The Rise Of Superman

The Rise Of Superman decodes the science of ultimate, human performance by examining how top athletes enter and stay in a state of flow, while achieving their greatest feats, and how you can do the same.

When you’re in flow, you feel like you’re on a “high,” you can do almost no wrong and your performance is supercharged. While this is often a spiritual experience, there sure is a lot going on in your body as it happens as well. In fact, five strong chemicals are released, all at once, when you’re in flow, and that’s what makes it so powerful:

Dopamine, which gets you excited about new ideas, while helping you filter what’s important from the noise, and thus sharpens your focus. Norepinephrine, which increases your heartbeat, blood sugar and breathing speed, to give you energy and attention to the task at hand. Anandamide, which works a little bit like cannabis, thus getting your brain to make more new connections and be creative. Endorphins, which absolves you from physical pain, because it’s 100 times stronger than morphine. Serotonin, which causes the glowing feeling after you achieve a goal and keeps you coming back for more.

As you can see, that’s quite a mighty chemical cocktail that keeps you buzzing. But for flow to happen, something else must occur. In fact, some parts of your brain have to stop buzzing altogether for a while.

Another factor, which is part of the flow experience, is something called transient hypofrontality. What this complicated expression means is simply that for a short time (transient) your preFRONTal cortex is less (hypo) active.

The prefrontal cortex is part of the neocortex, which, in turn, is the “youngest” part of our brain, evolutionary speaking. This is where all complex thinking happens (like you crunching numbers to decide which house you want to buy), and it’s what allows us to think rationally about our feelings and be self-aware.

Why does this part shut off? Because in flow, you don’t have time to second-guess your own decisions. When your self-awareness monitor shuts down, you’ll go with your gut, make split-second decisions and try new approaches exactly as needed – because the part of your brain in charge of doubting is turned off.

Another part that slows down during flow is your orientation adjustment area, the part of the brain that lets you assess your position in the world, relative to other objects around you. This is what causes surfers to feel “as if they’re one with the wave” or writers to just “think their words onto the paper.”