https://simpleprogrammer.com/flow-state/
Flow state is something super important for programmers and, those who have entered this state know what I’m talking about.
John Sonmez:
Okay. Now, I know a lot of people have different ideas of what flow is, what exactly is flow? And, I mean, probably some people are watching like “I don’t even know what you guys are talking about right now. What is this flow?”
Rian Doris:
Yeah, always happy to bring everyone up to speed, because it’s funny, even the word. We sort of have an internal running joke about the fact that we all have a little bit of a problem with the word itself. It just sounds a little bit make-y up-y.
John Sonmez:
Yeah.
Rian Doris:
It sounds a bit like energy or alignment or manifestation or something like that. But it’s actually a technical term. It’s a term that’s used within positive psychology and it was coined by a Hungarian psychologist called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote a book called Flow. And it’s a technical term. It’s used it’s used within positive psychology, within psychology generally, and even within the sort of neuro scientific research that looks at this state as well. And so it’s not something that we have labeled ourselves and it has a definition that exists outside of us as well.
John Sonmez:
Right.
Rian Doris:
And it’s technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness where you feel your best and you perform your best. And more specifically it refers to those moments where every action, every decision arises seamlessly from the last. You are so focused on the task at hand, that all else sort of falls away. An action awareness merge, your sense of self vanishes, so that kind of inner critic, that dialogue people often have going on in their back of their mind with themselves goes off line and your sense of time distorts. So you get time dilation where time either speeds up, which is usually what happens within knowledge work. And the programmers who are watching this, that’s probably the experience they’ve had where hours would go by in what feels like minutes, but then sometimes, with more sort of physically induced or embodied flow states, time can slow down as well, and you get that sort of freeze frame effect, like the way you hear people describe even things like car crashes sometimes.
Rian Doris:
And as the research shows, when you’re in this state, every aspect of performance, both mental and physical go through the roof. So, to give a little breakdown on some of the research and then what that looks like if that’s helpful?
John Sonmez:
Yeah, yeah. Sounds like it’s like taking the limitless pill.
READ or LISTEN to the FULL Interview HERE: https://simpleprogrammer.com/flow-state/