Flow States and Peak Performance Aging with Steven Kotler

9:59AM Aug 1, 2023

Speakers:

Angela Foster

Steven Kotler

Keywords:

flow

peak performance

people

day

work

talking

dopamine

ageing

skills

recovery

bunch

performance

years

produces

brain

book

challenge

feel

call

state

When most people hear motivation must think about, oh god, I gotta I gotta do this thing. The only tool they reach for is grit. I'm just gonna fucking tough it out. I'm just gonna do this right. That is a recipe for burnout. You're listening to the high performance health podcast helping you optimise your health performance and longevity. My name is Angela Foster, and I'm a former corporate lawyer and high performance health coach. Each week, I bring you cutting edge bio hacks, inspiring insights and high performance habits to unlock optimal health performance and longevity. So excited that you've chosen to join me today. Now let's dive in.

Hi friends. In today's podcast episode, we're going to be talking about two of my favourite topics peak performance and longevity and specifically peak performance ageing. My guest is Steven Kotler, the executive director of the flow research collective, and one of the world's leading experts on human performance. Stephen is a New York Times best selling author and award winning journalist and the author of 11 bestsellers, including three of my personal favourites, no country, the art of impossible and the rise of Superman. In a 10 year study McKinsey found that accessing a flow state makes you 500% more productive. I don't know about you, but I would like more of that. And in this episode, you'll learn how to access a flow state more often what the key prerequisites to flow are. And perhaps more importantly, what are the flow blockers. We also talk about the cool things that happen in the brain in your 40s and 50s. If you're doing the right things. I'm really excited for this. So let's dive into the world of flow and peak performance agent. So Steven, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you here today, you have been such an inspiration to me, we were talking there offline about my background in corporate law, which is probably the most kind of anti flow environment. And I spent the last few years really kind of studying flow and how to achieve more of it. I love your books I've just recently finished in our country. First of all, a very warm welcome to

the show. Thanks for having me. It's good to be with you.

Awesome. Let's kick off with I know you wrote in our country in in lockdown, essentially, I think that's where it started when all the ski slopes and things were closed. What prompted that?

So this is the hardest question to answer, because there's like 19 things that all came together in that really tight time window. The very short answer is the shortest answer I can probably give is not our country's book called Peak Performance at peak performance. Ageing is a field that only emerged in probably the past four or five years. And it's the blended result of about 15 different fields coming together. One of those fields is flow science flow has chicks me Hi, the godfather of flow psychology wrote four or five books about flow as a driver, an engine for adult development flow. We on the other side of flow states, we're not just more skilled, we don't just gain mastery and learning and flow. Our skills increase of course, but so just wisdom and empathy, all these kind of drivers ago development. So all Anyways, that's all background. On paper, there have been these wild discoveries, essentially, everything we thought we knew about ageing. What I like to summarise is like the long slow rot theory, which I'm sure you've heard of, it's what most of us grew up under, right? This is the idea that our mental skills that are physical skills decline over time, and there's nothing we can do to stop this slide. So it turns out the past 20 years, all of that's been turned on its head and disproven. In the lab, we've now discovered that all the skills, we thought we're using lucid skills, or we thought were just skills that that fade over time, we now know the user loses skills. So if you've never stopped using them, you get to hang on to them even advance them far later in life, anybody thought possible, or that was the theory. And so lockdown happens. And all these things sort of come together. And I decide it's time to put the theory to test to really take it into the world and try it out. And so I take a bunch of the ideas out of out of out of performance agent and blend them together, see if this things is true, I should be able to learn an incredibly difficult challenging skill in my 50s. And I chose Park skiing. For a lot of personal reasons. I had a lot of motivation to learn how to park skate, but you've got to understand parks games, this discipline that involves doing tricks off jumps on boxes, and rails and wall rides. And it's very acrobatic, and it's pretty dangerous. And for like 11 different reasons. It's considered like once you get over the age of 30, it's very difficult. Don't bother trying to learn once you get to 40. It's almost downright impossible. By the time you're 50. They just think you're crazy. Like nobody tries to learn this stuff in their 50s. So that's what I did. And the book tells the story of that experiment and the experiment worked. And then we reran that experiment with what I ran an experiment with a friend of mine so there were two data points in the original study. And then we took The same ideas, came back a year later and took 17 people and ages 30 to 70 and put them through the exact same protocol. And in four days on the mountain taught basically intermediate skiers and snowboarders how to park ski and snowboard, and you don't take my word for it, you've got it in our country,

regardless of age, even like up to the age. You go,

I mean, so it's so good in our country.com. And there's a peak performance ageing video, we had a National Geographic camera and follow us around. One of the ways we assessed everything is they judge freeskiing and the Olympics by a very set criteria. So we filmed everything we did from the first day on the health of the last day. And then we assembled an independent panel of judges to rate progress based on the same Olympic criteria they use to judge freeskiing. And so like and by the way, it was like a 36% increase in progress among our athletes and four days on this now and we're talking even people who were in their late 60s. And so it's pretty, it was pretty successful. And that's the story told in the book, essentially, that's the story in our country and that, but that's why it was sort of COVID brought a lot of things to the fore. And one was just the idea that it was time to like really test these things and hammer on them. And so that's what I did.

Awesome. Awesome. It's a brilliant book. I love it. Let's talk about flow. First of all, because most people have now heard of flow. I think and most people want to I think it's fair to say want to experience more flow in their life. How can you explain for those that might not be familiar with it fully? Or want to understand it better? What essentially is flow? And how do we know that we're in flow?

That's a great question. So flow scientifically, if we're defining it, technically, it's an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. That doesn't get us very far. But that's the definition of flow. What it refers to is any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption is so focused on what you're doing so focused on the task at hand, that everything else starts to melt away action and awareness are gonna emerge. Your sense of self self consciousness, your inner critic that voice in your head that nagging always on defeat this voice in your head gets really quiet. I'm strangely dilate, sometimes it'll slow down that freeze frame effect, my identity has been in a car crash, but much more frequently. It speeds up and like we get so sucked into what we're doing. Five hours go by, and like five minutes and throughout all aspects of performance, but mental and physical go through the roof. And that is not hyperbole. There's all kinds of different studies just give you some numbers from some of them. McKinsey, the business consultancy, wanted to know how much more productive and motivated are top executives in flow than out of flow. They spent 10 years they went around the globe talking to people, on average, it was 500% more productive. That's it. Shiny, step extraordinary thing and you would if normally, anytime somebody trots out a number like 500% more productive, you should call bullshit like right away. And a lot of researchers did. And then you start to see the other numbers the US Department of Defence does a study on soldiers and flow how much faster than normal do they learn 240 to 500% faster than normal work done by ourselves at Harvard and some of the University of Sydney found that were 400 to 700%, more creative in flow. And that's all aspects of creativity is measuring around the problem. That's why this numbers go all over the place. But we see the same thing with happiness well being overall life satisfaction. In fact, psychologists now know that flow is so important to all of those categories that when psychologists define happiness, there are three levels of happiness achieved by all humans. The top two tiers have flow built into the definition, so foundational to happiness, meaning well being purpose. And on the other side of flow, it's not just these like very measurable, clear skills, you also see a huge increase in empathy. wisdom, wisdom is a measurable skill. It's mostly emotional intelligence writ large, but it's a measurable skill. It's a discrete skill in the brain. So anyways, everything goes through the roof and flow and physical stuff to strength, stamina, fast twitch muscle response, endurance, we can keep going.

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How do you know if you're in flow? This was the chick sent me his first major discovery. We call him the godfather of flow psychology because he went around the world talking by everybody could about the times in their life, when they felt their best, they perform their best. And everybody said the same thing. When I'm at my best. I'm in this altered state of consciousness where every decision every action flows seamlessly, perfectly effortlessly from the last. That's why we call flow flow. Because once exactly how I went around the world talking to 10s of 1000s people one of the largest studies ever performed in psychology actually, everybody use that same term. He also discovered that flow states have six core characteristics. That's how you know if you're in flow, they all show up. So I've mentioned a bunch of these as we're going along, complete concentration on the task at hand the merge of action awareness to vanish and itself time passing strangely, we don't feel peak performance on the inside, right. That's what I look at you in flow and it looks like you're performing your best I see peak performance, what you feel is a sense of control. Oh my god, I can draw things I can't normally control the basketballs no longer basketball hoop is no longer tiny. It looks as big as a whole loop I can't miss. Or I'm a writer and my sentences are doing amazing things on the page for like 5am on a Monday morning, what the hell is going on? Right? That's what it feels like I'm controlling things I can't normally control. And finally, there's this euphoric sense. To call it just call autotelic means an end in itself means this experience is so damn delicious, that I'm gonna go really far out of my way to get more of it, right. And those six qualities are how we define flow. It's also how we measure flow. So if I want to know, were you in a state of micro flow, when all those characteristics showed up at like one or two versus macro flow, where they're all six show up and they're turned up to 11. We can measure the intensity those characteristics, we can measure it they show up. Now there's a little bit of an ongoing argument. Little bit, it's probably an understatement. How many of them do you need all of them, she sent me Tsehai said you need all of them. People have gone back and forth. In fact, I think in rises Superman, I went one way. And I think I've probably changed my mind by stealing fire on I think I've gone a bunch of different ways on this. We need more data. But it does appear that all six need to show up at some percent. But they don't all show up at once they come on gradually. We know for example, time distorts before I sense itself disappears. And we know why that happens. Why does it happen? So time distorts for three different reasons. The first is that dopamine levels in the brain, when there's more dopamine in the brain it with the world speeds up when there's less dopamine in the brain, it slows down. So that's very short, at the medium term. So as we move into flow, a bunch of different things happen in the brain, one of the things that happens is there's a deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex part of the brain that's right back here, very crucial part of the brain. This is higher cognitive functions, sense of morality, sense of willpower, long term planning, logical decision making. In flow, there's this efficiency exchange, you need all this energy for paying attention to the task at hand. So the brain has a fixed energy budget, it's always trying to conserve energy. So what it starts to do is it shuts down non critical structures to the task at hand and repurpose that energy to pay attention to what's going on. And a large portions of the prefrontal cortex go down time is a calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex and it's a network basically As that network collapses, like any network, we lose our ability to separate past and present from future. We've all had that experience of all that eternal present the elongated now, right time stretching out, that's happening, because past and future are vanishing. This has big performance implications as well. So most of our anxieties we talked about before this show that anxiety is really bad for peak performance, anxiety, blocks flow. Most of our anxieties are things that either took place in the past and want to avoid, we're steering around them in the present, but they're scary things that could happen in the future, right in we're trying to steer around them from the present. And when I remove those things, anxiety levels plummet. In fact, stress hormones get flushed out of our system at that moment, and nitrous oxide, pushes them out of our system and replaces them with a bunch of feel good performance, enhancing neuro chemistry that underpins flow. So that's sort of the transition into flow.

When we talk about when we talk about dopamine there, I know that obviously, there's two forms of dopamine want to avoid those. But when we talk about dopamine, people process this in different ways. And you can look, I think there's a gene, the comt gene, that kind of regulates dopamine, one thing I've found is there's there's a bunch of people, right who need a degree of pressure that they feel to get their best work done. And they almost need to create when we're looking at time, a little bit of time boundary around something. And there are other people who naturally need to be more organised. And they want to have this perception of time. And they can say, that makes them more productive. Otherwise, they're gonna experience anxiety at the kind of the extreme ends of the spectrum. So some people need the pressure of time. But that seems like a flow blocker. And some people also, like, process dopamine more quickly. My question would be, I know we have that struggle phase. And we can talk about the phases before you get into flow. For me, if I have set aside a whole day, it can be harder to discipline myself to get down to it. And that struggle phase can feel longer. If I have a set period of time in which I'm going to tackle a piece of work, sometimes it's easier to access. But I think the the boundaries of that time are quite critical in that. I'm curious, you've worked with so many people on this, what you found is the best way to achieve that peak level. And whether it is different for different people in that sense.

Yes, it is different for different people. And what you're actually talking about is the flow states. Two things to know. First, let's go back to what you mentioned. They're not binary, you're not in the zone or out of the zone, it's flow is actually a four stage cycle starts with the struggle face. This is the actually the opposite of flow, which is a loading phase, you're learning skills, you're onboarding new skills, and it's frustrating by design, literally, the more frustrated you get, the better off you are for a bunch of different neurobiological reasons. So in peak performance, frustration, designing moving in the right direction. This is followed by an incubation phase, what's known as release, you got to take your mind off the problem work really hard, thinking about it struggling on it, take your mind off the problem. low grade physical activity tends to work best studies have shown that building model aeroplanes or models with their hands is really great gardening. You can work out but you can't don't want to get tired, you just want to distract yourself. Long walks in nature, tend to work best philosophers forever have argued for this a lot of philosophers, they call themselves walking philosophy as a whole category, philosophers who went walking in mountains to trigger their ideas. This is why and Einstein famously used to sail a sailboat into the middle of Lake Geneva for this. And a funny tidbit about Einstein is he couldn't swim and he was a shitty sailor. So at Lake Geneva is round all these freak storms because of where it sits in the Alps. And so Einstein, this was part of his process, you'd struggle a lab and then it would sail his boat out for this release phase, and the storms would blow and you'd have to get rescued again. And again, it wouldn't stop because it was part of his process. On the other side of that there's the flow state itself. And then on the back end, there's a recovery phase, what goes up must come down, right and flows are very energetic state to produce. There's a recovery phase where you need deep delta wave sleep and you need a bunch of other things right on the back end of flow. Now, that's big macroscopic picture. This is the map of where you are, so you know where you are at various times in the first cycle. To move from one stage to the next, there are 26 known flow triggers three conditions that lead to more flow. They all work the same way. flow follows focus. So all the triggers drive attention in the present moment. Now they do it a bunch of different ways. One of the ways they do it is by driving dopamine into our system. So dopamine and all neural chemicals are multi tools. So one of the reasons people get confused around neural chemicals is because they don't they think, Well, I heard it does this and it does this. And yes, they do. Doesn't evolution is conservative by design was the works, that will get used again and again and again and again. So dopamine does, like 11,000 different things in the brain. That's a huge exaggeration. But in peak performance, it plays a lot of roles. One of the most important ones is it drives attention. And so when dopamine is in our system, we're excited. We're alert, we're awake, we're paying attention to know what's in front of us. We're psyched about it. A curious about of flows, triggers and this answer your question, the most important one is known as the challenge skills balance. This is the idea we talked about before the show a little bit that we pay the most attention to task at hand, when the challenge that tests slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. And she except me, hi, the godfather of flow psychology, put a number on it. We sat down with Google mathematician, we talked about this. He said the difference about 4%, meaning we pay the most attention the task at hand when the challenge about 4% greater than our skill set. Now, what does that number actually mean? First of all, we have around that number, a bunch of the flow research collective and likes something i We agree with. And we think it's a deadly, accurate metaphor. But there's no real can't find a way to test it. I can't tell you, it's real. I can tell you that we've hammered on it for years. And we think it's real, but I don't think it's the best practical metaphor I can give you. But 4% means if you're meek, shy, timid, scared, and remember, those are situational things. Nobody is me shy, timid, scared all the time, in every situation. Certain in certain situations, where more or less are those things, right, but when you're on that side of the spectrum, 4% is tricky, because you're just outside your comfort zone. So you've got to get really comfortable being uncomfortable, right? It's going to be feel edgy, it's gonna feel like you're pushing yourself, it's gonna feel scary a little bit, or hard charging type A types that 4% as a problem, because part charters like to take on problems that are 50% greater than your skill set for the thrill of it, it keeps us awake, right? And right, those big, big challenges are important that drive motivation effect at a really basic level. But what you have to do is chunk them down to what's right in front of you is 4%. What you're doing the day is 4% The big problem, maybe 50%. But today's portion is just 4%. And that's how you approach it. Now you asked questions about procrastination one. So what you've noticed, which is very true, people aren't we are hardwired as human beings for peak performance. And we will naturally move in the direction of peak performance. We don't know we're doing it. So we have other names for this. Procrastination is one name for this. So when we are procrastinating, what are you doing? You're saying, Wow, the challenge skills balance is not tuned enough. I'm bored. There's not enough stimulation here, I can't pay any fucking attention. So I'm going to delay until the night before the paper is due. Because now you got my full attention and I got a chance to getting into flow and read a kickass paper, we're designed for peak performance, we will move naturally in that direction. If you're overwhelmed, that's the other side, right? Too much anxiety, you're putting off the beer procrastinate because the anxiety is too overwhelming. Now what you have to do is chunk it down. So it becomes this small, tiny little thing that you can just do one tiny little bit of today and another tiny bit tomorrow. Because the problem is now too big. It's out of whack. Different people have a differently it sounds like you were somebody who likes time stress, a little bit of time stress gets the best at you. I'm sure it's not that not true in every situation. Sure, there are situations where time stress works against you. But in certain situations in the ones we're talking about assume stress is beneficial for you. And time stress, it tends to work against creativity. We know that because we have the anterior cingulate cortex works. So there's certain things that are not going to work well around time stress. So you know, if you have a logical PowerPoint to build, probably okay to delay that one. But if you've got a poem to write, probably not okay, earlier rather than later kind of thing.

Yeah, very true. And actually, the creative ideas I find come to me, mostly when I'm not looking for them, right, they pop up I could be walking in nature to kind of some of the activities you've described. And then it's a case of like, grabbing them it's almost like the universe delivers them to you and you need to note them down. Yeah, they can kind of go

There's a famous poem by I cannot remember her name right God I can't remember name. Oh, there's a fam about trying to catch a poem before it like is it before it passes by you in a few yield like it comes on like a wind and you got to catch it before it's gonna pass you by. Um, I think that's true for a lot of experiences of creativity, and a lot of it has to do with the anterior cingulate cortex, which I mentioned earlier. So it does a bunch of different stuff in the brain. But one of the things that does is it helps us detect a remote association between ideas pattern recognition. Now, by the way, dopamine amplifies pattern recognition. So dopamine because it boosts our mood calms us down makes us happier and allows the anterior cingulate the ability to find these remote associations, the more fear the less remote associations why when you're scared, the brain doesn't want a novel creative solution wants something tried and true. That's going to work 100% Of Time guaranteed, right? I got it like, I'm gonna fight I don't don't give me some novel solution, I gotta win, or I'm gonna die kind of thing. And this happens, most extreme version, we know it's fight or flight, right? You get really scared the brands is Oh, shit, I You can't have a lot of options. You can freeze, you can flee, you can fight those, you have three. That's it. In fact, one level up of that the most extreme example of this is extreme pain, and extreme pain, there's only one option, there's no choice, you can only think about the pain, there's nothing else to think about if you've ever broken about, right, it's just it's entirely you're focusing on one thing I'm saying it's all encompassing, so fight or flight. So interestingly, flow and group flow, which is the shared collective versus the exact opposite end of the spectrum. So we often as a really technical, weird detail, but you may like it, we were told by Freud, that the spectrum is pleasure, pain, we run towards pleasure, and we avoid pain. And for all this one, essentially, we thought that was true. We thought that was the how humans did motivation, we run towards pleasure, we run from pain. And it turns out, it's not true. And the reason we know this is group flow and flow are the people's favourite experiences on Earth. And yet, if you've ever been in flow, as an athlete, you know, you can be in extreme pain and still be in flow, you can be working incredibly hard, and you're still in flow flow shows up when we're sweating and pushing ourselves and often in pain, we don't notice we don't care. But physically, it doesn't feel good. Why do we prefer that flow more than anything, it's because of choice. We like options in flow are performing at our best. And so whatever direction we go in, we have the best chance of success. It's 360 degree choice and freedom. Whereas extreme pain, there's no freedom, we have one choice, we can think about the pain, that's all we can do. Next up the scale, fight or flight, and I and then you get to flow and group flow, which is the shared seen version of it. We like even better people prefer group flow to flow. This is the actual favourite experience on earth. And the reason is, it maximises creativity and innovation. That group is always more creative, more effective than the individual. And when the group is in flow and performing at their best, they have maximum options. Whatever direction they go in, they've got the greatest chance of success. And that's the actual spectrum of human experience.

Interesting, which is why it's more fun actually dancing with other people, right? It's kind of a group flow situation, when you talk about the pain there. And you're saying you can be in pain and experience flow. You also talk about in the book that we must try to avoid too much grit, which I think is what was happening when I was practising law, because that is linked to willpower, so it's depleting. How does that transition then between flow moving into kind of gritting it out? How can you avoid that? Great,

great question. So when psychologists talk about motivation, it's a big category. There's extrinsic motivation, external rewards money, sex, fame, things, we're going to work hard rewards. And out there in the world. There's intrinsic motivators. The big five are curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. There's the five internal drivers that create the most motivation. Then there's grit, and resilience, right? Those are in the end goal setting. This is the full suite of motivations. When you talk about motivation, that's what you're talking about. When most people hear motivation, most people think about, oh, God, I got it, I gotta do this thing. The only tool they reach for is grit. I'm just gonna fucking tough it out. I'm just gonna do this. Right. And that is a recipe for burnout, period. It's just a recipe for burnout. And but invariably, it's what most people do, but what really good peak performers do is grid as the last resort, it's because as you pointed out, it's limited on a day to day basis. It's linked to willpower, which is linked to energy levels, and states of consciousness. So if you want to reset willpower, you actually have to alter your consciousness you have to sleep. If the eat you have to meditate, you have to like, get into flow, you have to do something. It otherwise it just depletes over time. And it does that anyways, even if you do all those things, it's going to deplete over time until you get a night's sleep. So, you know, this is why good people, people on goal setting will say start your day with your hardest task first, right always are your biggest win first, because you're gonna have the most energy the most focus at the start you wouldn't willpower is highest at the start of your circadian cycle. Besides the point here, peak performers will instead of reaching for grit, they'll say, Oh, can I get this through autonomy or mastery, let me give you an example. I was a journalist, I was a freelance journalist when I started out my career. And in order to make my living, I had to be writing like 40 stories at once. And I would pitch five stories a day to a different magazine. And every day, seven days a week and just like keep pitching, I was always doing stories. And invariably I get stories that I I'm curious about almost anything, but sooner or later, you'd find this story, I was just like, I'm doing this, this is the money, right? Or I did for years, I went to Hollywood, I did a bunch of celebrity interviews, covers magazine covers, not because I did this. So this is a perfect example. celebrity interviews are the fastest way to make money as a journalist, because the celebrities themselves will only give you an hour. So it's the only situation in the world where you're gonna get an hour to do your interview. And then you have to write it up immediately afterwards. So it's this really fast loop. i The money was great. But I knew I needed to become the writer I wanted to be I knew I needed a lot of cycles through interview processes, and a lot of experience turning interviews into words and scenes and things like that. And so I hated the celebrity interviews. It wasn't it wasn't a really big fan of like, that just wasn't my thing. didn't hate the celebrity interviews, but they weren't really my thing. But I knew getting it out was a bad idea. So what did I do is I found mastery, oh, wow, I can do this, like make a lot of money doing it. But I gotta get really good at turning interviews into prose. In order to become the writer I wanted to write like, all of my books are story heavy. They're all made possible. Because I took five years and spent five years really becoming world class and not just interviewing people, but turning it into scenes and storytelling, and that sort of stuff. And I needed a tonne of laps under the labs with editors beating on my ideas. That's how I did it, I use that a little bit of mastery as a motivator and try to grit it out. I found something inside the problem. That was a skill I want to become excellent at. And that was deeply motivating to me. And right. So I did it that way. Curiosity works the same way. And on and on and on. So peak performers, when they're faced with a tough challenge, the first thing they try to do is align it with intrinsic motivators. Then they start playing with with with other things. But this is the same thing with with flow like I don't, if the situation if the challenge skills balance is getting too high of the situation and producing too much anxiety, for example. You can ladder a lot, we used to do this on the ski mountain all the time, we'd go out and be big mountain skiing, skiing harder and harder lines and bigger challenges and things like that and get to a point where like, Okay, I'm parked, like, I'm freaked out that last line scared the hell out of me, I'm outside the challenge skills balance, I don't want to go anymore. So we would let it go to the train Park. We don't actually go to the kiddie Park, the Baby Park. But we're suddenly the challenges are tiny. And by the way, you can really get heard of the Baby Park. Don't kid yourself. But the challenge is seeing tiny bears and what we've just been doing. And it shrinks the challenge skill sweetspot again, removes a bunch of stress and suddenly we're making progress and then train Park. So you can this is a this is another way of like, I'm not going to grit it out. I'm not going to try to fight the fear and keep pushing. I'm going to latter allies, mess with the challenge skill sweetspot. And, you know, get into a situation where I can be curious and exploratory and those other intrinsic motivators rather than scared.

Interesting. It's availa when you come away from something right, and you have a seat or something, and then you come back. It's almost like the brain has been reset, and you have a renewed kind of focus with which to approach it. And it's almost like neurologically, you've made connections with something that you're really struggling with. The next day. It just seems like there's clarity. That wasn't that

before. That that's one of the things you see in our country, right in our country is I've written a lot of books about peak performance and flow. This is the first one where I give you whatever had the opportunity to do applied peak performance. Right? It's a it's a, it follows a diary format almost through through the course of being running the ski experiment. And one of the reasons it gives you a look at what goes on day to day. And so you can see the struggle for it, you can see exactly the process you're we've been talking about, because and this is one of the main reasons I wrote the book The way I wrote it, and there's nobody's done this before. in book form, for a couple of reasons. One, you need expertise and peak performance. But you also have to get a really talented writer, because if not, all you're doing is a diary. And it's boring as hell. And nobody's going to be nobody's going to be willing to read more than, like, 10 pages, right. So I had to it was a huge challenge, the book was incredibly difficult, because I was constantly like, I never wanted the reader to get bored, I always wanted them to be learning, and having fun going through the adventure, but really seeing what applied performance looks like but the collective right, Mike, which is the flow research collective, where we're on the executive director, we train people in 130 countries, and 10s of 1000s of people every month in flow science. And the one problem we've always had, and my CEO and I are always talking about this is God, we need an example of apply peak performance is the day to day, it's really hard. Doesn't matter how we train it in a classroom, you have to go out and experience it. Or I could write a book like this. So I wrote the book, to solve a bunch of problems that I needed, the very thing we're talking about. I needed to make visible books so people could see it and understand what this looks like on a day to day basis, and what to expect from sort of like adopt and peak performance into into their lives.

I'm inviting you to join in on newly opened high performance health Facebook group, where we're all about unlocking our utmost potential. If you are a fellow bio hacker or a coach or a woman with an entrepreneurial spirit, looking for peak performance, and our community of ambitious women is just for you. But it's not just about connecting with like minded women, it's about empowering each other, we have weekly live training Q and A's and a bunch of other exclusive content that I don't get the chance to share anywhere else, you biohack some exploring plus extra nuggets of wisdom, from my podcast, guests, and so much more. It's free to join, simply click the top link in the show notes, or go to Angela foster.me, forward slash h P h. That's Angela foster.me, forward slash HP H or click the top link in the show notes. And once inside, send me a message so we can connect it personally, I can't wait to see. I find it super interesting. And the routine that you talked about there and how you mixed it up according to what you were doing with the skiing and how, like there's, there's a period where I think when you're doing the training, you're waking up at 3am. And then you're pushing your work schedule. There's like a block at the beginning. And then other times they sort of smaller blocks. And I was curious in relation to how you set yourself up in that term. And what part exercise plays in terms of achieving peak performance, because I think you talk about the fact that if you work out too hard, actually that can block it. And I'm curious about it. Because for me, if I get straight out of bed and work, I have an amazingly productive two hours, and there's something magical about those early hours. But then after about two hours, I need a break, I need to go move myself. But if I do that for more than a day, I'm itching for the early morning workout. And then if I've done the early morning work, I feel like come back. And I'm super productive. And it's almost like I have to cycle them. But I think you speak about a workout possibly inhibiting it. And just kind of curious because if anyone that's listening that really wants to

optimise. So this complicated answer. There's like seven different things in here. So one what, so let me just address with what I was doing in the book. When I ski what, right, which is I was running a ski experiment. I leave everything on the hill. I go as absolutely hard as I possibly can. And when I come back, there's very little work I can do. Right? My brain is mostly shot. So why did I start Now mind you, I just getting up at 4am So like at 3am wakeup time people make it sound very heroic. I pushed my wakeup time an hour earlier. It wasn't like it was It sounds ridiculous. But I was already I'm an early morning person. I'm most awake at 4am. So I wanted to anxiety, blocks flow. For me. My ability to pay my bills, my ability to make my little lip and my ability to do my job. is really important. And not being able to do those things produces too much anxiety for me to go to the ski mountain to leave everything on the hill, and then come home and not have a brain. So I had to get my at least my writing what book out, which is the most important than I have to do? Well, every day at least get my writing. And usually like some kind of company meeting with the flow research collective done before I got to the ski mountain. So that was why I was doing that. I also have this ridiculous schedule, because when I started out, I lived on the West Coast of America. And most of my editors were in New York, they would say three hours earlier. And they would get into their offices, or they were all young, and they would call me. And while I was poor, I needed to say yes to any assignment that came my way. And I also knew that if I didn't get my books written before, the editors called I wasn't going to be an author, I was just going to be a journalist, I wanted to be an author, too. So I just got up before they started calling me and they would get in at 830. And, you know, which was 530 my time, so I was getting up even earlier to like, just get my writing done. So this is just a long standing habit that I pushed a little bit earlier, but it was so I could get all of my actual major work done before I got to the scale, because I didn't want the anxiety that came from not being able to make a living, right mess with my experiments. That was why I sort of took that approach. And as far as the day to day, you know, which is better. i It's interesting. I, I firstly, find that. And maybe this I don't know how to I got one speed, I was told that say that two people, I got one speed. And so I don't know how to go to the gym and just be mellow. I don't I'm not mellow. I've never, that's not what that's not who I am like don't do that. So the way I do what you're talking about is I write my normal schedule is alright, from a 4am to 7:38am. And then I go hide my dogs. And the reason is because the morning may be a struggle face, right. Or it may be flip one of the two things that happened me they're gonna just stay and struggle on that drop into flow. If I get into struggle, I need to follow that with a release phase. low grade physical exercise works best you Don't exhaust yourself, because you still have to get into flow. And that requires a lot of energy. So I'll go for a walk my dogs to the backcountry, I'll hike for like 45 minutes an hour, and then I'll eat breakfast. That's my normal daily schedule. And then I'll go to the gym at the end of my day, and then leave everything at the gym. But so my morning hike, and you know from the book, I usually involve a weight vest, so I'm doing some work, but not too much. So and then the actual exercise comes a lot later. And if I've gotten to flow, I need to follow a flow with recovery activity. And a long walk in nature is a great recovery activity, I just will leave the weight vest at home. We know a long walk in nature is a great recovery activity because it it does a bunch of things. It shifts the brain and alpha, it produces serotonin, it lowers stress levels. It's a peak performance ageing tool. It's also you know, it doesn't it does a lot for us.

Interesting. So you will always do the work first, before you wouldn't do an exercise at all, you wouldn't even do the walk before you wrote.

The only time I vary that is when I'm travelling. And I'm on the road. And there are times when I don't know what my day is going to hold. So I want to just get to the hotel gym and get a workout in before my day start. But I also I don't write on the road I read. So I don't do any work on the road I just read. But I read nonstop on the road. I don't watch television I don't like I just I read. If I'm standing in line I read if I'm on a hotel, or on an aeroplane I read like just It's nonstop. And so I can that doesn't require the level of creativity the writing does so I can. But even sometimes when I'm on the road, I usually will probably read for an hour and then I'll go to the gym. Interesting.

I the reason I bring this up is because and I guess a lot of listeners will be in a similar situation. So I'm a very early morning person like yourself. And I think those hours are magical. And because I have three children, I have a whole bunch of stuff that starts at 7am with them. And that's not that's very difficult to access flow, right when there's breakfast going on their school rounds. There's kids, there's all this stuff. And so I kind of look at those hours of kind of 435 up until 637 is like the magical hours and so you have to be selective is that work? Is it Jim what Prime's me for the best part of my day? That's the reason for asking that question. And those two hours could be a combo, it could be work, it could be the gym, or workout or a walk.

This is one of the things that I always tell people. And this is a, this is a thing that was really at the heart of my book The Art of impossible. When we train people to flow research Collective, we have a we have a rule, which is personality doesn't scale biology scales, everything you're talking about everything we've been talking about for the past half an hour is examples of your personality, and its individuality and how what works best for you, and you've figured it out. And that's wonderful. There's this thing people do in coaching, critical error, to figure out what works for them. They try to train it, teach it to other people, and it's a disaster. And the reason is, personality is individual. It's based on nature, it's based on nurture, and early childhood experience, etc, etc. And so it's squishy, it's subjective, its individual, it's very hard to train from fact, when you go back to the 90s, when people were trying to train flow from the psychology of flow, the hit rate, you can read flow in sport driven by metrics and AI. And Susan Jackson, Susan Jackson's a brilliant sports psychologist from Australia, they were trying to apply all this stuff with athletes using this technology, they got nowhere, it was like their hit rate is terrible. Like it's it's almost embarrassing. And then you jump up to where we are in 2023, the flow research Collective, we measure flow pre and post using the exact scale that Susan uses her scale, we use her scale. And we get we see, on average, a 78% increase in flow on the back end of our trainings why our trends are based on neurobiology. So neurobiology is shared by everyone and shaped by evolution. So the individual stuff is going to be different for everybody. It's absolutely right. Key things like where are you on the introversion extroversion scale? And what are your risk tolerances? That's like, depending on your answers to those questions, that's how I train you. Right. But everybody's totally individual on that one. And so like, how do we find the challenge skills balance, the challenge skills balance and the fact that when we get it right, it produces dopamine and norepinephrine. That's neurobiology, how to tune it individually. That's personality. And that's everybody. So the point I'm trying to make is that you've done the work here, right? Which is figure out exactly like, you know, internally, Okay, today's day, I gotta go to the gym. Okay, today is the day I got to write first. Like, as I said, we will naturally move in the direction of peak performance. We got to get really good at listening to those signals, though, you've gotten good at listening to interoceptive signals, and being able to act on them. That's really, really crucial here. Interesting,

I was very encouraged. And how many hours of peak performance Do you believe we can have in any one period of a day? I realised that maybe broken up with recovery? Yeah.

See, there's a difference between peak performance and flow. And when I say performance, I just mean getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. That's a lot of biology. Right? How much time and flow can we spend? That's an interesting question. There's no, so there's no one number. Some flow states can stretch on and on and on and on. You'll get like stories. Jack Kerouac rode on the road in one, like nonstop drug addled flow state, right. But like, that's stuff like that happens. Startups on the way towards launch, right, we'll get into group flow, every time they show up at work, and right, and then I'll happen like every day for two months, that that's not unusual, normal circumstances, what we think is, you can have two to three micro flow states a day EZ macro flow, like the big turn it up to 11 You could probably have a state of micro flow and instead of macro flow, but if you're gonna get into state of macro flow, getting back into that state of macro flow, again, probably going to be delayed by a little bit because it took so much energy. So you might be able to get into Matt microflow the next day, but it's gonna be really hard. So this is this is a give you a really classic example. This happens to people a lot, but they got a ski vacation, where they go on a surfing vacation, or something in the, you know, day one, getting used to the new location, and it's things are new, and I don't quite know where I am or what's going on. Maybe it's a little flowy but it's not super flowy day two, I've got my bearings. I'm not so scared, deeply flowy and day three, they think, oh my god, I had this kick ass day yesterday. It all came together. For me, day three is going to be fantastic. And Day Three is terrible. And it's because you've used up most of the performance neurochemicals and you actually need a rest day and go and this happens. By the way I'm one of the world's leading experts in this, and I make this frickin mistake all the time, like, I will have an amazing ski day, huge flow experience, learn a whole bunch of new tricks or whatever. And I'll be so fired up that I'll go back the next day expecting more the same and no, I've exhausted myself, I've left it all up the hill, and I've got no feel good neuro chemistry dropped me into flow. And it like it's a joke, you can't I can't do it, I need to recovery day. And so I make them everybody makes that mistake, it's flow is delicious. And we want more of it. And that's why knowing the flow cycle is actually so useful.

I actually find that really reassuring. Now you don't expect because he kind of, you can beat yourself up and be hard on yourself. Like, why can't I replicate it?

Yeah, I will say I just on this point, because then this is, for me. I can't tell you how many days I've lost to self expectation. Like, if there is a crusher of days, I'm either gonna, I'm either gonna go down because I've impacted deck that death by docks. And it's like, you know, I'm dealing with like, banks and lawyers and forms and details, and I'm just getting tired to death by ducks. And I can't like this struggle. It's just, I'm overwhelmed. And I'm going to lose that one. Or, or it's going to be this flipside, anyways, of self experimentation, where I just come into the situation with expect I kicked us yesterday, I wrote great yesterday, or, you know, blah, blah, blah, and I come in, and it's just not that way. Rather than meeting my stuff, where I am and tuning the challenge skills balance accordingly, which I will eventually do, I have to first get super frustrated and beat myself up and hate myself and feel bad and feel like a failure. And then eventually I'm like, oh, okay, let's turn the challenge skills balance and make it really small, because you don't have a lot of energy today. And sure enough, I'll you know, there's a micro, there's micro flow for me. But you know, I, the only thing that's changed over time, is that the cycle of self expectation to like, shame and frustration, all that it's like, it's still go through it. It's just shorter, because I can recognise I'm like, Oh, this is where I am. Let's just tune the Jolin school balance and not deal with yourself.

And what are the optimal things for recovery that we should do to facilitate a kind of macro? You talk there about micro flow? But yeah, in the book, you talk about treating yourself as an athlete. Similar recovery is as important as the one

Yeah, yeah, well, so remember that our country is about peak performance ageing. So when it comes to peak performance agent, once you get to around your late 40s, your 50s if you're not going forward, you're going backwards. So, we talked in the beginning of this, all these users are LOSE IT skills, right that you want to keep training, right, but literally, if you're not training them, you are losing that. So. Art of art of peak performance ageing, is train like a pro with cover like a pro. But in general peak performance demands because flow is this high energy states so the rules are roughly the same. And where people screw up is quite simply passive recovery versus active recovery or proactive recovery. active recovery this specific term means specific thing but I'll just use it across the board. So passive recovery is what most of us do is TV and a beer. And it turns out alcohol blocks recovery not a single a single drink is okay. But once you get above two drinks or it for me, I don't play a lot so to drink and a half it starts to mess with REM sleep and starts to mess with sleep. And one of the non negotiables for recovery is seven eight hours of sleep a night and it does not vary. It's that's true for all of us. And I people push back and they push back and they push back and I have I have mothers pushing back and saying I got a career and I got kids fuck you. And I got right. So I hear that I hear this a lot. And let me just here's what I tell everybody. I agree with you. I hear you there are million IQ tests online. There's a bunch of them they're free. Take one one day after you've slept seven eight hours and now come back and other night then you've slept for five hours and take the same IQ test. You will never miss sleep again. And go to work like you won't do it. You can't one once you actually prove to yourself how much stupid or you are without sleep like it's it's gone. The other thing is this slow amplifies learning and memory we talked about at the top of the show right soldiers and flow to 40 to 5% above normal. You cannot learn without delta wave sleep. So if you don't sleep seven, eight hours, it doesn't matter how much you're tuning the skips. Your split flow is this side of mastery. I've learned these new skills I've onboard them. I can now do them unconsciously fantastic. It all came together. But you don't get to hang on to those skills if you don't sleep the next day. If you don't sleep the night after a flow state you did will not move the ideas from short term holding into long term storage. So you like you've just blocked learning, you'd have the best, most productive flow state at work, learn all all this stuff. And if you don't sleep that night run, get drunk to celebrate. And it messes with your sleep. You've not learned anything, you just wasted a flow state, you're gonna have to do it all over again.

Interesting. I think you've definitely made me included, pay more attention. The other

thing is active recovery. So it's not sleep is not enough. So what's active recovery, Epsom salt bath, Miss sauna, Saunas are phenomenal massage is really good. yoga, stretching, long walks in nature, mindfulness breathwork. Those are all active recovery, things that lower stress levels and your nervous system. And this is I always tell people, the three best ways to check your nervous system are a daily gratitude practice a daily mindfulness practice, or regular exercise. And what I tell people is, under normal conditions, you got to do one a day. If you're stressed out, do two or three during COVID. For example, you work for the flow research, collective work peak performance organisation, I expect my people to be at their very best and COVID was super freaking stressful for everybody. You wanted to work for me. You had to do a gratitude practice a mindfulness practice and get regular exercise every day. Otherwise, otherwise you couldn't work for me to COVID especially during the lockdown.

Because it's just the mind. I'm sorry. So that was exercise gratitude, mindfulness. So the mind yeah, so

gratitude. Gratitude is a is a five you know, it's a five minute product. It's it's write down three things that you're grateful for turn one into a paragraph or write down 10 things. The most important point is you want to get at the feeling of gratitude. And I can talk about the neurobiology of gratitude, we're running out of time, I won't go into it, but like it works. It's an incredibly effective tool. The second thing is mindfulness. 11 minutes of focus on your breath, meditation, lowers stress levels, you can run a loving kindness meditation script, which takes about 11 minutes to very effective tool that which I actually prefer to breath work where you can do a Wim Hof breathing protocol, three rounds of Wim Hof will take about 1112 minutes, that'll take care of it, or exercise. And if you want to exercise for anxiety, you want to exercise until it gets quiet upstairs and your lungs open up. That's a simple signal that nitrous oxide has been released in his flesh stress hormones out of your system. So one a day under normal conditions, to perform at your best to just enable peak performance. Two or three a day during times distress. And definitely if you get into a flow state and need a big recovery, any of those things are

really good for recovery. Amazing, though, though,

obviously, if you've worked out and you need recovery, now you're just doing like, you know, restorative yoga instead of a vigorous workout.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, one last question, before you go, then what, uh, what is your view on nootropics, and the use of any kind of substances to help facilitate a flow state.

So I have a couple of different views. One, we don't do that work at the flow research collective. And the reason is, we don't work with substances, and we don't work with technologies. And it's not that substances or technologies don't work, it's that I want to be able to perform my best. When I need to perform my best, I don't want to have to rely on a technology or a substance and that Reliance can be a real big problem for people. And so, you know, people are only able to check the nervous system by using a meditation app, and you find yourself skiing extreme line and you're at the top of the line and you need to tune up your nervous system and you don't have Wi Fi What the fuck are you going to do that? Right? People really get into habit so I get unwary that alcohol can sort of produce some of like, it pushes a little dopamine versus doing it artificially induced transient hypofrontality it turns out parts of the prefrontal cortex, it feels a little flowy. And writers are famous for using alcohol as a writing lubricant for this reason, and I will tell you, a very close personal friend wrote her first book using alcohol. And in book one, it was a glass of wine. By the end of Book Two, which didn't go as well as Book One, it was two bottles a night and now she had two problems. So that's, that's not uncommon with that stuff. There's also a bunch of nootropics that people think, produce flow, so Ritalin, Adderall, Modafinil, all those things actually are flow blockers. They amplify anxiety they amplify nor epanet From too high, they make like a fake flow state feels flowy. But the quality of your thinking is reduced from what's actually true and flow. Now all that said, we have also been doing a bunch of research on caffeine and flow, the flow research collective, and there is a definite relation. Caffeine definitely seems to work as a flow booster. For a lot of people flow follows focus, caffeine amplifies focus, now it is easy to drink too much coffee, it's very individual, and etc, etc, etc. But there is a length, there's also a length between marijuana and flow. So in our country, there's a bunch of marijuana and in our country, and the reason is that the combination of marijuana and caffeine has been a anecdotal flow hack for 50 years, called the people that are about as the hippie Speedball in action sports, it's 2530 minutes, do your warm up exercises, then get a cup of coffee and smoke a sativa base joint and you've got a chance to getting into flow doesn't work for everyone. And there are lots of individual caveats. So for me, for example, it like that will work occasionally. But if I'm tired, if I'm cold, if I'm hungry, won't work at all, it'll, in fact, it'll block flow. But if I'm scared, it won't work at all. So there's very specific conditions where that combination will work for me, and a lot of conditions where it won't, and it's very individual, very, very individual and on and on top of it. Marijuana is a performance enhancing chemical, if you practice with it, you can't use it out of the box and expect it to enhance performance, it produces state dependent learning, which is you heard about state dependent learning in about in regards to the SATs, so or any test study for your high school exams and purple sweats and then take them in purple sweats, right, that state dependent learning what marijuana produces state dependent learning. So what happens is most people learn to use marijuana when they're in high school, and it's like, eat Cheetos smoke pot and watch Monty Python movies with your friends. And you learn to laugh and eat junk food. And that's what you think marijuana is used for. It actually, you can use it for good performance, but you actually have to train with it. And you have to start very small and work up into it. And again, this isn't we don't do this work at the flourishes collective because it's so individual, it's not going to work for everyone. And I don't want to rely on substances, but at a personal level, I will occasionally use marijuana besides those things, most of the other nootropics that are out there. I'm not I've play i I'll experiment with tonnes of shit. And I do all the time always running, you know, whether it's peptides or nootropics or whatever. And I yeah, I'm not impressed i caffeine i So is a general, I've said this for a long time with supplements and things like that. I like things that have a long global history. So Tumeric for inflammation is true in you know, dozens of countries across the world and was true long before there was mass communication. So there's a lot of anecdotal data from a lot of different regions that, hey, now there's a bunch of science backing it up. I'm interested in things that have been time tested and battle tested. So sometimes I'll look for herbs that have been around for a long time. And they've been used in a lot of places rather than what is coming out of a lab. And I say this with a lot of affection. I've been running, you know, talking about this in our country. I've been running performance, ageing experiments and experiment with regenerative medicine now for 30 years. And I will tell you from firsthand experience that you know, when it's got about a 10 to 20% hit rate. So you know, it's at the cutting edge, you hear about it, do you think it's amazing and using it over time, you'll probably find 20 years out 10% of that stuff remains the other 90% is bunk or bad for us. So, you know, buyer beware. And I'm I'm always Don't believe the hype. Don't believe the hype. Don't believe the hype. There's always somebody making a buck on the other side of a nootropic. Let me give you one final example here, peak performance ageing. So, peak performance ageing in a sentence is this. If you want to rock to your drop, you want to regularly engage in challenging creative and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. Now, I'm not going to unpack that. It's all in our country, but that's peak performance at the sentence, what you'll notice about all those interventions, two things, one, they're all psychological interventions that produce neurobiological results. That's what those are the big levers, if 60 years of data that shows if you want to really sort of extend your lifespan, extend your health span those that's what you want to do. These are the things that work best. If you were to listen to the app daging conversation right now you're going to hear about nootropics, you're going to hear about supplements, you're gonna hear about peptides, you're going to hear about mitochondrial boosters, you're going to hear about a million different substances and pharmaceuticals. And all that is just the cutting edge. So maybe, but historically 10% of it is going to turn out to be true. And the rest of is going to be bullshit. What do we know is real? All the psychological triggers that I just talked about, we know that's real, there's 60 years of data. And we know it's significant. But nobody can make a buck off that. How do you patent and sell challenging social activities? Right? Like you can't do it. So it doesn't get as much hype, because they're not supplements, and nobody's selling them. So it's, you know, it's a different thing. But the data, the data is on on the side of these interventions.

Yeah, I'm always curious about them. I guess for me, it was one would be L theanine because it's been used, like in green tea by Buddhist monks, monks?

Yeah, I mean that. With that stuff, what I always say is true, probably true. So fine, great green tea, and like, go to the source. And the thing about L theanine on max le GAVI Garvey is a huge fan of L theanine. And I remember talking to him about this years ago, years and years and years ago. And I took it for a while. And I was like, okay, not for me, like you didn't do anything. But I've met tonnes of people like you who are like, Oh, my God, this is the shit that this is a problem with supplements. It's very, very, very, very, very, very, very individual. And nothing is going to work for everyone. And the most important point as our insides change, right? Which something you just think about the supplements that are going to work for a woman pre and post menopause, right, we know those supplements have to change, because the entire hormonal profile is going to change. So people act as if like, it's the supplements are the end, the only thing that tends to work that way, are the herbal supplements that have been around for 1000s and 1000s, and 1000s of years. And it's sort of like battle tested. We know cayenne pepper is gonna fight inflammation, we know Tumeric is gonna fight some of those things, but they're really low level interventions. So like, if you're a biohacker, and you want a big huge, you know, I'm going to inject BPC, 157 into my joints, which is great. I've done it right. It works really, really well. But it's going to stop working after a little while because you joined to get used to it. And then you got to cycle off and whatever. The Tumeric doesn't have that effect you can it anti inflammatory all the time. I don't know why. But these things seem to be true. And they seem to be true for everyone.

I think mushrooms are exciting lion's mane and things like that because of nerve growth factor. But yeah, I like experimenting, but

I'm an investor and I'm in a big mushroom company. So I'm with you on that. I'm not a huge fan of the psychedelic mushrooms. I know a lot of people are they just give me headaches and make me feel lousy. But people love them

each their own. Thank you so much. The new been really generous with your time. I mean, now country inspired me that actually moving into my 50s is exciting in terms of what's going to happen to the brain, particularly as you say, if you keep using it, not losing it. Oh, it's cool. So yeah, you've that's the first time it's made me feel like getting to 50 is going to be Oh, it's my teenagers don't think so.

No, it's it's interesting, right? I mean, it's actually like, once you take a lot of the fear out of it, you're like, Oh, this is me. And it really like that shift in mindset of what the my best days are I had to make. And literally like literally, like there's massive amounts of evidence that if we get it right, literally, we will enjoy the second our lives are more than the first half. Like all those things go meaning purpose, happiness. Well, they all of it goes through the roof, naturally. And biologically, we just have to get it right. So yeah, it's it's exciting. I'm glad you had that experience. And thanks for having me on.

Thank you so much. Thanks for all your work. Where can people find and connect with you? What's the best way?

Well, I'm on social at Steven Kotler. You can find me at Steven kotler.com is my website flow research collective.com. Is organization's website if you're interested in training with us or learning more about flow? And I think nar country.com If you want the website for the book and you want to see the peak performance ageing, experiments, the videos that we had, you can you can find those. They're

awesome. Thank you so much. It's a brilliant book. Thanks for all your work and for coming on the show.

My pleasure. Have a great day.

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