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Flow Habits

We all have habits. We walk a certain way, talk a certain way, put on our socks and shoes a certain way, eat the same foods, take the same route to work and when we have to break these habits we can find it incredibly difficult to do so. It’s not that what we want to do instead is difficult, rather it’s that when we say, “Let’s take a different route to work today!” we don’t realize we haven’t done that till we’re already half way to work!

Those that live the Flow life and get into Micro and MacroFlows consistently, often don’t do these things with a conscious effort. For these Flow Artists, getting into Flow is no more a conscious effort than is you choosing your route to work. These Flow Artists have simply built smart habits, Flow Habits.

A habit is a loop that consists of a cue, a process and a reward. The habit loop goes like so, Cue –> Process –> Reward. Check out this image:

A Cue is “a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which [habitual routine] to use”. In other words, a cue is any external, or internal event that causes your brain to initiate a specific brain activity. This brain activity may cause physical movements, thoughts and or emotional reactions.

A Routine is the specific brain activity that is caused by the cue, again, the specific brain activity may cause physical movements, thoughts, and or emotional reactions.

A Reward is what you receive for your completion of the routine and tells your brain whether or not the particular routine is worth remembering to carry out again in the future.

Example: You walk into your room and see your bed, the cue, it makes you feel sleepy, and you think to yourself “I guess it’s time for bed”, so then you lay in your bed, all of this is the routine, finally, you fall asleep, have beautiful dreams and wake up fully rested, the reward.

Example 2: You get home from school and see your game station, the cue, you feel excited to start playing your game again and think of crushing all those noobs online, you sit down and turn on your game station, the routine, finally, you start crushing noobs, the reward.

Example 3: You walk into your kitchen, the cue, you feel hungry, you immediately think about what you want to eat (maybe the snack you bought earlier), then you grab the snack, the routine, you bite into the sweet deliciousness, the reward.

Over time these habit loops become more and more automatic, therefore becoming easier and easier for your brain to perform. Before even realizing it, you’ve slept way too much, played thousands of hours of video games and eaten tons of snacks, even though you were supposed to be working on your school assignments! In your brain, the Cue and Reward have become so intimately “intertwined that powerful senses of anticipation and craving emerge”.

What makes habits so powerful and important, is that they reveal a basic truth about the brain, and about YOU. The truth is that: When a habit loop begins, the brain stops fully participating in decision making, effectively turning you into a robot. Worse, is that every time you complete the habit, you get better and better at it, and a lot of times, it’s difficult to realize you’ve engaged in a habit until after the habit has been completed.

This is what I meant when I said, “The brain is always adapting and getting better at what it’s doing”, you can think of the brain as a huge mush of habits.

The good news is that just knowing about habits and how they work can help us take back control of our lives. We can ignore habits, replace them, or change them! In our case, we’ll be trying to set up habits which get us into Flow more often through replacing/changing our habits!

Since I don’t know what habits you currently engage in, or what completely new habits you’d like to create, I am simply going to give you a way to replace/change your habits in a way that is conducive to generating/triggering Flow more often. Here it goes!

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