Daniel Goleman: Focus, Flow, and Frazzle

The bestselling author of "Focus" describes the relationship between performance and stress.

[DimaDesu]

I follow everything this guy is saying. Super relevant to my life right now! Thanks so much! I'll go now to do anything does not matter what to get out of boredom and get into flow! I'm a flow addict from now!

[MrHitchslap]

AMAZINGLY SAID! I experience this all the time and I've thought about it alot,  and this all strikes me as crazy good news cause it's a win win! Like he said its a quiet joy and we do our best at it!

[Simmy]

If you actually want a scientific answer to creating flow please never consult Daniel Goleman. His journalistic renderings of many topics (e.g., Emotional Intelligence, Focus) are often ripped off from others, distorted, oversimplified, and in many cases flat wrong. Take flow. Flow is not about optimal levels of stress, as Goleman posits. Flow comes from research by Csikszentmihalyi and represents a state where you are completely immersed in what you are doing (such as a rock climber who just gets lost in climbing for hours). The conditions for flow reflect the optimal combination of two things: challenge and skill. If something isn't challenging enough, you find it boring. If it isn't at your current skill level, you experience anxiety. In fact, many of the case studied of flow by Csikszentmihalyi reflect people who experience no stress whatsoever and are simply wholeheartedly engaged in an activity they find interesting. This includes artists lost in their paintings, doctors absorbed by a surgery, or musicians engaged in a concert.

[ajmarr]

Why the Flow Model is illogical: A contrarian perspective on Flow from the perspective of affective neuroscience
(also agree with earlier comment that flow does not include any physiological indicators of stress). And yup, Goleman is a hack.

On the surface, the graphical representation of the flow channel is simple to understand. When you arrange a demand/skill match, flow happens. For any task, the problem is that although demand moves up or down dependent upon the exigencies of the moment, skill should be relatively stable during or within the performance, and only change, and for the most part gradually between performances. Thus, one may accomplish a task that from moment to moment varies in demand, but the skills brought to that task are the same regardless of demand. What this means is that for any one-performance set, skill is not a variable, but a constant. That is, one cannot adjust skill against demand during performance because skill can only change negligibly during performance, or in other words does not move. Thus, for performance that requires any skill set, the only variable that can be manipulated is demand. For moment to moment behavior the adjustable variable that elicits flow is demand and demand alone. But that leaves us with figuring out what demand exactly is.
A demand may be defined as simple response-outcome contingency. Thus, if you do X, Y will occur or not occur. It is thus inferred that demand entails a fully predictable means-end relationship or expectancy. But the inference that the act-outcome expectancy is always fully predictable is not true. Although a response-outcome is fully predictable when skill overmatches demand, as demand rises to match and surpass skill, uncertainty in the prediction of a performance outcome also rises. At first, the uncertainty is positive, and reaches its highest level when a skill matches the level of demand. This represents a ‘touch and go’ experience wherein every move most likely will result in a positive outcome in a calm or non-stressed state. It is here that many individuals report euphoric flow like states. Passing that, the moment-to-moment uncertainty of a bad outcome increases, along with a corresponding rise in tension and anxiety.
Momentary positive uncertainty as a logical function of the moment to moment variance occurring when demand matches skill does not translate into a predictor for flow, and is ignored in Csikszentmihalyi’s model because uncertainty by implication does not elicit affect. Rather, affect is imputed to metaphorical concepts of immersion, involvement, and focused attention that are not grounded to any specific neurological processes. However, the fact that act-outcome discrepancy in relaxed states alone has been correlated with specific neuro-chemical changes in the brain that map to euphoric, involved, timeless, or immersive states, namely the co-activation of dopamine and opioid systems due to continuous positive act/outcome discrepancy and relaxation, narrows the cause of flow to abstract elements of perception rather than metaphorical aspects of performance. These abstract perceptual elements denote information and can easily be defined and be reliably mapped to behavior.
A final perceptual aspect of demand that correlates with the elicitation of dopamine is the importance of the result or goal of behavior. Specifically, dopaminergic systems are activated by the in tandem perception of discrepancy and the predicted utility or value of result of a response contingency. The flow model maps behavior to demand and skill, but not only is skill fixed, so is the importance of the goal state that predicates demand. However, the relative importance of the goal state correlates with the intensity of affect. For example, representing a task that matches his skills, a rock climber calmly ascending a difficult cliff would be euphoric if the moment to moment result was high, namely avoiding a fatal fall, but would be far less so if he was attached to a tether, and would suffer only an injury to his pride is he were to slip. Finally, the flow experience correlates also with a state of relaxation and the concomitant activation of opioid systems along with a dopamine induced arousal state that together impart a feeling of euphoria, which would also be predicted as choices in flow are singular and clear and therefore avoid perseverative cognition. It is the sense of relaxation induced pleasure and a feeling of attentive arousal that constitutes the flow experience.

I offer a more detailed theoretical explanation in pp. 47-52, and pp 82-86 of my open source book on the neuroscience of resting states, ‘The Book of Rest’, linked below.

The Psychology of Rest