The Emotional Conditions of Flow

On the door: you cannot walk into flow. You can only walk toward it with the right weather at your back.

Five boats at dawn

Saturday, before the sun. The Marin masters squad is on the dock, and the coaches are switching people between boats until the crews are even. Nobody is moved for being liked. The job is to make every boat a race.

A constructed scene, though any rower will know it: a rower sits down tight in a new seat, in a crew stronger than expected, and the first minutes are work, hands watched, timing checked, strokes counted. Then, on a good day, the tightness turns into interest in the catch, and the counting stops. On another morning the same rower sits down bored in a familiar crew, and nothing much happens unless somebody changes the task.

My rule in these boats is short: do no harm and pull your weight. And I am just happy to be included. That last part is not modesty. I think it is a condition. When I feel I belong in the boat, I stop defending my seat and start rowing it.

This article asks a narrow question. Which feelings are standing at the door of flow, and which way do they tend to push? Curiosity, enjoyment, anxiety, frustration, boredom. And under all of them, whether we belong. Tend is the honest word. No feeling reliably opens the door or locks it.

What the research can see

Start with the map. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's model, flow tends to appear when the challenge in front of you and your sense of skill are both high and roughly matched. Fausto Massimini and colleagues later split that space into channels scored against each person's own average: high challenge with low skill is anxiety, low challenge with high skill is boredom, both low is apathy. The map came from experience sampling, where people are beeped through the day and rate what they are doing. A 2015 meta-analysis of 28 studies by Carlton Fong and colleagues found the balance a moderate correlate of flow (see No. 06). Correlate is the word. Balance and flow travel together; the data do not show which drives which.

So the feelings in this article are not only obstacles on the map. They are reports about where you stand on it.

One distinction keeps the rest straight. The weather you carry to the door is not the weather inside the room. Before a task, you can feel anxious, flat, eager or annoyed. Inside flow, people mostly report something quieter: absorption, little self-talk, often a sense of ease that only turns into enjoyment afterward. So a feeling before the task is a starting point, not a forecast. Feelings can make flow more or less likely. They are not fixed prerequisites. The research below is mostly about the starting point.

Curiosity reports a gap you think you can close. Paul Silvia's appraisal model holds that interest comes from two judgments: this is new or complex, and I can make sense of it. With Todd Kashdan he puts it as events that seem "new but comprehensible." Remove the second judgment and the model predicts confusion or anxiety instead. The supporting studies mostly use art, poetry and reading in the lab, so this is a good account of interest, not a test of flow.

Enjoyment may widen the view, with a catch. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions widen attention and the range of things we feel like doing; replications are mixed and the positivity ratio was withdrawn (No. 02). The catch: a 2016 study by Jäger and Rüsseler cites work in which strongly wanting positive states narrowed attention instead.

Anxiety often stands in the way, but not always. Christian Swann and colleagues' 2012 systematic review gathered 17 studies of 1,194 elite athletes. Five facilitators appeared in all five core studies on how flow occurs: appropriate focus, preparation, motivation, optimal arousal, and positive thoughts and emotions. Negative thoughts and emotions were among the most common preventers and disruptors. One study in the review found athletes whose anxiety was lower, and read as helpful, were much more likely to report flow. Most of this rests on retrospective interviews and small samples. Then a 2016 study of ten male professional golfers by Swann's group found two states. "Letting it happen" was flow: calm, open goals, ease. "Making it happen" arrived suddenly, often after a look at the leaderboard, with fixed goals, effort, intensity and nerves, yet players still felt absorbed and in control. Ten men, interviewed after their best rounds, so it is a careful start. Yuri Hanin's IZOF model sits beside it: the best emotional intensity is individual.

Boredom reports attention with nowhere to land. John Eastwood and colleagues defined boredom in 2012 as an unpleasant state of wanting to engage and being unable to, tied to failing attention and blamed on the surroundings. It is a theoretical synthesis, not a trial.

Wanting it for itself, with others. Self-determination theory, from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, holds that intrinsic motivation grows when three needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness, the sense of belonging. A recent summary notes much of the evidence is cross-sectional self-report. The autotelic personality, people who seek flow for its own sake, is in Nicola Baumann's review rich in description and weak in measurement; the link between curiosity and how often people find flow has rarely been tested.

The weather at the door

Read it as a rough sketch of the research above, not a rule: the Storms tend to show up where challenge outruns skill, the Low Skies where skill outruns challenge, and the Open Weather and Rising Airs sit nearest the channel. Any of them can turn up on either side on a given day. The families come from No. 02; here they matter only for how they meet challenge, skill and attention.

Reading each weather

Each row is my reading of the research above, with my rough sense of how strong the evidence is.

None of these rows says a feeling causes flow or stops it. Most of the data are correlational, collected after the fact, from small or narrow groups. What the table can do is help you read the weather before you push off.

Imagine a nurse starting a night shift on a ward she does not know, anxious and short-tempered after a hard drive in. For the first hour she checks everything twice and keeps glancing at the clock. Then a patient needs a line placed, a task she has done hundreds of times. Her attention narrows onto the vein, the angle, the next step. The anxiety does not vanish. It turns into care. Three hours later she realizes she has not looked at the clock since. She did not fix the feeling first. She found a task the feeling could serve. That is a constructed scene, and I suspect it is a common one.

So you need not wait for the perfect mood before you begin. The question is not whether the weather is ideal. It is whether we can work intelligently with the weather that has arrived: recognize what this task requires, and let the feeling you have be put to that use, or set beside it.

Letting the others in

Rowing has an old fault for the opposite of belonging: pulling as if you were the only person in the boat. The fix is rarely more power. It is to let the others in, to trust that the person behind you will pull. As Daniel James Brown tells it in The Boys in the Boat, a boatbuilder once gave a guarded Washington oarsman that kind of advice.

I am careful with all this. A rowing observation is not a study, and nobody measured flow in a masters boat on a Saturday. Social connection looks like a possible enabling condition, not a proven cause of flow. Team cohesion is a property of the group, and flow is a state in one person. The two may be related, but they are different things, and the data are thin. What the table cannot show is the ordinary version: when you stop rowing for yourself, your attention has somewhere to go.

Aristotle saw this from the other end. In W. D. Ross's translation of the Ethics, the best friendship is between people who are good and alike in virtue, who wish each other well for the other's sake. Then he adds a proverb: people cannot know each other until they have "eaten salt together." Trust of that kind takes time. It cannot be declared on the dock. A season in an eight is a lot of salt.

The old line and the flow research rhyme. As No. 07 argues, you prepare the conditions; the state comes or it doesn't. Curiosity, a task pitched at the edge of your skill, and the slow trust that lets you belong in the boat are conditions. Flow, when it comes, is not something any one rower earns.

That is also why I say I am just happy to be included. A rower who is still auditioning for his seat has part of his attention on the audition. A rower who knows he belongs can spend all of it on the water.

Where SportsFlow fits

If belonging is a condition, it is worth measuring, and measuring it carefully is the hard part. SportsFlow's Connection module reads six things: Belonging, Being Known, Open Hands (generosity), The Group (how the team holds together), The Working Bond (with the coach) and Gratitude. These measures are in development.

The rules matter more than the scales. Connection is never used in selection. No athlete ever rates another. The Working Bond never reaches the coach it is about. Coaches build the fastest boat, and this part of the record stays out of that decision.

The module also sets up support pods of four to six athletes. They are never ranked and never seat-raced. They are there for the slow part, what Aristotle called eating salt together: the time it takes to trust that the person behind you will pull.

Still not enlightened, Orion