The Performance Benefits of Flow: Why You Can’t Reach Your Full Potential Without Getting ‘In the Zone’

This article is a (slightly adapted) excerpt from my upcoming book, Mastering Flow.

"When in flow, the individual operates at full capacity." —MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

"Flow is powerful. It can save lives, and it allows people to push the human body beyond the limits of what we thought was possible. . . . People are better when they’re in flow. They seem to have more time. They make better decisions, and they make them faster. . . . Flow can boost creativity for days. . . . Athletes in flow take in more data and process it more efficiently." —AMIT KATWALA, AUTHOR OF “THE ATHLETIC BRAIN”

Think about the most productive and creative moments of your life—the times when you’re performing at full capacity. You’re able to access your complete repertoire of skills and knowledge. You’re fully on, and you’re being the best you’re capable of being. You’re in flow during these moments, aren’t you?

For me, it’s very obvious: Whether I’m writing, running, reading, playing tennis, or acing an exam—I perform at my best when I’m in flow; when the voice in my head is quiet, and I’m confident, focused, and fully engaged in what I’m doing.

In this article, we’ll look at the evidence of flow’s performance-enhancing benefits. We’ll first consider the anecdotal evidence. We’ll see that everyone from top athletes and successful coaches to world-class creatives, famous artists, and major companies like Toyota, Patagonia, and Ericsson are singing the praises of flow. We’ll then look at the science. We’ll see that research from all over the world has confirmed that flow boosts performance across various fields, including sports, music, academia, and work. Finally, we’ll cover why flow is so beneficial for both short-term performance and long-term achievement. We’ll see precisely how flow brings out the best in us.

“When you get in that zone…”

During half-time at the Super Bowl of 1992, Jimmy Johnson, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was asked what he did to prepare his team for this supreme test. Johnson held up a copy of Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow in response. After winning back-to-back Super Bowls in 1992 and 1993, he explained that he had built his team around the concept of flow: “For many years, I’ve admired Dr. Csikszentmihalyi’s pioneering work and tried to apply his concepts on the football field. Some people have labeled my approach as ‘intense,’ but the more accurate term might be ‘in flow.’ Being totally absorbed in the task at hand is essential to becoming a sports champion.”[1]

Legendary basketball player Bill Russell, a key player for the Boston Celtics during the period when they won 11 championships in 13 years, is one such sports champion who credits flow for raising his performance: “When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. . . . At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in the white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive. . . . I’d be putting out the maximum effort . . . and yet I never felt the pain.” [2]

Fellow basketball legend Kobe Bryant famously scored a career-high 81 points in 2006, the second-highest score in a single game in NBA history. His interviews were often littered with references to being in the zone. He once said: “When you get in that zone, it’s just this supreme confidence; you know it’s going in. It’s not a matter of if . . . it’s just that it’s going in. Things just slow down. You know, everything just slows down, and you just have supreme confidence. And when that happens, you know, you don’t really try to focus on it at all because you can lose it in a second . . . you try not to let anything break that river. You’re oblivious to everything that is going on.” [3]

“Teams at the highest level prioritize flow,” says Steve Kerr, head coach of the Golden State Warriors. [4]  “There’s nothing else that can match group flow. That’s what I’m constantly hoping our team achieves.” Kerr started with the Warriors in 2014 and led the team to its most successful period in history, reaching six NBA Finals and winning four championships in 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2022. In the 2015–16 season, they won an unprecedented 73 games, breaking the record for the most wins in an NBA season.

Lewis Hamilton is one of the most successful Formula One drivers in history. He has won a joint-record seven Championship titles (tied with Michael Schumacher) and holds the records for the most wins (104), pole positions (104), and podium finishes (199). According to sports journalist Amit Katwala, who has interviewed Hamilton multiple times, it’s all about flow for the Brit. [5] After winning the Spanish Grand Prix in 2020, Hamilton said in an interview, “I felt like I was in the most . . . It was like a clear zone. . . . The clarity I had when I was driving . . . Honestly, I felt fantastic in the car. It was physically challenging, but in terms of not making any mistakes, delivering lap upon lap upon lap, I was in the perfect zone. And that's the zone I dream of being in. . . . There were all these elements perfectly in place. I was very centered in my core and I've got to try to get there every day. . . . I always like to talk about trying to be our higher selves, because each of us has an unlimited capacity. It just felt like I was at a high plane. I am always talking about perfect races and that was one of them. We all try for perfection and it is not always easy to deliver like that but today, for me and the car, I was ecstatic. When I came across the line I didn't realize it was the last lap. I was still going. I was like a horse with blinkers on. I was going to keep going.” [6]

Football icon Pele mentioned “a strange calmness” and “a type of euphoria” during his best performances: “I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their team or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically. I felt I could not be hurt. It was a very strange feeling and one I had not felt before. Perhaps it was merely confidence, but I have felt confident many times without that strange feeling of invincibility.'' [7]

Sports psychologist Michael Sachs hypothesizes that in “every gold medal or world championship that’s ever been won, most likely, we now know, there’s a flow state behind the victory.” [8]

In the world of extreme sports, meanwhile, accessing flow isn’t merely the difference between setting a new record or falling short, between winning the title or coming in second or third; it can be the difference between life and death. “While finding flow may be the goal of every athlete on the planet, for action and adventure sports athletes it’s a necessity,” explains Steven Kotler. [9]

“In all other activities, flow is the hallmark of high performance, but in situations where the slightest error could be fatal, then perfection is the only choice — and flow is the only guarantee of perfection. Thus, flow is the only way to survive in the fluid, life-threatening conditions of big waves, big rivers, and big-mountains.” As legendary skateboarder Danny Way put it: “It’s either find the zone or suffer the consequences—there’s no other choice available.” [10]

For writers, flow is viewed by many as the ideal writing state. “While there is no scientific proof that flow necessarily produces top-quality writing, research has found that many writers are convinced they produce much of their best work while they are in such an altered situation,” explains Susan K. Perry, author of Writing in Flow. [11] “When you’re in flow, scenes and images almost seem to concoct themselves. As one writer told me, ‘I have to keep reminding myself that all I have to do is get into that place and the language will furnish itself.’”

Flow “connects you to the joy of writing,” explains Anne Janzer in her book The Writer’s Process. [12] “When flow happens, it’s worth the work. For many people, the experience itself is reason enough to write. Look for ways to structure your process to increase the opportunities for flow.”

Novelist Zadie Smith describes a highly productive state of magical thinking, during which “you sit down to write at 9 am, you blink, the evening news is on and four thousand words are written.” [13] John Steinbeck, a Nobel Prize in Literature winner, once remarked in one of his journal entries: “Not an early start today but it doesn’t matter at all because the unity feeling is back. That is the fine thing. That makes it easy and fun to work.” [14] For Australian singer-songwriter Tash Sultana, flow is so integral to everything she does that she named her debut album after it. The album is called “Flow State.”

These sentiments ring very true for me. Without flow, writing is slow, hard, frustrating, and demotivating. With flow, writing is fast, easy, fun, and rewarding. When flow shows up, I make progress today, and I gain momentum and motivation to come back tomorrow. Flow is, in many ways, the fuel that powers my writing. If I wasn’t able to access flow somewhat regularly during my writing, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book right now.

In the corporate world, top executives report being up to five times more productive during flow, according to a ten-year McKinsey study: “When we ask executives during the peak-performance exercise how much more productive they were at their peak than they were on average, for example, we get a range of answers, but the most common at senior levels is an increase of five times.” [15]

Venture capitalist James Slavet lists “flow state percentage”—the amount of time people spend in flow—as one of his five most important management metrics. [16] Jim Clifton, former CEO of the Gallup Organization, once said, “People with high flow never miss a day. They never get sick. They never wreck their cars. Their lives just work better.” [17]

When Stefan Falk, a former vice president of strategic business innovation at Ericsson, moved to Green Cargo in mid-2003, the company had been losing money for 120 years. After Falk, who had studied flow and applied it previously at Ericsson, instituted a new management program based on flow, the company made its first profit, and Falk was credited with the turnaround. [18]

“In all our studies of extreme performance improvement, the people and organizations who covered the most distance in the shortest time were always the ones who were tapping into passion and finding flow,” [19] says John Hagel, founder of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, an organization researching the future of work in a changing world.

Former Patagonia CEO Michael Crooke completed a Ph.D. thesis under the tutelage of Csikszentmihalyi on the topic of creating a workplace environment conducive to flow. “Flow was at the center of everything I was doing at Patagonia, and remains at the heart of all my professional activities since,” Crooke explains. [20] “[Flow] manifests itself in focused, on-time, on-spec products that win in the marketplace because they were developed in a system in which the customers and the internal people all know what they want and need.”

Patagonia, whose corporate headquarters are on the California coast, “have a policy that when the surf comes up, you drop work and you go surfing,” says Yvon Chouinard, the owner and founder of the company. [21] The idea is that if employees get into a flow state in the water, the productivity and creativity boosts will carry over into their work. [22]

As you can see, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that flow is great for performance. Top performers from all walks of life praise and seek out flow for its performance-enhancing benefits. Next up, let’s see what the science has to say on the matter.

The Science

The link between flow and performance is well-established in the scientific literature. Flow is positively associated with creativity, intrinsic motivation, skill development, and peak performance in various fields, including academia, sports, music, and the workplace.

In academic contexts, flow is consistently linked with improved learning, higher grades, and development of skills, commitment, and achievement.

A study by Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues followed talented teenagers over a period of four years. [23] They found that those who experienced more flow at age thirteen went on to outperform their less flowy peers in various areas of talent (e.g., math, music, or football) at age seventeen. More flow at age 13 predicted greater performance four years later, at age 17. In a similar, albeit shorter, study with math students, those who experienced more flow in the first part of a course performed better in the second half. [24] A 2008 study, which measured flow experience during a French course and a statistics course, found the same thing. [25] Those students who scored higher on levels of flow during lessons at the beginning of the semester performed better on their exams at the end of the semester.

More flow today equals better performance tomorrow.

In the area of game-based learning, flow has also been shown to predict performance. So-called serious games are games that may be enjoyable but are designed primarily for the purpose of training or education. A 2010 study brought people into the lab, gave them a serious game to play, and then tested them on how much they had learned. [26] Lo and behold, those who experienced more flow while playing the game learned more and scored better on the test.

In the area of sports, a study with college athletes in a broad range of individual sports (including swimming, golf, gymnastics, running, field and track athletics, and tennis) found that self-reported flow scores were significantly higher when athletes referred to their best performances than when rating their general performances. [27]

A study with runners came to the conclusion that flow enhances marathon performance in an indirect way. [28] Runners who experienced flow during training or in previous races found the experience more enjoyable and were thus more motivated to continue, which led to increased training. Performance in marathon races was not significantly influenced by flow during the race in question but by pre-race training. By positively influencing pre-race training, flow boosts race performance indirectly.

Work productivity and creativity get a boost, too. Jef van den Hout and Orin Davis, two experts on flow in the workplace, assert that finding flow is the “holy grail of business success for individual employees, teams, and companies.” [29] They explain: “Flow experiences are extremely valuable to companies, because the more employees experience flow, the more they will love their jobs, perform well, come up with more creative solutions, and put their all into their work. . . . When people experience flow at work, they experience their jobs more as meaningful callings, and are willing to go above and beyond their job descriptions. In addition, they are more likely to develop their skills, becoming better able to perform complex tasks and create value.”

A 2019 field study with office workers found a positive relationship between flow and self-reported work performance. [30] When participants reported experiencing relatively high flow, they were more likely to report “being productive,” “finishing many things,” and “not making any mistakes.”

A 2010 survey of customer service personnel in 20 tech companies in Taiwan found that participants who reported more flow at work also reported delivering higher quality customer service (e.g., being more reliable, responsive, caring, trustworthy, knowledgeable, empathetic, and polite). [31]

A 2014 study investigated the effects of team flow on performance during a project management simulation. [32] Students met in teams of four to six and were instructed to build a scale model of a goods vehicle. After 6½ hours, the vehicle had to be able to travel two routes varying in difficulty. Team performance was measured on a scale from 1 (the vehicle did not start) to 6 (the vehicle completed two routes). As expected, teams who experienced more flow performed better than those who experienced less flow. “The results of this study corroborate the importance of fostering flow experience among work team members,” concluded the researchers. “More specifically, this study shows that flow is not only a determinant of individual performance, but also a determinant of team performance. Hence, team managers should put in place ways to foster flow in their teams.”

A 2006 study investigated flow and creativity in musical composition. [33] Forty-five music students were split into groups of three and given the task of composing a musical masterpiece. When each group’s composition was rated on measures of creativity, those groups with higher average flow scored better than those reporting less flow. “It is clear from the results that increased levels of flow are indeed related to increased levels of creativity,” concluded the researchers.

In a 2012 study, researchers used a brain stimulation technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to artificially induce a state similar to flow in their participants. They then gave them the nine-dot problem to solve, a classic test of creative problem solving that in most studies is not solved by any of the participants. [34] This was true again in this experiment—without tDCS, nobody solved it. With the stimulation, however, more than 40% did. “Whereas no participant solved this extremely difficult problem before stimulation or with sham stimulation,” the researchers explain, “14 out of 33 participants did so with cathodal stimulation.”

According to investigative journalist Sally Adee, this type of invasive brain technology has been found to “more than double the rate at which people learn a wide range of tasks such as object recognition, maths skills, and marksmanship.” [35]

Adee got to try out tDCS herself in the course of investigating a story for the New Scientist magazine. [36] In a lab in Carlsbad, California, she participated in an “accelerated marksmanship training” simulation. “It's the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault,” she explains. “I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified M4 close-range assault rifle, first without tDCS and then with.”

Without it, she was terrible; with it, she was excellent. “The 20 minutes I spent hitting targets while electricity coursed through my brain were far from transcendent. I only remember feeling like I had just had an excellent cup of coffee, but without the caffeine jitters. I felt clear-headed and like myself, just sharper. Calmer. Without fear and without doubt. From there on, I just spent the time waiting for a problem to appear so that I could solve it. It was only when they turned off the current that I grasped what had just happened. Relieved of the minefield of self-doubt that constitutes my basic personality, I was a hell of a shot.” The feeling that emerged as soon as the current switched on was “markedly similar to the flow state.”

Michael Weisend, the researcher who hooked up Adee’s brain with the electrodes, explains that her experience was fairly common. “The number one thing I hear people say after tDCS is that time passed unduly fast.” [37] Movements become more automatic, people report calm, focused concentration, and performance improves immediately.

Weisend has been doing research with tDCS for years and points out that not all forms of it bring about the flow state. The one he used with Adee, however, does. And it reliably boosts performance as well. In one study, it boosted the speed with which wannabe snipers could detect a threat by a factor of 2.3. [38] That’s a 230% improvement.

And this isn’t the only brain technology used to artificially blow up performance and accelerate learning by inducing flow states. [39] Chris Berka of Advanced Brain Monitoring uses a technology called neurofeedback to help novices achieve brain states similar to those of experts—brain states more closely to flow than struggle. [40] Berka is able to cut the time it takes novice archers to shoot like a pro by more than half.

No matter where we look, flow and performance go together. [41]

How Does Flow Improve Performance?

Flow is said to improve performance in two ways: (1) “direct,” which refers to flow being a highly functional state that directly boosts performance on the spot, during the activity itself; (2) “indirect,” which means that flow enhances other factors, which then boost performance.

Let’s begin with the direct pathway. All things being equal, the person in flow will outperform the person who isn’t. Someone who enjoys what they are doing, is highly motivated, deeply focused, free from worries and doubts, and feeling confident and in control will perform better than someone who’s distracted, overthinking, worrying, anxious or bored.

Many of flow’s characteristics facilitate performance themselves. If combined during flow, it’s no wonder, really, that performance goes up.

Consider “focused attention.” Research on elite athletes consistently shows that they possess greater concentration abilities than their average peers. [43] Poor performances and failures are typically ascribed to being unable to concentrate effectively. Research on reading comprehension proves the obvious: The more focused you are while reading, the greater your comprehension; the more your mind wanders away from the text, the worse your comprehension. [44]

“Concentration is essential for performing one’s best whether the performer is an athlete, student, surgeon, musician, or something else,” explains a group of sports psychologists. [45] “When I’m focused, there is not one single thing, person, anything that can stand in the way of my doing something,” says Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time with a total of 28 medals. [46]

Or consider “loss of self-consciousness.” If we are free from self-conscious thoughts, we find it much easier to concentrate on the task at hand. Once the nagging inner voice goes offline, self-doubts disappear, and we are free to perform to the best of our abilities. The opposite experience—getting caught up in self-referential thinking to the detriment of performance—goes by the names of choking, the yips, bottling it, or simply getting in one’s own way. Clearly, being able to turn off self-consciousness is vital for performing at our best.

The same spiel could be made with the other common characteristics of flow. The point is: Flow is a highly functional state that directly enhances performance whenever it shows up.

The indirect pathway comes down to flow’s inherently enjoyable nature. Because the flow experience is intrinsically rewarding, we naturally seek to repeat any activity that provides it; what gets rewarded gets repeated. The person who experiences flow while doing math and thus finds the activity enjoyable will be at an advantage compared with the person who finds math boring or anxiety-provoking. The former will be more motivated to do math, will “practice” more, and will improve more.

Flow creates the motivation that keeps us coming back to an activity, which leads to long-term skill development. “Experiencing flow encourages a person to persist at and return to an activity because of the experiential rewards it promises, and thereby fosters the growth of skills over time,” explains Csikszentmihalyi. [47]

When we come back to an activity, we often do so a little more skilled. To experience flow again, we thus need to up the challenge so as to not feel bored. We then get better again, up the challenge again, and so on (Figure 2). “The relation between flow and the realization of potential is this,” explains flow researcher Jeanne Nakamura, “Flow is achieved when an activity challenges the individual to fully engage his or her capacities; as these capacities grow, staying in flow requires taking on increasingly greater challenges.” [48] Thanks to the rewarding nature of flow, we keep getting better and better over time.

Consider Figure 2, which represents a specific activity, such as playing tennis. [50] When you play for the first couple of times, you find yourself at point A1. You have very little skill, and the only challenge is hitting the ball over the net. You find yourself in a flow situation because the level of difficulty is just right for your level of skill. As you keep practicing, your skills improve, and you grow bored just hitting the ball over the net (A2). Or, if you play a practice match against a superior opponent, you’re likely to experience some anxiety because you’re over-challenged (A3).

Neither boredom nor anxiety are nearly as enjoyable as flow. Because you remember how much fun it was when you were in flow, you feel motivated to get back to flow again. If you’re in A2, the only way to get back to flow is by increasing the challenge (you can’t reduce your skills). If you’re in A3, the way to get back to flow is by either increasing your skills or reducing the challenge. The latter would temporarily bring you back to A1, and then, as you keep practicing, to A2, and then via A2 to A4. Either way, sooner or later, you’ll end up in A4, which represents a deeper flow experience than A1. (Greater challenges and skills usually bring forth more intense flow experiences.)

In A4, playing tennis is fun. However, as you keep playing, you’re bound to get bored or anxious again, and you’ll feel motivated to again increase the challenge or increase your skills. Over time, you continue to move toward the top right-hand corner of Figure 2. If you keep playing, you can’t help but improve your skills. And what keeps you playing? What keeps you excited and motivated to play? The rewarding experience of flow.

 If you never experience flow during a specific activity, you’re highly unlikely to feel motivated to engage in that activity again. This is a major reason why flow at an earlier point in time results in greater performance at a later point. It’s why, in Csikszentmihalyi’s study on talented teenagers, those who experienced more flow at age 13 performed better than their peers at age 17. [51] Flow ignites and continually fuels the fire of intrinsic motivation and thereby results in long-term commitment, perseverance, and, ultimately, achievement. If you’re unable to experience flow, you’re unable to fulfill your potential.

Bottom line: We need flow to perform our best. It is necessary for acing a one-off test, tournament, race, or game. And it’s necessary for long-term motivation and skill development, and thus achievement. Without flow, we simply can’t perform to the best of our abilities. Without flow, we can’t reach our full potential.

This article is a (slightly adapted) excerpt from my upcoming book, Mastering Flow. If you want to be notified when the book is available, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.