Flow state: why time flies when you are in the zone

Have you ever sat down to draw, play a game or practice a song, and then looked up to find that the whole afternoon had slipped away? You weren’t bored. You weren’t stressed. You were simply all the way in.

Psychologists have a name for this lovely feeling: the flow state. Scientists have spent decades trying to work out what it is, when it shows up, and what the brain is up to while we are in it.

A name for being “in the zone”

The idea comes from the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who introduced the flow concept in 1975. He wanted to explain something curious: why people do some activities for no reason but the activity itself, with no outside reward.

A 2022 review led by Corinna Peifer describes flow as a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption. It turns up when people face a challenging activity and feel they have the skills to cope with it. During flow, people are deeply motivated to keep going, and to come back and do it again.

Csikszentmihalyi described up to nine features of the experience:

• a challenge that matches your skills
• clear goals
• clear feedback on how you are doing
• deep concentration on the task
• a sense of control
• doing and noticing merge into one
• self-consciousness fades away
• your sense of time changes
• the activity feels rewarding in itself

That time one is the famous part. A 2021 review by Dimitri van der Linden, Mattie Tops and Arnold Bakker puts it simply: when people are in flow, time often seems to fly.

The sweet spot between bored and stressed

Flow research keeps coming back to one key ingredient. In Csikszentmihalyi’s early “flow channel” model, flow happens when a person’s skills meet the challenge in front of them. Later versions of the model added that both should be high, and in balance.

How strong is that link? In a meta-analysis of 28 studies, Carlton Fong, Diana Zaleski and Jennifer Leach found that the relationship between challenge-skill balance and flow was moderate. It was weaker in some settings, such as work or school, and among people from individualistic cultures. Even so, compared with other things thought to bring on flow, challenge-skill balance stood out as a robust contributor, together with clear goals and a sense of control.

Brain scientists now use this balance as a recipe in the lab. In one setup used in several studies, people solve mental arithmetic problems in three versions. One is too easy (“boredom”), one is too hard (“overload”), and in the third a computer keeps adjusting the difficulty to fit each person’s skill (“flow”). In a 2018 study by Kenji Katahira and colleagues, people rated the adjusted version highest on the questions that describe flow.

Flow at work? Really?

Here is a surprise. In 1989, Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre followed 78 adult workers for one week. At random moments through the day, the workers filled in short reports about what they were doing and how they felt. In this study, being in flow meant a moment of high challenge and high skill.

For nearly every measure of how good a moment felt, being in flow mattered more than whether people were at work or at leisure. The two exceptions were relaxation and motivation. And the great majority of flow moments were reported at work, not during leisure.

Yet whatever their experience was like, people said they felt more motivated during leisure than at work. So in this study, being in flow and wanting to be there did not always go together.

What flow looks like in the body

In 2010, Örjan de Manzano, Töres Theorell, László Harmat and Fredrik Ullén asked professional classical pianists to play a piece of music and then rate their flow. Each pianist played the piece five times, so that flow could vary while everything else stayed the same. Meanwhile, the researchers recorded their pulse, breathing, head movements and two facial muscles.

Flow was linked with heart period, blood pressure, heart rate variability, breathing depth and activity in one of the facial muscles, the zygomaticus major. The team suggested that flow is a state of “effortless attention,” which comes from positive feelings and high attention working together.

In 2015, Harmat, de Manzano and colleagues turned to a puzzle game. 77 people played Tetris at three levels: easy, optimal and difficult. The optimal level brought the highest flow, the most positive feelings and the most effortless attention. Higher flow came with deeper breathing, which the researchers read as a sign of a more relaxed state.

What is the brain up to?

In 2004, the neuroscientist Arne Dietrich offered a bold idea. He split the brain’s work into two systems. An explicit system, tied to the frontal lobe and to structures in the middle of the temporal lobe, is flexible and analytical. An implicit system holds skill-based know-how, supported mainly by the basal ganglia, and is more efficient.

Flow, he proposed, is when a well-practiced skill runs on the implicit system without interference from the explicit one. For that to happen, he suggested, the brain’s analytical and self-reflective abilities must be turned down for a while. He called this “transient hypofrontality,” and the 2022 review describes it as a predicted drop in activity in the prefrontal cortex.

So, do flow brains really go quiet up front? The answer so far is: partly, and not in the way you might think.

In 2014, Martin Ulrich and colleagues scanned 27 people with a type of fMRI while they did the boredom, flow and overload arithmetic tasks. During flow, activity rose in two areas: the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left putamen. It fell in two others: the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The researchers linked these changes to features of flow: a deeper sense of control, a higher expected chance of success, less thinking about oneself, and less negative arousal.

So one frontal area actually got busier, while an area tied to thinking about yourself got quieter. A 2016 follow-up with 23 men and much shorter task blocks found a similar picture. Activity rose in the anterior insula, the inferior frontal gyri, the basal ganglia and the midbrain. It fell in medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex and in the medial temporal lobe, including the amygdala.

Other studies have not found the frontal quieting at all. In the Tetris study, the researchers also tracked oxygen changes in the prefrontal cortex using near-infrared light. They found no link between frontal oxygen levels and flow, and so no support for hypofrontality. In a 2017 review, David Harris, Samuel Vine and Mark Wilson called the brain-imaging evidence for hypofrontality equivocal. They also saw clear signs of something else: reduced activity in brain regions linked to thinking about oneself, and a crucial role for higher-order attention networks.

Brainwaves and game brains

Katahira’s team also recorded brainwaves with EEG from 16 people doing the arithmetic tasks. Theta waves over the front of the head were higher in the flow and overload versions than in the boring one. Alpha waves over the front and the right center rose as the task got harder. Flow sat in a special spot: lots of frontal theta, with alpha only in the middle range. The team read the theta as a sign of high mental control and immersion, and the moderate alpha as a sign that working memory was not overloaded.

Video games make good flow labs, too. In 2018, Richard Huskey and colleagues ran three behavioral studies and one fMRI study with an open-source video game. When the game’s difficulty matched a player’s ability, players found it more rewarding in itself. In the brain, that balance came with stronger connections between key parts of the networks for mental control and for reward. When difficulty and ability did not match, activity rose in the default mode network. That is a set of brain areas that van der Linden’s team describes as linked to thinking about oneself and to mind-wandering.

Van der Linden’s team has put these pieces together into a proposal. They suggest that the brain’s dopamine and noradrenaline systems may power the drive to keep going, and that teamwork between three large brain networks may support the deep focus, low self-talk and feeling of control. They present this as a set of ideas to guide future research, not a settled answer.

So what is flow, really?

The 2022 review gathered 252 flow studies published between 2000 and 2016. Its authors conclude that research has made real progress, but more experiments and long-term studies are needed to sort out what causes flow and what flow leads to.

Still, a gentle picture is taking shape. Flow shows up when a challenge fits our skills just right. Attention pours into the task, the chatter about ourselves quiets down, and the clock seems to speed up. It isn’t a switch that turns the thinking brain off. It looks more like a brain that has rearranged itself to be all in, for the simple joy of the thing itself.

#flow state #attention #motivation #prefrontal cortex #everyday brain

Sources

1. A scoping review of flow research. Peifer C, Wolters G, Harmat L, et al. Frontiers in Psychology 13, 815665 (2022)
2. Go with the flow: a neuroscientific view on being fully engaged. van der Linden D, Tops M, Bakker AB. European Journal of Neuroscience 53, 947–963 (2021)
3. The challenge–skill balance and antecedents of flow: a meta-analytic investigation. Fong CJ, Zaleski DJ, Leach JK. The Journal of Positive Psychology 10, 425–446 (2015)
4. Optimal experience in work and leisure. Csikszentmihalyi M, LeFevre J. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56, 815–822 (1989)
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10. Neurocognitive mechanisms of the flow state. Harris DJ, Vine SJ, Wilson MR. Progress in Brain Research 234, 221–243 (2017)
11. EEG correlates of the flow state: a combination of increased frontal theta and moderate frontocentral alpha rhythm in the mental arithmetic task. Katahira K, Yamazaki Y, Yamaoka C, Ozaki H, Nakagawa S, Nagata N. Frontiers in Psychology 9, 300 (2018)
12. Does intrinsic reward motivate cognitive control? A naturalistic-fMRI study based on the synchronization theory of flow. Huskey R, Craighead B, Miller MB, Weber R. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 18, 902–924 (2018)