You Cannot Force Flow

On wanting it: the state cannot be ordered; the conditions can be prepared.

Saturday at dawn

Saturdays at dawn I row with a Marin masters squad, crews switched around to even them out. I have rowed in some capacity for forty years, and in all that time swing has never once come on order.

Swing is the rower's word for the thing this series keeps circling. The eight bodies stop being eight. The catches land together, the drive feels like one push, and the hull keeps running under you between strokes as if it did not need you at all. When it comes, the work does not get easier. It gets quieter.

What rowers learn about it, slowly and mostly the wrong way, is that the worst thing you can do is go looking for it. A constructed scene, though any rower will know it: a few strokes start to lift, and someone in the boat thinks, here it is, hold on to it. On the next stroke it is gone. Attention moved from the blade in the water to a report about the blade in the water. The boat noticed first.

You do not need a boat to know this. Imagine a writer with a deadline who sits down and decides that today inspiration will come. She clears the desk, sets a timer and waits for the good sentences. Every few minutes she checks: is it happening yet? Each check is a small vote of no confidence, and the page stays thin. Then she gives up on inspiration and just fixes one clumsy paragraph. An hour later she notices the words have been coming for a while. That is a general case, not a person. I think you have lived some version of it.

The pattern is the same. The state arrives while attention is on the work. It leaves when attention turns to the state.

My working line on this is short. The state cannot be ordered; the conditions can be prepared. On a Saturday that means rowing the stroke I am in, with the people I am in it with, in whatever boat the coaches made.

This article is about why. And about what you can do, since trying harder is not it.

The coach with a flat boat

Imagine a coach whose crew rowed well on Tuesday and went flat on Thursday. A constructed scene, though every coach will know it. She has two ways to read the flat boat. One says the state is missing, so demand it: louder, harder, more. The other says the conditions are not right yet, so change one thing and watch. The first teaches eight people to check themselves. The second asks them to row.

The second reading is the older one in the sport. As Daniel James Brown tells it in The Boys in the Boat, Washington's coach Al Ulbrickson spent a long stretch reshuffling lineups instead of ordering swing, and No. 05 tells the swing side of that story. What a coach can do is change one thing, watch, and keep preparing the conditions until the boat finds it.

Why trying gets in the way

The research on this is real, and in places weaker than the popular version. Effort is not the enemy of flow. The attempt to control the experience of flow can become its own distraction. Three lines of evidence matter here.

The monitor that brings back what it looks for. In 1994 Daniel Wegner proposed ironic process theory. Any deliberate attempt at mental control runs two processes. An operating process works toward the goal. A monitoring process searches for signs of failure, which means it keeps the unwanted state in view. Under stress or mental load, the operator weakens and the monitor wins, so you get more of what you were trying to avoid. Wegner and colleagues tied the idea to mood, sleep and unwanted actions in sport. A 2020 meta-analysis of 31 studies by Wang, Hagger and Chatzisarantis found rebound effects after suppression, and found that thoughts surged during suppression only when people were under cognitive load. That is lab work with short tasks, so I treat it as a mechanism, not a measure of how often it happens on a Saturday.

Valuing a good feeling can spoil it. Iris Mauss and colleagues ran two studies in 2011. In the experiment, 69 women read either a mock newspaper piece praising happiness or a neutral one, then watched a happy or a sad film clip. After the happy clip, the happiness group felt worse than controls, and disappointment explained the gap. After the sad clip there was no difference. The samples were small and all women, which the authors flag. The finding has a limit worth holding: it is the gap between wanting and getting that hurts, in a moment that should have delivered. And trying is not always the problem. In Ferguson and Sheldon's 2013 music studies, people who tried to feel happier while listening to upbeat music did feel happier. What seems to matter is where the trying points: at the music, or at the scoreboard of your own mood.

Watching the steps breaks the skill. Series readers met the skill version of this in No. 04, and No. 11 takes up when conscious control helps a learned skill. Flow carries a different risk. The thing you start watching is not your elbow. It is the state itself.

Put together, the evidence points one way without proving it. The state you want seems to depend on attention resting on the task. Wanting the state, and checking for it, moves attention off the task.

Two loops

Read the top row as what happens when the state becomes the goal, and the bottom row as what you can do instead: the only box you cannot fill on purpose is the dashed one. Two rowers make it concrete. One checks every few strokes whether this is flow, and scores the answer. The other listens for the rhythm, the feedback through the handle and the next stroke. Same boat, same effort, different loop.

What is yours to prepare

Here is the split between what you can prepare and what you cannot order, in plain words.

The left column is long and ordinary. Almost everything that raises the odds is dull, repeatable and yours. The right column is short and is not yours at all, and the trouble starts when you treat it as a to-do list.

Preparation and striving can look the same from outside. Both mean showing up early and caring a great deal. The difference is where attention points and what counts as done. Preparation points at the conditions, and it is finished when they are in place: the routine run, the task set, attention placed on the work. Striving points at the state, and it is never finished, because it keeps asking whether the state has come yet. One test helps. If you can tell whether you did it without asking how the session felt, it is preparation. If you can only tell by checking your own inner weather, it has turned into striving.

We can practice the conditions that welcome flow. We cannot make flow the price of practicing.

Trying not to try

The early Chinese thinkers had a name for the state and a long argument about the paradox. The name was wu wei, usually rendered as effortless or non-forcing action. The scholar Edward Slingerland built a book around the argument, Trying Not to Try. His reading, in my words, is that wu wei is a real state of skilled, spontaneous action, and that every school that prized it ran into the same wall: you cannot get there by aiming at it, and you cannot get there by not aiming either. Some answered with long training, others with letting go. One summary of the book adds his practical paths, among them shaping your surroundings and stepping away.

The Zhuangzi has a woodworker named Qing who carves a bell stand so fine that people think spirits made it. Asked how, he says he fasted first. In James Legge's 1891 translation, after three days he no longer thought of "congratulation, reward, rank, or emolument," after five he stopped thinking of praise or blame, after seven he forgot his own limbs. Only then did he walk into the forest and look at the trees. What he prepared was himself and his attention. What he did not do was decide in advance that the work would be great.

Wu wei is not passivity, and it is not relaxation. Qing's fasting was discipline, and the carving that followed was a response to the tree in front of him. Preparation did not replace the response. It made room for it.

The Sufis drew the cleanest line I know. They distinguish the station, maqam, from the state, hal. A station is reached by sustained effort and practice, and it stays. A state is momentary and, in the classical teaching, a gift. Hujwiri, writing in the eleventh century, said a person can neither push a state away when it comes nor pull it in by effort. You can work for the station your whole life. The state arrives when it arrives.

I hold that as my reading, not a proof. The lab finding on monitoring and the Sufi teaching on the gift are not the same claim, and research does not confirm a tradition. They rhyme. They point the same way: there is a part of the work that is yours, and a part that is given, and the second does not respond to being demanded.

That is also where the rowing lives for me. I had a stroke at ten that left my left side weaker than my right, and I rowed competitively anyway. I could not order my left side to match my right. I could show up at 5:00 and pull the stroke I had. That was the station. Whatever came on a good day was the state, and I did not earn it so much as stay ready for it.

A coach's long search through lineups is a maqam. Whatever finally runs under the boat is a hal. The best crews need both.

Where SportsFlow fits

SportsFlow's flow recipe is the experiment below, kept up for longer. It compares your own sessions with and without a condition you control, and each condition is logged at the session, not recalled, because memory rewrites conditions to fit the result. What it gives back is a short list of conditions that seem to go with your better sessions. It never gives back a state to hit.

The part I care about most is a refusal. The AI coach, FlowCoach, will never promise you a flow state or prescribe one. It can suggest a condition to try next week. It cannot hand you the hal, and it does not pretend to. The measures are still in development. The machine serves the person; the person is never the raw material.

Still not enlightened, Orion