How To Unlock Insane Focus On Command

Have you ever struggled to complete a task that should have taken 90 minutes, and after 8 hours of hard work, you still haven't finished well? There is a neuroscientific explanation for why this happens and a simple way to solve it behind the most successful program in the world. People advocate the four pillars of flow that allow anyone to become effortlessly productive. Now my name is Ryan Doris, co-founder and CEO of Research Collective along with my partner Stephen Cutler and we have taught thousands of professionals and organizations how to access Flow State at will so they can become dramatically more productive in their work lives it all comes down to to the four pillars of the flow state: first, there are the flow blockers, second, the flow pronus, third, the flow triggers and finally, and fourth, the flow cycle, these are the pillars that drive the brain . of the most productive people on the planet we'll cover that in a moment, but first, what is flow?

I want you to remember for a second the last time you were hyperproductive and totally absorbed in what you were doing which was flow. Now flow is a state of consciousness that makes work feel effortless have you experienced flow maybe when you were riding a bike surfing a wave making music singing dancing maybe working on a big project many of humanity's greatest achievements have happened in this state of flow Alex Honnold in the movie solo free was in a state of flow when he reached the top of El Capitan without a team Sam Altman and his team at openai when they were coding GPT chat, which has already changed the world, They were in a deep state of flow while doing so when Mari Curie did her pioneering research and Einstein finally discovered By discovering the theory of relativity, they were harnessing the power of flow to achieve these superhuman feats that propelled humanity forward and flow.

It's not just a metaphor; In fact, over ten thousand research articles on flow have found that the neurophysiological changes that occur during flow increase the exact skills that research has shown are most critical to thriving in the 21st century, such as learning, creativity, productivity. and the reason Alex, Sam, Marie and Einstein were able to achieve such feats is because of what happens in the body and brain. when the flow begins from the neurochemical cascade of dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide, serotonin, endorphins, alpha theta brain waves and the performance-enhancing alteration of the neuroanatomical changes that occur in the brain, in the flow, listen, it all sounds great , flow sounds like some sort of panacea that is working. to solve all your productivity and peak performance problems in an instant and that would be true if you could access a state of flow on demand, but the problem is that most of us can't do it until you train yourself in the four pillars of flow . will remain elusive and no place is less conducive to accessing flow with consistency and reliability than the 21st century workplace and the 21st century way of working, where fast-paced distractions plague us across the country and chronic stress sets in.

Just consider it the norm, you know, that's horrible. feeling overcaffeinated and plagued with productivity guilt for delaying what you know you should have been doing and then arriving at lunchtime with barely any work done, even though half the day was done well, yes Has this ever happened to you, it is due to the flow. blockers, if you were going to run a marathon first, you would have to make sure that you don't have some fundamental injury or health condition that would simply prevent you from doing it and it's kind of similar when it comes to Flow State because research shows We are evolutionarily programmed to flow, your brain and your body actually want to push you into a state of flow.

State when the condition is necessary most of the time. Our 21st century work style blocks flow at every turn. Think about it when you wake up in the morning. The first thing you look at well, if you're like 80 percent of people, you look at it within 15 minutes of waking up and it's full of flow blockers, distraction, uncertainty, task persistence, deficit, attention deficit, trait, and this thing is the source of more than a dozen. other flow blockers like a damn blockage that prevents a river from moving forward naturally. Now obviously this thing is your phone, so what's a tool to remove the most common source of stream blockers?

Well it's simple, we call it flow before phone, the golden rule is to get two. to three hours of productive flow on your highest priority task in the morning before turning on or, ideally, even touching that device is now easier said than done, it's hard to change ingrained habits, especially when the habit itself is tied to a device that is designed to be addictive, but once you try this and once you experience deeper and deeper flow states, the flow states you can access become more compelling and negate the addiction. Next we have the pronus flow, so let's say you've removed all the blockers and you can still.

Don't go into flow because this is what happens to a lot of people, it's because they missed the second thing which again is flow pronus, so using the marathon analogy, consider this your general fitness level because flow pronus is Simply your tendency to access flow and the probability of entering flow at any given time, we need to make our physiology, our body, our psychology up here and our environment conducive to flow propensity, to maximize our probability of accessing a flow. flow state, now the easiest way to do it is to wake up and get to work within 90 seconds of opening your eyes, it probably seems like something strange to you as a workaholic, but it's actually the opposite: do your most important work within the first two or three hours of the day.

A floating state will simply dramatically amplify productivity, you can relax much more the rest of the day. The neuroscientific reason for doing this is that your pronus flow is highest first thing in the morning. This works for several reasons, one of which is that Theta or Delta sleep brain waves are similar to Alpha Theta flow brain waves. As a bonus, the first 90 seconds of the morning are also before the rest of the world can impose its will on you, making it easier to

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. you removed the main source of flux blockers and have increased your flux pronus, so how do you actually activate flux directly?

This is where flow triggers come in. These are preconditions that instantly lead us to flow now in the family of 1960s psychologist Mihai Chic. Flo's godfather, who coined the term flow, identified several of these triggers and Stephen Cutler and other researchers have since identified Even more so, while mihai trixemihai pioneered psychological research on flow. Kotler pioneered neurobiological research on the state and is commonly considered the world's leading expert on flow. Now, the more triggers you have present in an activity at any time, the faster you will get into flow, the deeper the flow state will be, and The longer you will be able to maintain and sustain that state of flow.

Activities are naturally rich in flow triggers, such as browsing, playing music, video games, the first three flow triggers that Mihai Chic sent me. Clearly identified or clear goals. Immediate feedback and challenge. Balance of skills. So here's an example of each of these in action. Let's say you are surfing you see the wave you catch it you write down these are the clear objectives that will make you flow then you feel the balance on the board and the power of the waves this is immediate feedback to which you are taking action in response to the information you receive of the wave and as you continue surfing you ride waves of different sizes, of different difficulty and if you are a surfer the weight varies depending on your skill level to keep you engaged, what is the challenge skill balance in the game , now, that's all good. and good for surfing, but what about your job?

The trick is to take these triggers and add them to activities where they don't necessarily appear, so to apply this right away, you can adjust the balance of challenge skills by engaging in tasks that are about four percent harder than your current skill level. Our constant goal, as Mihai Chic sent me. The title of High's book suggests it is moving beyond boredom and anxiety. That is the sweet spot that leads to flow. Fourth pillar flow is rarely discussed, but it is the reason behind the Benson was a Harvard cardiologist and first wrote about it in his book called The Breakup Principle and then Stephen Cutler mapped it directly to flow in his book The What Rise of Superman tells us is that flow states are more like dimmer switches than light switches.

Now first there is fight. This is a loading phase which is when you first start a task the neurochemistry involved which is cortisol and norepinephrine. Writhing through discomfort makes us want to avoid the task, relieve ourselves of the discomfort and distract ourselves. The sad truth is that most people spend their entire careers in and out of the first few minutes of the fight phase and never persist long enough to achieve it. in flow, they are an inch deep in the job forever, so start by having Grace persist during the fight phase, this comes down to persistence on the task.

You can do this with something we call attention span stretching, so if you had a bar that was hanging. Of every day, research shows that if you did that, you would actually grow an inch in height Similarly, if you stretch your attention, your attention span becomes longer, for example, read a book from cover to cover, even if it's uncomfortable, even if you retain less. Get more sustained attention. You are training your intentional capacity. If you do a long meditation, just try adding another minute and another minute. The same with deep and

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ed work. Add another minute and then another.

Treat it like a Muscle Max off the reps and then the release happens once you reach. On the verge of struggling with the task or problem, maintaining true focus and attention as you persist, your brain increases dopamine, improves focus and motivation, eventually taking you out of the struggle through release and into the flow state itself. Then next we have flow, which is the state where I've been talking about this all this time during flow, the prefrontal cortex is deactivated to allow quick, instinctive and efficient decision making to occur. After the flow state itself, we have the recovery phase at the back of the flow, where we replenish ourselves and finish the stretch of neurochemistry that is. involved in flow or recovery after expending so much energy and we are integrating the knowledge or skills acquired during flow, so there you have the four pillars of flow that underline Elise's productivity, extreme achievements and hyperfocus on understanding and apply these pillars of flow. you can become consistently productive and achieve incredible results.

Our goal here is to take every peak performance research paper and flow and decipher it into easy-to-view, instantly applicable steps so that while you stay tuned to our channel, you develop the skill set to drive yourself. in a constant state of flux in which the critical skills that will thrive in the 21st century will be developed.