How Meditation Can Help You Get In The Flow: Maximizing Creativity and Productivity

WRITTEN BY HIRA KHAN

If you have been meditating for some time, you may be wondering how you can adapt what you learn from it practically into your everyday life. 

This is a question scientists have been exploring in a similar manner for over 150 years.

More recently, they have gone beyond looking at brain chemistry, and meditation, to the areas of creativity and flow to explore how and why they impact productivity so significantly. 

Photo by Geordanna Cordero

The Basics of Flow and Creativity

First, the basics about what flow and creativity are and how they connect. 

A quick definition for flow is that it is a state of high performance.

It includes, as Chase Jarvis points out,

“intense concentration on the task at hand, the merger of action and awareness, the loss of a sense of self, the distortion of time…flow is progressive.

It exists on a spectrum that is sort of like emotions.”

The issue with both flow and creativity is that they are not easy to train because they are not skills.

They are states of mind.

Flow, as Steven Kotler defines it, is an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” 

In contrast, while creativity is also a state of mind, “There’s this mistaken assumption that creativity is a solitary pursuit.

This may be true, but the business of creativity is always collaborative.”

Creativity is about making connections whether it is with other people or ideas. 

What scientists who have found is that when we go into flow, it shuts down our inner critic.

Therefore, we have less impulse control and are more willing to try new things.

This is why flow and creativity and productivity are connected. 

Perhaps this is why flow has been found by researchers to be an experience shared by all successful people.

However, they have also found that everyone can access it even though large corporations and top CEOs are the one who have harnessed it most systematically. 

Jarvis says “Companies like Toyota, Microsoft, and Patagonia have flow woven into their corporate philosophies.

A lot of the really innovative things that companies like Google and Facebook do to manage their knowledge workers comes down to flow science.

Flow is everywhere in business—it’s just that most people are unaware of it.”

Boost Your Productivity With Flow Research

Research on flow and meditation has become of increasing interest to scientists.

They want to see if they can reproduce the effects of those heightened states in everyday life, particularly at work, to increase success. 

You can benefit from their research, and increase your creativity and productivity, by adopting the following tips. 

First, they found that regular sleep is crucial.

Therefore, protect your sleep patterns and regulate your body’s circadian rhythms.

This helps you access flow and creativity more efficiently. 

Second and third, how you begin anything and everything is important.

This is true of the first hour of your day and the first hour of work.

You need to protect those first hours for reflection, resourcing, fuelling and strategizing.

Fourth, make sure that you take regular breaks.

Those breaks should also be “active recovery” instead of vegging out.

That means do not work yourself to the point of exhaustion. 

And finally, keep curious and plan adventures and experiences that keep your mind engaged when you do have time off. 

Triggering Flow and Creativity

After all this discussion of flow, the most obvious question that comes to mind is: how hard is it to achieve?

The answer is that initially both can be difficult to learn.

However, research has shown it can be done.

Scientists have induced flow artificially for short periods with methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and certain drugs.

However, the effects of those methods are uncertain and brief.

Instead, as Kotler states, “the most important thing to know is that flow follows focus.”

The same is true of creativity.

There are also a couple simple things to keep in mind if you want to become more creative: do it regularly, persevere and keep exploring so that your mind gets into the habit of looking for relationships spontaneously.

Finally to connect flow and creativity to meditation, they both are relevant but to different types of practice. 

To increase flow, due to its intense focus and often heightened states of bliss, this most closely resembles Vipassana or concentration meditation.

Practice those if you want to experience flow.

Creativity with its openness and presence in the moment then its making connections is more closely related to lovingkindness and mindful awareness.

Practice those if you want to improve your creativity.

Together, improving your ability to be creative and flow, has proven to dramatically increase productivity and is certainly considered a secret to success for many top business leaders and CEOs.◼︎