specific things. Did you have the right background? Do you have the right parents? Did they have enough money? Did you go to the right schools? Did you have the right coaches? Were you on the right teams? The only thing sort of internal at all was Walter Michelle had done the marshmallow test, and we knew that kids that could delay gratification could outperform others. But none of that stuff held up in action sports. Like the people I knew came from like horrific childhoods. They had broken homes. They had no money. They had almost no education. Forget about the ability to delay gratification. This was a cult of instant gratification. And in these communities, the risk taking was off the charts. And I was a natural born risk taker. And like this was beyond any of you had ever seen, the substance abuse was also off the charts. And normally, if you have a community and you have all those conditions, not a lot of education, no money, high risk taking substances, et cetera, people die young. They go to jail. What they don't do is reinvent what's possible for the human species. So that's what I was witnessing and sort of participating in the sort of fringes of. And I wanted to take the tools of neurobiology and use them to decode it. And that's sort of where it started. And very quickly, like found mentors in neuroscience who were interested in helping me answer those questions. And it went from there. And I wrote books about what I discovered. I took the questions out of access for it and into business and into technology and into science. Every time the impossible became possible, I tried to be in the room and tried to figure out what was going on. It didn't matter where I went or what group people I looked at. Every time I saw the impossible, whenever you see extreme innovation, you see a state of consciousness known as flow. And that's where it started. And what's the neurobiology flow became my project. It's where I've spent 10 years, it was a journalist and a blogger and writing a couple books on it. That was the course I'm going to, most of my books, to let's build an actual organization with a neurobiologist and start studying this. Now I believe the flow research collective is the largest neurobiology based research and training organizational world, the studies, paper performance and trans people and paper performance. You know, I am lucky enough now to get to write research papers into experiments with the biggest names in neuroscience. And you know, really have managed to push this so much farther than the most of us thought was possible, especially in the beginning. So it's been incredibly exciting and fortuitous and fun and long and slow and guru like right. I love it. Wow, I have so many follow up questions and comments. So the first thing I wanted to comment on is that I actually studied writing also in college through a minor creative writing. And I was really into creative nonfiction specifically memoir. And now I don't write that much kind of through the podcast through my Instagram platform, through my newsletter. I found that writing is like a really creative all it for me to tap into that flow state. but it always just makes me feel good. So I love that you also come from this background in writing and journalism in English because there is such like an intersection and also skill sets that can be transferable between having more of like that right brain. Then also moving into the left brain, more into neuroscience, psychology and other types of sciences. So I feel like, you know, people who share in that background, like it's a really unique combination, but super valuable. So I just wanted to share that commonality and then, you know, this idea of flow kind of being that common denominator where you see the impossible. Becoming possible is really fascinating, specifically in the business context, which I want to talk a little bit about. You kept using the word innovation in my day job, which we talked a little bit about before this is working in innovation consulting at Accenture. And something that I've noticed is when you're getting clients into a room to think big and aspirationally, you need to create an environment that gets them in that head space. In other words, you need to get them kind of into a flow state through how you design the day through the activities that you're guiding them through just really like curating the vibes to put it more simply. So I would love to hear from you, you know, the work that you do at the flow research collective and how you partner with companies like Accenture and other organizations to show like the business value of bringing flow into an organization that we back up four steps and give you a handful of definitions. So we don't leave everybody behind when let's dive deep into your question and comment. And I want to go back to the first thing you said just for half a second, which is the balance of having a creative outlet and an athletic outlet. I think has one of the reasons I've got as far as I got as a researcher and flow because it was immediate transference. In fact, you know, if you could be as ridiculously lucky as I've managed to be where I have my writing and then I have a company that I run and I have an athletic thing. So I have organizational flow, individual creative, you know, cognitive flow and then physical flow and being able to like design and think about those faces. It's just it's allowed me to have a lot of visibility, you know, just at the front end is just ask questions and then we never it's never like what I always assume what works for you won't work for you. I just that's a rule of ours like for a lot of different, different reasons. I think coaches make a huge error. They figure out what for them and I try to teach to other people and fails miserably for a lot of reasons. The main reason and this is where I'll go next is let's define people performance. What do we mean by people for instance, the flow research collective nothing fancier than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. So all we're talking about right there's nothing else going on. And by the way, this is not our new sexy idea. William James, Godfather of American psychology said as much as the very first psychology that's book written in like 1901. He said the great thing in any education is to make your nervous system, your brand new body, your ally and not your enemy. So this is an old idea, right? And it hasn't changed in the so what's changed is we now understand exactly what that biology is. And for the most part how to get to work for us and at the center of the biology of performance, not the whole picture, but the center is a state of consciousness known as flow. We've been talking about it. Technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where feel our best and perform our best next level down. It's any of those moms of rap detention total absorption. It's so focused on tasks the task of handling everything else just disappears and melts away since the self self consciousness really really quiet in your head time as a stranger. And you see just it's up in what you're doing in five hours go by and feels like five seconds throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical go through the roof. And flow amplifies tons of stuff and can talk about what gets amplified along the way. But if you're talking about human peak performance, you're talking about exactly as you pointed out, figuring out how to drop yourself into flow. What's interesting organization I was just so I got to earlier than week I was with a giant energy company and which global and for their Saudi Arabia company, but other global company and they brought together all of their senior HR executives for flow training and conversation or not. HR executives have standard HR questions like, hey, if can I hire for flow and or if I just flow and increase employee retention, all those kinds of questions and they're sort of really great questions you think until you know anything about biology, biology, paper, performance, and you realize that those are not real questions. You're not measuring the right things. You're not looking for the right things, not just give you a really simple example of this at a high level and then we'll go deeper and don't your question but it's right at the heart of your question which is, can you hire for flow? Sure, there's such a thing as flow-pronest. You could be biologically hardwired with flow. It could be neurochemical. It could be a bunch of different things for the child experience. You can also train yourself a little bit in flow, most high achievers intuitively because this is how our biology works. They start finding ways to drop themselves in the flow. You could train with an organization like ARCs, right? So if you hire these three categories, can you test for them? Sure, there's psychometric insurance that will test for them. If you hire those people, does it, for example, guarantee employee retention or productivity or any of those things? The answer is not really. The reason is, if you take a high flow person and put them on a low flow organization, they're going to quit. Employee retention goes down. If you want a high flow organization, you have to start with organizational culture. In fact, starting with organizational culture, and this tends to be what we do at the collective. It's definitely the work we've done with the center of your organization. We tend to start with the C suite executive. We tend to start at the top of the company with the folks who have been there a little bit longer, are more invested there. There's a lot of different reasons. The simple versions that flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. Flow follows focus. So it can only show up when all are tensionally here and now that's what all the triggers do. They do it a bunch of different ways, neurobiologically, but they drive our attention to the right here right now. So let me give you a simple example of this. Passion, purpose and curiosity are obviously flow triggers. Right? Flow triggers give us focus for free. That's amazing. Focus is the most expensive thing the brain can do. Burns are tremendous amount of energy. So anything that gives us focus for free, curiosity, passion, purpose. That's a huge, huge benefit. So one of the reasons we start with the C suite is they tend to have more curiosity, passion and purpose for the organization itself. Also flow is contagious. Like in the same way, emotions are contagious. There's brain entrainment. Leaders in flow will drive their teams into flow. So it's one of the best places to start where we tend to start. Our training is always the same. It doesn't matter who we're training. We're training a sensor. We're training Audi. We can pre-training the US Air Force. We can be training Google. We can be training insurance brokers from Iowa, all of which are the other people that we train. The protocol is always the same. It's an eight week digitally based training. Go through with the PhD psychologists and the coach and the information is the same why. Because the biology is the same. So at a basic level, the foundational training, there is no difference whoever you are in the world. The only thing that will tilt a little bit is where do we start? If you're coming and burned out versus what the two groups of people we tend to train a lot are burned out C suite executives. And our house women, usually in their late 40s, coming back to their careers after having raised a family. And they're rarer to go and fired up. And they've got all this energy and they're in exact opposite places that the burned out C suite executives. So we have to start them in different places. But by the second or third lesson, we're all in the same place together. But a low flow organization that tries to hire from flow is going to break those in place. Or I'll give you another really tricky example. So there's a match between your personality, which flow traders you like best and are most susceptible to. And what kind of environment works best for flow. An extreme introvert and an extreme extrovert, one different environments where you are on the risk tolerance scale and which risks you prefer in which ones you dislike massive impact on flow. Are you coming in happy or not happy? Is there psychological safety in the environment or not? Like all these things really, really, really matter, but they're mixed and mapped. So what you really can do is map jobs to persons flow, prep elections because everybody's flow problem, right? It's hardwire and all humans who are all flow problem. But you need a flow problem or you need a high flow culture that's sort of built around and cherished flows, triggers. And then you have to match the employee in the environment very, very closely to really get what you want. And so the answer is yes, you can sort of do all those things if you get it right. You can go live and police and collage protection. Hell yes. But all a high flow company means is you've cranked up the volume on employee engagement. But if they don't like what they're engaging in or you're engaging them in the wrong way, you're going to lose that employee. Then you have a very frustrated employee who's heading for burnout and is going to quit. So when we think about psychological safety, for example, because you mentioned that, is that a part of the equation, is that a factor that contributes to creating a flow? So yes and again, yes and no, I'm very tricky here. So yes, at a really basic level. So let me invert it for you and then let me break it apart afterwards. Any high flow company is going to be a company that produces psychological safety for their employees. You can. not do it any other way because anxiety nor epinephrine will block flow. Little bit, you need it to spike creativity and learning and phenomenal. But you turn it up too much and it will absolutely block flow. Kicks employees out of the most important of flow's triggers as soon as the challenge skills balance. We pay the most attention to the task at hand and the challenge slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch, but not snap. You want to push it on your skills using them in the utmost, but you can't be pushed over. As soon as you're pushed over, you have problems. So anxiety levels really matter. And why that means at a very basic level, if you're interested in more flow in your life, we recommend a daily de-stress and ritual. Whether it's a gratitude practice or a mindfulness practice or regular exercise or reading fiction or yoga or there's a million things you can do, but you got to do some at all times. Now here's where it gets trickier with psychological safety. So one of the things we know about team flow organizational flow, for example, is that one of the triggers is sort of equal participation and equal levels of skills. So that is obvious like in a sports environment. If you have two rock climbers who are skating the wall together and one is great and one sucks, they're not going to get it to flow, right? Because the first is great. Or if you're with a group of snowboarders or skiers and 50% of them are pros and 50% of them are amateurs, it doesn't tend to work. Because the speed, everything everybody wants to do, mismatches. Now, this gets really tricky in an organization because of a high flow team as a team that has the same common language, has equal levels of skills and is pushing on their skills to the utmost. How do you bring new employees along for the ride? What do you happen if you have new team members who aren't as familiar with the language you need their skill set, right? What if their, how hard they like to be pushed is different from how hard the rest of the group likes to be pushed, right? And it could just be different because you don't know these people and don't trust them so much because you're new to the group. So you want things to go a little more slowly and they want you to come along really, really fast. You feel psychologically unsafe but you need these conditions for flow. So there are push pool things about that and then as a general rule, flow requires learning to be uncomfortable. In the current environment, people somehow have taken psychological safety to mean that I'm not going to feel bad or uncomfortable and that's actually not true. You shouldn't feel bad because somebody is being misogynist or a bully or x, y, and z, for sure, not that way. But could you feel bad because you don't have enough skills and you have to really wrap up your game and those kinds of things, yes, could you feel bad because you have a boss who's trying to push you into that challenge skills, sweet spot and you think they're being something, do you think they're bullying you? Yeah, these are real problems. Now that we're having conversations about psychological safety and there's so much mean calling, go on the long with it and so many people are using the call for psychological safety as an excuse saying, I don't have to feel uncomfortable anymore and you made me feel uncomfortable as you made me feel unsafe. Well, no, that's actually not peak performance at all. That's what's this matching thing that I talk about and the thing that I say over and over and over again is you've got to have your conversations out loud. You're going to do flow work. You have to have your conversations out loud all the time. I don't believe you can, it's very hard to, for example, pursue peak performance at a really serious level, especially at an organizational level and by organ, I can be talking about your family, not your company, right? But like inside, without being able to talk about yourself and your emotions comfortably, you're going to have to be able to do that really honestly. There's a emotional maturity that really comes with doing this work because you're, hey, gotta be identified what's going on inside and be, you gotta be mature enough that you can talk about it without getting tilted because those are the conversations that are going to allow you to like create the psychological safety in a high flow peak performance environment because yes, you need it. But does psychological safety mean what everybody thinks it's, it means no. It made worse by, we have a culture of trauma right now and most people are getting the trauma information for a couple of very loud for lack of a better sources. And I'm not going to name names here, but like three or four of those private books on trauma are written by people who don't understand the science or are lying about the science. I'm being generous, but they should all know better. So you have a fake cult of trauma and people claiming for psychological safety and you're putting these things together in a work environment, trying to create a high flow work environment, that gets complicated. I'm not, it's totally doable, but it's complicated. Right. That's a really good point. I mean, so psychological safety can feel kind of fluffy. And I think that's kind of what you're getting to because it's not about just having everything being nice and you're not feeling uncomfortable. I mean, something I always try to come back to is that the only thing constant in life is change and change is inherently kind of uncomfortable because the act of change means that you're moving away from something you're comfortable with, something that you're used to into something completely different. But that is the process of life. And something, you know, when I reflect on my own career, I have felt the most reward from what I've been doing and the work I've been doing when I've been a little pushed and I've been busy and I've been having to keep myself sharp. And yeah, it's uncomfortable. But I do think and I can speak for my own experience within my team. There is a great culture of psychological safety. And by that, I mean, there's trust within our team. And so I know that if I need to put up a boundary at work or if I need to prioritize something differently, I can openly talk about that to my peers, my colleagues, to my boss. And it feels safe enough to do that, to fully express like where I'm coming from. So I think, you know, to your point, yeah, psychological safety isn't about kind of negating the discomfort. It's about learning kind of how to work through it. And I really like that you brought up this point around like emotional maturity because I think that speaks to more broadly, just how we need to kind of adopt this holistic perspective to health and wellness because everything really is interrelated. And you know, we go back to what you were talking about around how you have these like three different outlets for flow, organizational flow, individual flow, athletic flow. Do you see these different areas of your life impact, how you feel flow in each area? Like are they talking to each other? Is there kind of an influence on, you know, if you're not feeling so good at work one day, does that kind of screw up your flow in your athletic performance? And then in your personal life, how do these things relate and play off of each other? We know flow massively impacts happiness, well being overall, set us faction. One of the reasons we know this is positive psychologists have baked flow into the definition of happiness. We know that we have three levels of happiness available to everybody right there's general happiness. How do you feel right here right now? You know, Dan Harris was kind of right about that right here right now that happiness, you can get about 10% better. You can have a mindfulness practice, you can have a gratitude practice, you're going to hold a pencil between your let you know, you can do those kinds of things and you will get you can manipulate yourself about 10% happier. But happiness is set. We have emotional set points and they set up by the time we're 10, 11, 12. This is the worst you're going to feel on the planet, this is the best you're going to feel, they can move a little regular athlete to flow will increase the upper boundary, product unemployment or the death of a child will decrease the lower boundary. So they're a little movable but not easily and you will live your life chances are between all of them, which is why you get about 10% happier. If you actually want to move up the chain to life satisfaction, well being then you need the next level up is enjoyment. It's a high flow lifestyle where the thing that's creating the most flow is goal oriented. Right? So you're getting a lot of flow while you're going towards your goals. I want to write a new book and I'm getting into flow along the way. Finally there's purpose, which is the best we get to feel on the planet where it's a high flow lifestyle and the thing that's producing as flow is aligned with your purpose on this earth. So flow in general, it'll have to happen in just a little bit but it'll really increase meaning overall life satisfaction will be those sorts of things. We know that the happiest people and earth are the people with the most flow in their lives. We also know, and this is the answer, first part of the answer to your question, that this huge boost in happiness will and it's delicate but as a general rule, it will last the flow state. Flow states, there's no average at all but 90 minutes, neurochemically, neurobiological, there about 90 minutes long. Now there can be much longer ones, you can pop in and out of flow a bunch, there's a lot of other things that can go on and you can very much increase the amount of flow in your life. The amount of flow states you're going to get along the way but general rule is 90 minutes long but if you know what you're doing and you understand the neurobiology what's going on underneath flow and that there's a flow cycle and a whole bunch of things we haven't really talked about but if you get that you can sustain that happiness. If I go skiing on Sunday it'll help my happiness and that mood will carry into my business meetings on Monday and Tuesday. Interestingly, another thing that flows significantly as we were talking about was creativity and innovation. There's different numbers, people have done all kinds of different studies, it also done how you define creativity but as a general rule we see a 400 to 700% boost in creative creativity and innovation. That's across the boards. And yes, if you break creativity apart into the eight subcategories as defined by Michael Mumpford, we've done this and measured problem solving and problem identification and question formation, all those individual things one at a time. We also see them then boosted a lot. But Theresa and I'll let Harvard figure out that the heightened creativity on flow state last the flow state by a day maybe two. So that's really cool. Means I can go skiing on Sunday and like flow, you know, Monday I shop in a meeting for the collective, you know, a research meeting and some like the science ideas are much better, much more creative, much more innovative. So there's a bleed over effect. Three, those are focusing skill, like mindfulness, but not quite. Right. It's a little closer, I guess, to the open sense as meditation that you get during yoga or through walking meditation. But again, not exact different things are going on and really different like neurobiology when you start looking at it, it's pretty different. That said, we've known since back in the 80s that training mindfulness will train up flow. And we've also known that because it's a focusing skill, I get into flow on Sunday it's going to help you get into flow on Tuesday because it's a focusing skill on just training up the skill. Also now, and this is where it really starts to matter for a bunch of reasons that we can go into if you want to if you want to drill down here, flow resets the nervous system completely. So it flashes all your stress hormones out of our system and it resets us back to zero. So this is why people with a high flow lifestyle don't get burned out. This is why people with a high flow lifestyle always flourish. This is also why, for example, a flow in non-mark hours is going to bleed into flow during the work hours and importantly, keep you a hell of a lot calmer, which for we said, anxiety is going to block flow. So getting into flow resets your nervous system to zero and you're suddenly completely calm, which is so rare in today's world. You forget all the other stuff. You now have just a better chance of getting into flow in general because calm is flow prone. Kind of thing. Optimism correlates a little bit with flow proneness. So if you're in a good mood and you're calm, et cetera, et cetera. So there are downstream effects. Now, let's not kid ourselves if you get into a lot of flow and then something changes at work or whatever and you're still in locked out of flow, that frustration is probably going to be also equally high if not higher, right? Because you're used to high flow lifestyles and you've been locked out. But as a general rule, there's bleed over. Would you say that someone who's in a high flow lifestyle is more resilient when they're faced with challenges, they're able to kind of bounce back quicker? Yeah, this is interesting. We just had this discussion with George Manano, who's my favorite trauma expert, probably the world's best expert on resilience right now or one of them. So it's almost impossible to train resilience. It's very tricky. You can't really train it head on. You can train adaptive flexibility, which is really what we truly mean by resilience. And you can train flow, which will inadvertently train adaptive flexibility because flow is a very adaptively flexible state. And so flow inadvertently transfers resilience and obviously you can have your resilience without flow, post traumatic growth is a flow-based process among other things like so all the bounce back stuff has flow sort of baked in. And if you look at the product of paper, I want to say, I mean, it was a year ago now in neuroscience and body heavy reviews on what happens in the brain as we transition to a flow state. It examined the core question of a same event could either produce flow or PTSD. In fact, those are very common outcomes from high stress situations. So we want to know why do some things lead to trauma and what something leads to flow. Obviously, other things could happen, but why do these two outcomes? What we learned, and there've been a lot of data pointing this way, but in a sense, flow is the invert of traumatic stress, right? It's the exact, taking the exact same high energy situation and processing it completely, inadvertently. And that is obviously, that would be giving you a neurobiological way to start to define trauma and there isn't one yet or define resilience, excuse me, there isn't really one yet. Just as, you know, there's not, there are definitions for grit that are psychological, that are not great. Like in the art and possible, when I got, when you try to get under the hood of the psychology, and you find that people are actually training eight different grit skills individually, and then there's something else called resilience. So it's a big sort of combination platter and flow is a commonality among a lot of this stuff because of how the neurobiology works is obviously a lot of other things that go into it as well. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I want to kind of click down into this concept of how flow impacts our nervous system because something that I talk a lot about as a yoga teacher is how yoga really is a practice to help regulate the nervous system through linking breath with movement. And I think that's the most powerful thing when you're able to regulate your nervous system, you're able to really like take control of your emotions and be in that calm, rest and digest state. And when I think about like certain life experiences where I feel like I've tapped into flow, it's either through writing or through, I used to play the violin for many years. And it's like when you're not really thinking and it's just going and it's just for lack of a better term, it flows naturally. Like those are moments where I feel very peaceful. And no matter like the environment that you're in, if it's chaotic, whatnot, you have a sense of like being grounded. So what is going on in the brain and the body to produce that experience to regulate your nervous system? It's a different interesting question. I don't think any of us ask for what we mean by regulating our nervous system. And I don't I don't know if I have the exact answer either here, but let me let's follow the science a little bit. When I think of a regulated nervous system, the first thing I think of and the thing that I think you get a little bit more space from flow and with mindfulness and possibly yoga and whatever is you get a little distance from your emotions. All right, just you get that one second where they come up before meaning gets attached because the minute you attach meaning, right? The minute an emotion becomes us feeling to use the technical feelings have energy, right? Now they've got meaning they've got past top down meaning the top of our brain is emotions are bottom up feelings are top down feelings come with meaning they come with baggage they come with history want something that comes up feeling. You're sort of off to the racist. So the first thing I think of when I think of emotional regulation is how can I look at that all that energy and reframe it into the direction I wanted to go rather than the direction my fear based amygdala is going to want to take it right that's the first thing that I think of and that comes that distance and there's a lot of what you know what I mean like mindfulness is exactly what it gives you some of the new psychedelic therapy specifically ketamine therapy because it's a disassociative will actually help you train that up yoga some of the embodied practices do it as well regular access to flow helps us a lot so I think on a certain level there's a skill set right I'm talking about a skill set here and you can develop it a lot of different ways and then there's the other half of this equation the stuff that flow does automatically so as we move into a flow state we don't know if it's 100% all the time her benton fix is 100% he mapped this originally actually doing some work right now to write a retest these ideas to make sure it's on as we move into flow there appears to be a global release of nitrous oxide gas, siglin molecules everywhere in your lungs if you've ever worked out of the GM some of your lungs open up and some of these quiet upstairs that's nitric oxide and what it does is it pushes stress hormones out of your system flushes your system for your stress hormones the difference between like what happens at the gym and what happens in a flow state is you go to the gym the stress hormones come out of your system and maybe maybe depending on how hard you're working you're going to get a little in the end of my that's immediate pain relief and if you go really hard as you know tidal your podcast you can get some dorfins right I was going to ask where does endorphins play into the dorfids are massively massively tricky as you probably know they're so complicated in terms of their role in flow and when they show up and why they shop into they shop in every flow state there's all kinds of crazy endorphin questions the endorphin muscle and flow is one of the oldest and like it's been sort of Mr Toge's wild ride around that particular question but you'll get other feel good neurochemicals in flow that you don't tend to get for regular exercise also so flows a little bit more than than you'll get but so that happens automatically that's an automatic calming down that's a big reset you can get that same kind of reset you know if you get really good at breath work not so much meditation breath work there are a bunch of different breath work protocols that will really sort of reset the system that thoroughly and you know a bunch of other stuff but I those are the things that I think about most and I like the one thing I want to point out about emotional maturity let people get this wrong whether we're talking about Buddhism or peak performance like they get it wrong in spiritual context that get it wrong in just straight up people performance context, which is just because I have a emotional regulation doesn't mean World War III isn't going on in here, right? World War III is still going to help your human being, right? The emotional regulation is, oh, I'm just not going to take it personally and I'm not going to leak, right? Those two things together, if you're just like, if you're not going to leak, like you're holding your butt, but it's World War III inside, you don't have a emotional regulation, that's not a emotional regulation. You've got some self-control and good for you, but like that's not right. You have to be able to look at it and have the power to sort of reframe what you're looking at that actually constitutes emotional regulation. Like, oh yeah, everything's crazy inside because it's going to happen. Like that's going to happen automatically where human beings, so I learned this differently not with emotional regulation, but with courage. I was one of those important lessons I learned from the Laird Hamilton, the big wave surfer, but I had been scared my entire life, like fear was the most common experience in my life. I would just like go at the thing that I was afraid of, right? Because like I hated being afraid, some of my children had to go try to do the thing I was afraid of. I was absolutely certain that wasn't a brave person and I had no courage, because I was scared all the fucking time. And I remember meeting Laird Hamilton for the first time. God, he was just he had just turned 30. I was probably like 28 or 27 and it was in the mid 90s. And Laird said to me, we're talking as he's like, yeah, fear is the most common emotion in my life. I can't remember a day when I had been scared. In the early 1990s, Laird Hamilton was pretty much the undisputed toughest person on the planet. Mike Tyson might have had the crown before Laird and Laird took it from him. And he was like at that moment in time, he was that person. And I remember being so shocked. Like wait a minute, this, I use the definition of like courageous brave at all. And you're telling me you're terrified all the time. And I suddenly realized that like courage wasn't how you felt on the inside. It was what you did despite how you felt on the inside. That's what we were talking about. And I wasn't a coward. I was actually brave and I didn't know it at all, which was really interesting. That's something with emotional regulation. It could feel like hell on the inside, right? It could feel like hell on the inside. It doesn't mean you don't have emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is what you do with that hell. People, people mess that up, right? They think, Oh, you're a Buddhist. It must be always quiet upstairs. No, that's not how it works. I can get it quiet upstairs. And I have tools. And that's maybe right. But the foundational case is going to be a little different than the experience right that that experience that everybody thinks they want. Maybe, I mean, maybe we get maybe at some point, you know, and I'm not not me so far, maybe so. Not in this lifetime. I don't see. I mean, I love that. I mean, look at like life, like life happens. There's never going to not be something happening that's going to cause some dialogue to go off in your brain. It's just not realistic. And something that bothers me is when people say, Oh, but I'm not good at meditating or like, it's like, that's not what it's about. Like you said, it's a tool that you can use to make it quiet up there. I also will say the people and he says they're not good at meditating has not found the right meditation style for themselves for sure. Because there's so much out there. Once you find the match, I'm not saying it's going to be the greatest fun thing you've ever done. And you're going to like it more than drugs and sex. You're not going to like it more than drugs and sex. But you will find something that works for you and does sort of reset you in a way that you're like, Oh, now that I see the reset, now I start to like it more than dry, right? Like what it does, right? Because yeah, once you see some of the benefits, you're probably more inclined to want to do it. But what I do believe is like to your point around true courage, it's really like learning how to sit with two things at once that are conflicting. Like the thought's going up in your in your mind, but still having that like calm composure, you don't have to quiet it up there. But how do you sit with these two conflicting things? And I think that is probably one of the hardest things to do. And it's like a lifelong lesson and skill that we have to cultivate and then think that we have to learn how to continuously get better at because life's always going to throw us challenges. And then you know, to that point, a big part of why I do this podcast is getting to talk to people around hearing from them, like how they find their joy in life, how they find their endorphins. Because I truly believe that if you can anchor on to the good things, it's like I'm forgetting what that psychological principle is. But when we do think about like the negativity bias, it's so much easier to recall negative affect and experiences and emotion rather than positive ones. So it's so important that we, you know, bring our awareness to the good things in life. And I think one way to do that is through seeking out those endorphins or, you know, simple pleasures and joys in life. So the final question that I want to leave with you, Stephen, is what is something that brings you a bit of endorphins every day? God, writing, hiking my dogs through nature, skiing, riding my bike, going to the gym, meditating, walking meditation, reading. The better question might be, what do I do that doesn't? You've created a lifestyle that is high flow. So everything in theory is bringing you endorphins. So yeah, what are the things that don't? Meetings? Yeah. And that's really a lot entirely, that's not entirely entirely true. I think meetings don't, but I like, I can jump in and, you know, I like the intellectual ping pong and all that stuff. And so even the stuff that isn't high flow, I can make it's high flow. And that's part of the game too, I think. Everything actually is sort of designed to do that. But I've been doing this for a long time. And I'm lucky enough that I get to control my own schedule, which helps a lot. Yeah, absolutely. Having ownership of your calendar is very nice. Getting up at four o'clock in the morning and writing. Is that your routine? 4am? Yeah. And I like to write, I like to go from bed to my desk within like five minutes, because you wake up in your brain as an alpha, which is much closer to flow, which is the alpha theta borderline. Waking consciousness is beta. So I don't want my brain to wake up to get to awake alert and already already churning. I want to, with as little distraction as possible, I want to transition directly into my writing. And I always start my writing by editing what I wrote the day before, because it's got pattern recognition underneath it. And that's a flow trigger. So it's less hard. It's much more likely to produce a little dopamine kickman to flow before I end up facing the blank page. So it's a very specific protocol. I don't know how you're like awake at four in the morning. I mean, I have been, I've been waking up at six. It's been helpful. No, no, no, no, yeah, by the way, this is not, let's add here, because otherwise people always like, when they beat somebody who gets up really, really early, they think it's a moral judgment of their character that they don't let me be really clear. One of the founders in people, if we talk about the start of your gigabiology or foreign rather than against you, I am biologically an extreme lark. I focus best at three to four o'clock in the morning after a night's sleep. That's my wife is a night owl. My wife wakes up at like four or five o'clock in the evening and she focuses best then. And most people are right about where you are. They get around six or seven and they actually, their peak focus is right when work starts at like nine am. That's most of us, which is why sort of works. It's very hard to fight your circadian rhythms. That's almost impossible. So you want to start your work session with your circadian rhythms with your highest flow activity in the most manicured way possible to get yourself into flow smoothly. Now I need to think about what my circadian rhythm is because I've noticed that I feel, I feel great when I'm up at six, I go to the gym, shower, breakfast, get everything ready, and I'm very focused in the morning. Like I like to dial in in the mornings. So maybe we can do a part to you on circadian rhythms because I think that's fascinating. But in the meantime, where can my listeners connect with you follow along and also like read your books and just learn more about the flow research collective. If you want to train with us easiest way get more flow.com. That's how you train with us. If you want to learn more about us flow research collective.com sort of tell you everything you want to know. You can find this stuff up there or stevencaller.com and there's 14 books and Amazon is your friend here. 14. Wow. Okay. That's lots of morning writing sessions. Thank you so much, steven. It was such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks for having me Stella. It's fun to hang out with you. Appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Every Day and Dwarf Units. If you liked what you heard and you want to continue to follow along, make sure to like, rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on whichever listening platform you prefer. If you want to stay plugged into Every Day and Dwarf Units outside of the podcast, I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok and you can also drop your email to subscribe to my newsletter. It's the Every Day and Dwarf Units Upstack where I talk about the interviews that I've done that month. Any events happening in New York that I've hosted and just a stream of consciousness of my thoughts. Thanks again for tuning in and reminder to keep spreading in Dwarf Units and finding the things in life that bring you joy. Until next time.