It wasn’t intentional, that’s the first thing to know. Certainly, action and adventure athletes have found flow more frequently than most, but much of their
success has been accidental.
Take external triggers, our starting point. These are qualities in the environment that drive people deeper into the zone. One tamer example comes from office design. In recent years, as the production of flow has been deemed critical to the success of organizations, organizations have reacted by trying to design environments that produce more flow. As flow requires focus, one of the first changes suggested by experts was the removal of cubicle farms, those open office plans that permit constant interruption. “These interruptions…move us out of ‘flow’ and increase research-and-design cycle times and costs dramatically,”
writes Greylock Partners venture capitalist James Slavet on Forbes.com.
“Studies have shown that each time a flow state is disrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all.”
Yet if focus is the goal, then rearranging office furniture is the long way around. Action and adventure athletes cheat this process with fundamental biology. Evolution hardwired humans to pay attention to certain stimuli more than others and, as these athletes have discovered, nothing catches our attention quite like danger.
Humans evolved in an era of immediacy, where threats were always of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Immediate threats require immediate responses, and this fact has shaped our brain more than any other. Consider information processing. Every second, our senses gather way more data than we can actually handle. As a result, much of what the brain does is tease apart the critical from the casual. Since nothing is more critical than survival, the first stop most of this incoming information makes is our danger detector: the amygdala.
An almond-shaped sliver of the temporal lobe, the amygdala is responsible for primal emotions like hate, anger, and fear. It’s our early warning system, an organ always on high alert. With most incoming sensory information heading there, when there’s danger lurking in the environment, we don’t have to rely on artificial forces like office design to drive attention. Merely by plying their trade in a “high consequence” environment—with high consequence being the first of the external triggers we’ll be examining—extreme athletes rely on risk to drive focus, the requisite first step toward producing flow.
Another way to think about this is “hacking.” The term comes from electronics, wherein hackers were originally found (the word has since taken on darker connotations), those interested in tinkering with technology in an attempt to improve performance. In this case, instead of hacking “external” technologies like computers and telephones, our focus is on hacking “internal” technologies
—our own psychology and neurology. As such, we’ll be using flow hack and flow hacker to refer to any action that helps propel people into flow, and anyone performing such an action, respectively. In these terms, extreme athletes use risk as a “flow hack” because flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention.
But consequences do more than catch our attention: they also drive
neurochemistry. As risk increases, so do norepinephrine and dopamine, the feel-good chemicals the brain uses to amplify focus and enhance performance.
Because norepinephrine and dopamine feel really good, playing with this trigger often produces long-lasting effects: risk takers are transformed into risk seekers. “There was a rush,” Doug Ammons once wrote, “and for that moment we couldn’t tell the difference between joy and the grab in our throat, but we knew without saying that it was a new path. And from that point on nothing seemed the same.”
Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward. An entirely new relationship with fear begins to develop. When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass—
literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next (i.e., the direction that produces more flow). “If you’re interested in mastery,” says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, “you have to learn this lesson. To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk—you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.”
When these athletes actually take a risk (putting themselves in a high-consequence situation rather than a high-risk environment), an even bigger neurochemical response is facilitated. Risk taking itself releases another big squirt of dopamine, further enhancing performance and increasing pattern recognition. Once the pattern-recognition system lights onto the proper response (i.e., identifies the chunk that will save the athlete’s hide in this particular situation), even more dopamine is released and the cascade continues.
As we know these facts, we also know a bit about hacking the “high consequence” flow trigger. For starters, risk is always relative. While some danger must be courted for flow, confrontations with mortality are not required.
In fact, even physical risk itself is optional. A shy man need only cross the room to say hello to an attractive woman to trigger this rush. In casual conversation, merely telling someone the truth can serve the same purpose. “To reach flow,”
explains Harvard psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, “one must be willing to take risks. The lover must lay bare his soul and risk rejection and humiliation to enter this state. The athlete must be willing to risk physical harm, even loss of life, to enter this state. The artist must be willing to be scorned and despised by critics and the public and still push on. And the average person—you and me—
must be willing to fail, look foolish, and fall flat on our faces should we wish to enter this state.”
What all of this adds up to is options. Certainly, risk is needed for flow, but if you don’t want to take physical risks, take mental risks. Take social risks.
Emotional risks. Creative risks. Especially creative risks. The application of imagination—one very shorthand definition of creativity—is all about mental chance taking. And the risk is real. Loss of respect, loss of resources, loss of
time—the consequences of betting on a bad idea can certainly threaten survival.
Yet, if we’re going to hack flow by trading mental risks for physical risks
—and especially if we want the same kind of accelerated performance seen today in extreme athletes—then our commitment to the process better be ferocious. Why? Because today’s action and adventure athletes aren’t just occasionally pulling the high-consequence flow trigger; they’re squeezing hard and all the time.
Action and adventure sports are packed with do-or-die moments.
Traditional athletics, in contrast, are cushioned by the artifice of the game. In basketball, the only time one can launch a game-winning buzzer beater—the riskiest shot—is in the last seconds of play. And the worst thing that can happen if that shot goes wide? Being benched for the next game. But action and adventure sports have an unflinching referee: the laws of physics. A surfer who doesn’t commit completely to every inch of a big wave ends up begging for mercy at the bottom of the impact zone.
Thus, if we want the accelerated performance of these athletes, we need their ferocious commitment as well. More than that, we need to understand that risk is only the first of our external triggers, and flow hackers have plenty more choices available. In fact, it was these additional choices that Ammons was counting on to help him survive the Stikine.