Mark Stedman (0:01)

Welcome back to Limitless Win. Before the break, Mark and David gave us their answer. The question was, how many words are there in total? In the chorus of the Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give youe Up, you have locked in 34 words. Did you go over with 34 or are you still in the game? Still in the game. Well done. So for £20,000, is 34 words an exact answ? That's my dad and me on a quiz show that went out on ITV in the UK in early 2024. The game's designed to give you a mix of questions you can work out and questions you can only guess at. There's a two minute time limit on each question and it's a good job that Ant and Dec, the show's presenters, have got their eye on the clock because it's incredibly easy to lose yourself and focus all of your attention on figuring out the answer. I'm certain you'll have been in that state yourself. Sure, the stakes might have been slightly different, but what happens in the brain is the same. Everything else falls away, time stands still and you're in that sweet spot where the work is challenging enough to hold your attention, but not so difficult that it causes you stress. This is the state known as flow and it might just prove itself to be one of the keys that that unlocks long term happiness. I'm Mark Stedman and this is Undo, where we look at productivity methods through the ages and try to separate the brilliant from the bullshit so you can build a system that works for you. We're going to talk a fair bit about happiness today because while on the face of it, flow has a lot to do with productivity, it has more to do with where happiness comes from and how we can find more of it. I'm not going to bore you with the whole story of the quiz show my dad and I went on. You can check it out for yourself if you're interested. But the short version is that it got me out of debt, but it didn't make me happier. That's in line with what we've come to realize about happiness. After your basic needs are met, there's a limit to how happy more money will make you. But take what I'm saying with as many heaping helpings of salt as you see fit and replace them with the words of Douglas Adams from 1978. This planet has or had a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper. Which is odd, because on the whole it wasn't these small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. I think many of us are unhappy for a good deal of the time. A dozen eggs costs the GDP of a small island nation, and everyone, at least on the Internet, seems to hate everyone else. The world is run by super villains from Saturday morning cartoons, and any superheroes we do have are locked in squabbles among themselves or fighting over who gets top billing in their inevitable film franchise. So we look to tv, to short form video, to alcohol and fast food to give us a lift or a moment's respite. We distract ourselves, numb ourselves, and do everything we can to avoid sitting with our feelings. Feelings and okay, I'm laying it on a bit thick maybe, but a lot of us, me included, just want to flop on the sofa and do something mindless after work. And why is that? Because work isn't giving us what we need. It's either stressing us out so much we need an escape, or it's so beneath us that we're wondering if this is all there is. And this is where flow comes in. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was a Hungarian psychologist and academic. He was born in 1934 and died in 2021. Flow, the psychology of optimal experience, was published in 1990 and is still considered 35, five years later to be definitive on the subject, we'll get into the connection between happiness and flow in a bit, but first off, let's define what flow actually is. Imagine a seesaw with boredom on the left hand side and anxiety on the right. Now think about a job you need to get done today and place it somewhere on that seesaw. If that job's too difficult, it makes us feel anxious or stressed. Too much of that and you end your day curled up in front of Netflix with a glass of wine just to recharge. If the job's too easy, we get bored. Too much boredom and we end up seeking quick rewards like scrolling through TikTok or ingesting industrial amounts of chocolate. What Csikszentmi High found is that there's a spot on the seesaw that's just far enough to the right to make it interesting without upsetting the balance too much. Much. In other words, where the work is challenging enough that the brain absorbs itself in it, but not so difficult that it throws us off the seesaw. Now what flow looks like to you will be different for what it Looks like for me, I get into flow when I'm coding. Yeah, bro, I code. And when I'm playing something more intricate on the piano. I'm sure you can remember being in the zone yourself at some point. Maybe it was playing football, tennis, or maybe it was fixing a broken piece of tech. Flow puts us in a state of ecstasy, in the original Greek sense of the word, meaning outside oneself. It really is like being in another world sometimes. And the crash back into reality can sometimes feel a bit violent. That need, or at the very least, desire for escapism, isn't new, by the way. It's not a symptom of modern life being more complex and busy. Ancient civilizations built temples and took drugs to experience other worlds, other ways of being, other states of consciousness, if you like. Some of them were looking for God, but what they found is that what we now call flow can transport us somewhere outside of time. And what's more, it feels amazing. And while this might all sound a bit fluffy, it's grounded in something we can easily understand. Actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. That's from a TED Talk Csikszentmihalyi gave back in 2004 when they were a little bit more chill. So our capacity to perceive something is very similar to how we think about broadband speed. We can process around 110 bits of data a second, but me speaking to you is eating up around 60 of those bits right now. How many bits you can process or how fast your broadband will vary from person to person? Most of us can't hear more than two people speak at the same time because all our bandwidth is eaten up. I'm gonna send this episode to my mum so she can finally understand why both my dad and I get incredibly flustered when we're on the phone to a relative. And my mother is, in her most helpful way, reminding us to ask the other person how their cousin is, while we're also arranging next week's pub crawl. So rather than imagining me on the phone to my uncle, let's think about someone at the piano composing a new piece of music. And all the way in the zone, most of his bandwidth is taken up with the notes he's playing and the wider arc of the piece. He doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels or his problems at home. Home, he can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. His body disappears. His identity disappears from his consciousness because he doesn't have Enough attention like none of us do to really do well. Something that requires a lot of concentration and at the same time to feel that he exists. So existence temporarily sustained. Pendant Although Csikszentmihalyi studied artists and scientists as part of his research, flow isn't confined to knowledge work. You can see people in flow when they're cooking a meal with multiple pots and pans, or doing intricate carpentry, or solving a tricky puzzle. That works if you're an in home cook, a woodworker, or a professional escape room player. No, I don't think those exist either. I just needed a third thing. It works because part of what makes flow happen is intrinsic motivation, meaning you do the thing because you love doing it. And that's where happiness comes in. When we spend less time stressed out and more time focusing on challenging tasks, we balance out the seesaw in our own brains. Imagine that in your reward pathway there's a teeter totter, like in a kid's playground. When you do something pleasurable, it tips one way, and when you do something painful, it tips the other. The balance. We wants to remain level so that with any deviation from neutrality, our brains will work very hard to restore a level balance. That's from a TED talk by the author of Dopamine Nation, which I urge you to check out if you're into this sort of thing. You'll find links to everything at Undo FM Flow. So, contrary to what you might think, we're not designed to live our whole lives in a state of total bliss. Nor. Nor of course, are we designed to always be miserable. Despite what Russian literature or French cinema would have us believe, our brains want us to be somewhere in the middle. And so, given that most of us have to work in order to put food on the table, our long term mental health is improved by doing work that puts us in the zone where we're challenged but not overburdened. Now, I ain't no psychiatrist. I ain't no doctor with degrees. Seriously, I'm just a podcaster standing in front of a listener asking you to like and subscribe because it really helps the algorithm or something. If you have a particular relationship with your brain chemistry that, for example, involves medication, some of this won't work. I think most of us have dysfunctional relationships with dopamine, but there are plenty who need a bit more help in getting things regulated. So take as much of this as works for you and discard the rest. All right, so given we spend around eight hours doing stuff that doesn't give us intrinsic motivation and doesn't induce flow. Where can we find it? How can we get into that flow state so we're not completely shagged out at the end of the day? We'll find out right after this break. Don't go anywhere. This podcast is supported directly by you. If you'd like to show your support for Undo and keep it free of ads, you can become a member of the Undo Book Club over at Undo FM Club. In return, you'll get extra bonus podcast content and every month I'll deliver an in depth review of a much lauded self help book so you can extract all the good stuff without the waffle. This month we're doing Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. Membership costs $5 a month and all the info you could ever need is@ undo fm/club. Okay, let's get back to it. Earlier on I played a clip from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a weird thing, but I think Douglas Adams had a lot of useful things to say about psychology and mental health than was realized at the time. One of his observations in the second series, yes, Hitchhikers was a radio show before it was a book or a TV thing, was that people would start bringing artificial constraints into their everyday work things to counter the advances in medicine. And there's something to that idea. It feels like most of our jobs these days involve sending and receiving emails. So what if you set yourself some challenges throughout the day to help move the task along the seesaw from boring to interesting? Why not set a goal to answer 10 emails in an hour or to communicate on instant messenger without using the letter N? What if you had to sneak the titles of Nickelback songs into your next presentation without getting caught? Or write a status report in the time it takes you to micro away for your lunch? Yeah, these are daft and I bet you could come up with better ideas. But the point is to introduce a challenge, something your brain can lock onto that feels satisfying to accomplish but ideally won't get you into trouble. You can use this stuff outside of work too. Why not set a time limit on doing the dishes or finishing the vacuuming before the end of your next podcast episode? Another thing you can do is set clear goals or keep the gamification element going. Last week we talked about the Pomodoro technique where you divide moments of focus up into 25 minute increments separated by 5 minutes of rest. For each Pomodoro you complete, give yourself 5 points, then award yourself a point for every 5 minutes of rest you get set out 2 or 3 clear and achievable objectives for the day, like solving a particular client's problem or prepping for a meeting, and make sure the stuff you're doing is aligned with that goal. Shower yourself with points when you achieve them and notice how your brain rewards you with a feeling of satisfaction. I started a daybook where I list the three things I want to do today. Fill in the pomodori, I complete jot down any thoughts that pop up while I'm in focus mode and keep track of good experiences throughout the day along with those that I've learned from keeping it going and reviewing it at the end of the day gives me another little boost, like the neurochemical equivalent of an Atta boy. It all adds up. You can get into flow outside of productivity too. Crosswords are really great for this, as I think are some video games, especially racing games or endless runners. But flow isn't the same as losing time on the toilet swiping through tinder profiles. There has to be an element of challenge involved, otherwise it's just like inhaling a bowl of Mac and cheese. Cheese enjoyable in the short term, but full of calories your body can't do anything good with. One of the core tenets of this podcast, and which will become part of the inevitable drinking game that follows, is that productivity is a capitalist agenda and that most of the advice exists to make us churn out more work under the illusion we have autonomy. So the ideas I'm sharing with you here are not about how to feed more work into the machine, but to keep your brain on an even keel so that when you get home you can spend part of your off hours doing something creative you love, you might have noticed the approaches I've talked about are based on intrinsic rewards, not extrinsic ones. Rather than rewarding yourself with a peanut after achieving a task like a good little monkey, the key is to set your brain challenges it can solve. Your brain likes to solve problems, and solving them comes with their own reward. Okay, it's not the pupil widening, explosive sugar rush you get from a tub of Ben and Jerry's, but because it doesn't give you the high, it won't give you the low that comes from your brain trying to find that all important equilibrium. Now, I don't know about you, but pretty much any time I hear people talk about happiness, I think, yeah, that's cute and everything, but who's got time? I've got a bunch of deadlines. I'm just trying to make ends meet. I've got friends, family, coworkers, and somehow my neighbors to manage. To quote a little from Father Ted, the farm takes up most of the day and at night I just like a cup of tea. So who has time for happiness? And I completely get it. I wonder though, if we're thinking about happiness in terms of the American Dream, like it's something we have to chase down with a star spangled shotgun. Happiness is not the credits at the end of the film where the characters amble off into the sunset to Walk of Life by Dire Straits. Depending on the decade you were coming up, happiness might be somewhere between laughable luxury or fanciful nonsense. So let's look at it another way. Instead of thinking about happiness as an eternal beach holiday where the drinks are free and your only concern is which seaside cafe to explore next, think instead about answering the question how are you? With the reply. Good, actually. Yeah, really good. Does that mean everything's perfect? Of course not. Life's going to hurl shit in our direction from time to time. There'll be death and sadness and soaring interest rates and high cholesterol, and your favorite TV show will get cancelled. But when you spend as much of your productive time in Flow as possible, you get better at turning into the skid rather than looking for quick escape routes. And if you have a day job, the more mental energy you have at the end of the day, the more of it you can channel into a creative practice that could lead to something greater or at the very least, lets you spend more time in Flow. Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. I'm going to share my experiences with Flow in just a sec, but in the meantime you can find links to more resources at Undo fm, which is also where you can sign up to receive new episodes directly up your inbox. I'm all over the Internet at hello Stedman, and I would love to hear from you. I'll be back again with you in just a tick, so stick around after this quick heads up. This here is not a commercial message, but a thank you. The response to the first few episodes of Undo has been nothing short of amazing. So to anyone and everyone who's binged the back catalogue or shared them with a friend, you have my heartfelt thanks. If you like the show but aren't in a position to support it financially, just telling people about it is the best way to help it grow. And if you ever have any questions or feedback for an episode, Hellondo FM is where you can find me. Alrighty, let's get to the shed. So, as I mentioned in the sort of main piece, I experience flow in a few different ways. Coding. Like I said, I grew up as a web developer, software developer, all that kind of stuff. So my brain very quickly can. Can get itself into flow and it really. I have experienced those moments of, oh my God, is that the time, you know, suddenly something, you know, you finish working on a problem, whatever, and then you look around and you suddenly go, why has everybody left the office and the lights are off? I've genuinely had those moments where I was working on a project so intense, intently that I hadn't noticed that the co working space I was in, everybody had left and they'd turn the lights off at some point, everybody had gone and it was suddenly 10 at night. Doesn't happen that often, but it can do. And there is also, you know, almost maybe a thing here to talk about, like how do you get yourself out of flow? And I think that's where external interruptions come in. You know, usually I think it's either you close the loop that's in your brain or someone else comes in and there's an external cue, or maybe your bladder is about to explode. Again, speaking from personal experience, but sometimes we want to be able to induce flow so that we can sort of get through a few, a few different tasks. And I think that's where maybe there is some combination here between the Pomodoro technique and this traditional idea of flow that Csikszentmihalyi has, where we are challenged enough to do something that might otherwise be a little bit boring. So I would love to know how this lands for you. I'd love to know your thoughts, your feedback, questions, anything like that. Hellondo FM is the email address where you can nab me and we'll have a chat about it. Until then, look forward to speaking to you next week.