Flow, Its Necessary Components, and Depression

https://youtu.be/yImlXr5Tr8g?t=2h10m45s

Lex Fridman Podcast episode with John Vervaeke touches on the components of Flow, and the Flow State. Very interesting discussion all around, I definitely recommend listening to the whole episode, but this section was particularly appealing to this community and I wanted to share it. 

Outside of the coolness of hearing an intellectual talk about the critical components needed to enter flow state, the other subtle topic of interest for me was the concept of ruining our ability to easily enter flow state by playing video games, and likely other similarly obsessive online behaviors like social media over usage.

The other piece that I found interesting was the notion that depression is located on the opposite end of the spectrum from the flow state. While they didn't touch on this, I find the great moments in my weekend climbing are typically followed by quite a difficult time on Monday. Usually it's because I just know I want to be out climbing more, but after hearing this, it makes me think the absence of being in the flow state when in the daily grind feels that much more painful after experiencing it for two days straight. 

Props to Lex for having a guest that specifically references rock climbers! 

Darn, I thought this was going to be a discussion about fluid dynamics. 

Neurologically speaking, moving back into a rest state is essential, natural and healthy.  Problems like depression happen when there are imbalances and one gets stuck in in the rest state.  

Sam Gileadi wrote:

Neurologically speaking, moving back into a rest state is essential, natural and healthy.  Problems like depression happen when there are imbalances and one gets stuck in in the rest state.  

Right on. That is a great way to summarize depression.

The more interesting idea though is how we can seemingly train our minds to be able to enter flow state easier, or train our minds to make it very difficult. 

I'd love to see some replies from climbers who are generally "scared" or "anxious" on the wall. Seems like they would also have those tendency in daily life as well, possibly who practice bad habits like too much screen time, and if so, maybe the climbers who enter flow state easily have great habits off the wall that are easily transferable when it's really needed. If we could ever recognize the habits to practice off the wall to facilitate "flow induction", then maybe the next generation of climbers will have a leg up. 

I have an idea of what Flow State is to me.

How do you define Flow State?

It feels like a mistake to treat video games as a single category - they can be either flow-inducing or depressing.  Same for social media and work.  Even climbing BTW - e.g. bad interactions with other parties can ruin flow.  You just have to figure out what works for you and avoid what doesn't.

I'd have to agree with Serge. You can certainly enter flow with video games, especially when you are extensively familiar with their mechanics and you have developed the muscle memory and timing.

For some gamers, and only them, watch some speed runs of games that you have played and understand well the mechanics of... otherwise you can't fully appreciate the skill and flow that skilled players can get into to continue making very difficult coordinated movements consistently.
Minecraft: Dream's speed runs and speed runner vs multiple hunter videos.
ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7McBVQ9lTI (collection of some high IQ plays)
Metroid Prime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQwwThhwAM8
Skyrim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv-xI3iE3j4
Halo 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN7rxoHmD1I

Trail running and climbing do it the most for me.

The intellectualized/philosophical stuff doesn't hit for me personally. I don't think that that the semantics in: 'depression is the opposite of the flow state' are correct to what's really happening in the brain enough to be useful verbiage. The claims about post video gaming depression are nonsense - might happen but not from exiting the flow state in video games vs a different activity.  Gacha games and mobile skinner box type games are dangerous but often don't have the challenging gameplay that can induce a flow state.  For those games it's not the gameplay or flow state that is the issue, it's the designed in addiction mechanics that can cause depression.

Books on training for climbing already have what's best for climbers down pat without the wordy schtuff tbh.

The description of flow in this study covers some of the science. 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00300/full

Matthew thank you for starting a substantial thread. I don’t have time to participate right now but it’s a nice change from gates in gates out/ bolts are evil/ gri gri is good/bad, etc. 

The father of flow state, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, was at the U of Chicago when I was there 1958-59. I believe this was the Mihaly that would go up to Devils Lake with the U of Chi Mountaineering Club. So I suspect flow state was influenced by climbing and talking with climbers. 

My experiences with flow were mostly on longer moderate free solo climbs I had done over and over. I recall the feeling of weaving in and out of the rock on a 700' granite pillar upon which by 2000 I had traveled 20 miles. Don't knock it. There's more to rock climbing than going up the stepladder of grades.

I first learned to appreciate flow while practicing gymnastics.

Matthew Jaggers wrote:

I find the great moments in my weekend climbing are typically followed by quite a difficult time on Monday. 

It's been my experience that any activity that is showering your brain with adrenaline, endorphins, dopamine, etc can end up leading to a type of withdrawal or drop when that activity ends. I don't have my copy of Flow handy as I lent it to a friend but I think Mihaly even warned about chasing addictive highs in his book.

Serge S wrote:

It feels like a mistake to treat video games as a single category - they can be either flow-inducing or depressing.  Same for social media and work.  Even climbing BTW - e.g. bad interactions with other parties can ruin flow.  You just have to figure out what works for you and avoid what doesn't.

I think their main argument is that video games are like a synthesized version of flow state, making it harder for our brains to induce the flow when we're in the real world. Seems logical. WHO seems to agree. 

Video games make it easy and are very often designed to make people to chase those addictive highs for long periods of time if they aren't careful.  Unlike with climbing, no rest days are needed.  It's not nearly as physically taxing.  If the argument was reworded to that the problem is that video games can provide the addictive rush without the flow state, and it's far easier to get burnt out, I think that would be more acceptable. 

With both meditation/calm/sleep and depression states, brain wave frequencies are dominant in the same band (theta).  Depression happens when something prevents the brain from moving back to where faster waves are dominant in a normal cycle.  You could think of it as classic feedback or feedforward loops.  An unregulated feedback loop will overload (burnout).  An unregulated feedforward loop will stagnate (depression).  There are so many factors that can disrupt proper function. It's not as simple as 'do X to avoid depression' or 'games/climbing/music have effect Z.'  

We can train ourselves. Rhythm with climbing/training/resting cycles, mental preparation and visualization cycles, sleep cycles, work/personal life cycles. I think many climbers do this without thinking as part of what it takes to git gud.

Sam Gileadi wrote:

Video games make it easy and are very often designed to make people to chase those addictive highs for long periods of time if they aren't careful.  Unlike with climbing, no rest days are needed.  It's not nearly as physically taxing.  If the argument was reworded to that the problem is that video games can provide the addictive rush without the flow state, and it's far easier to get burnt out, I think that would be more acceptable. 

With both meditation/calm/sleep and depression states, brain wave frequencies are dominant in the same band (theta).  Depression happens when something prevents the brain from moving back to where faster waves are dominant in a normal cycle.  You could think of it as classic feedback or feedforward loops.  An unregulated feedback loop will overload (burnout).  An unregulated feedforward loop will stagnate (depression).  There are so many factors that can disrupt proper function. It's not as simple as 'do X to avoid depression' or 'games/climbing/music have effect Z.'  

We can train ourselves. Rhythm with climbing/training/resting cycles, mental preparation and visualization cycles, sleep cycles, work/personal life cycles. I think many climbers do this without thinking as part of what it takes to git gud.

Just like with everything else in climbing, knowing why things work or doesn't work is an advantage over previous generations. If we can distil down the habits of succeful climbers versus the rest of us, then that seems very useful. Just saying we would do the best thing for our climning without thinking about it is pretty naive in my opinion. It'd be similar to just winging our dietary choices. Seems silly not to want to know how to optimize our minds while attempting optimization of literally every other part of our body. 

For example, MAYBE scared climbers just did everything wrong in the week leading up to their outing and they just didnt have a clue the effects of their bad daily habits? Look at Chris Sharma. He's practically a munk, and he seems to enter flow state better than anyone in climbing history. Ondra is very similar, maybe sans any herbal remedies. 

The fact that legitimate geniuses took the time to go beyond the typical experiential flow state description means we likely have another factor to plug into the performance equation. Likely this is less impactful than finger strength, or general power, but maybe it's worth a grade or two of peak performance.

Matthew Jaggers wrote:

https://youtu.be/yImlXr5Tr8g?t=2h10m45s

Lex Fridman Podcast episode with John Vervaeke touches on the components of Flow, and the Flow State. Very interesting discussion all around, I definitely recommend listening to the whole episode, but this section was particularly appealing to this community and I wanted to share it. 

Outside of the coolness of hearing an intellectual talk about the critical components needed to enter flow state, the other subtle topic of interest for me was the concept of ruining our ability to easily enter flow state by playing video games, and likely other similarly obsessive online behaviors like social media over usage.

The other piece that I found interesting was the notion that depression is located on the opposite end of the spectrum from the flow state. While they didn't touch on this, I find the great moments in my weekend climbing are typically followed by quite a difficult time on Monday. Usually it's because I just know I want to be out climbing more, but after hearing this, it makes me think the absence of being in the flow state when in the daily grind feels that much more painful after experiencing it for two days straight. 

Props to Lex for having a guest that specifically references rock climbers! 

Have you tried to induce the flow state at work?

Matthew Jaggers wrote:

 I find the great moments in my weekend climbing are typically followed by quite a difficult time on Monday. Usually it's because I just know I want to be out climbing more, but after hearing this, it makes me think the absence of being in the flow state when in the daily grind feels that much more painful after experiencing it for two days straight. 

When my husband and I were both still in the working work, we called this PVD - post-vacation depression.  it's just a little temporary situational depression arising from the contrast between (for us) outdoor and indoor, "fun" vs "work".

But one thing that may be interesting for people to think about is the power we give things by putting labels on them.  It's a natural tendency to notice a feeling in our bodies and automatically give it an emotional label.  I noticed a long time ago that after a few days of climbing or some other physically demanding activity, that I'd wake up and think "I feel a bit depressed today".  But when I checked in with my body about what I was really feeling, I realized that what I was labelling depression was just general mild physical fatigue.  The same thing happened to me this morning at breakfast, when the thought popped into my head that I was feeling slightly angry and irritated.  When I checked in with that, I realized my entire body was just noticing the after-effects of last night's 2 hrs of deep tissue and somewhat painful full body massage.  There really was no emotional component.

Matthew Jaggers wrote:

Just like with everything else in climbing, knowing why things work or doesn't work is an advantage over previous generations. If we can distil down the habits of succeful climbers versus the rest of us, then that seems very useful. Just saying we would do the best thing for our climning without thinking about it is pretty naive in my opinion. It'd be similar to just winging our dietary choices. Seems silly not to want to know how to optimize our minds while attempting optimization of literally every other part of our body. 

For example, MAYBE scared climbers just did everything wrong in the week leading up to their outing and they just didnt have a clue the effects of their bad daily habits? Look at Chris Sharma. He's practically a munk, and he seems to enter flow state better than anyone in climbing history. Ondra is very similar, maybe sans any herbal remedies. 

The fact that legitimate geniuses took the time to go beyond the typical experiential flow state description means we likely have another factor to plug into the performance equation. Likely this is less impactful than finger strength, or general power, but maybe it's worth a grade or two of peak performance.

I agree.  My post is mostly concerning depression and burnout.  Training and resting as a lot of climbers do is very healthy.  Both depression and flow state are worthy topics on their own.

I've gotten into the flow state most intensely on runouts. I only like to run it out where I feel safe and confident, but sometimes there is no good gear and no choice but to keep climbing on automatic. Those situations are usually terrifying for me after the fact.

Not quite the same experience with flow states in video games and music, both of which I think of as more or less abstract mediums with low consequences of failure (music with the lowest, slop never hurt anyone). Both require an insane amount of practice and training to get to anything close to the flow state in climbing in my experience. Pattern recognition, muscle memory, precise micro timing (~3ms resolution with a good vocalist or drummer, or per-frame timing in some fighting games), strategy, creativity and rhythm are all important. Personally I feel the opposite of depressed for a long time afterward if I can get auto mode to kick in.

I think the science to understand a lot of what happens is not quite there yet, and even geniuses have biases or might infer something from raw data to fit it in their worldview. So insight from experienced/elite climbers is pretty valuable for sure! I guess that's the point I'm trying to make.

I'm working with a Muse headband right now to track EEG when I'm playing music, but it's not accurate. Or wearable enough to climb with. It would be super interesting to do controlled studies on the brain wave activity of elite climbers, speedrunners, drummers and so on. (In other words, preaching to the choir.)

Sam Gileadi wrote:

Video games make it easy and are very often designed to make people to chase those addictive highs for long periods of time if they aren't careful.  Unlike with climbing, no rest days are needed.  It's not nearly as physically taxing.  If the argument was reworded to that the problem is that video games can provide the addictive rush without the flow state, and it's far easier to get burnt out, I think that would be more acceptable. 

I think this is a little reductive--some of it is true, but I think it fails to account for the depth of games and play and what exactly people are chasing in games. The best work, imho, has been done by Jane McGonigal and I recommend Reality Is Broken to anyone with an interest.  Here's the TED talk if you're not down to take a flyer on the book immediately.

The tl;dr or tl;dw is that too much of our life is spent on the mundane and meaningless and we really do thirst for being important, doing important things, even in simulation.  So much of the history of games, and sport (which is also games really) is about creating challenge that feels meaningful and then having the opportunity to fail with low consequence, try many times, and then feel the rush of success.  Dr. McGonigal posits that our life doesn't have enough of this cycle in general, and we would all be better off if it did.

Spopepro O. wrote:

I think this is a little reductive--some of it is true, but I think it fails to account for the depth of games and play and what exactly people are chasing in games. The best work, imho, has been done by Jane McGonigal and I recommend Reality Is Broken to anyone with an interest.  Here's the TED talk if you're not down to take a flyer on the book immediately.

The tl;dr or tl;dw is that too much of our life is spent on the mundane and meaningless and we really do thirst for being important, doing important things, even in simulation.  So much of the history of games, and sport (which is also games really) is about creating challenge that feels meaningful and then having the opportunity to fail with low consequence, try many times, and then feel the rush of success.  Dr. McGonigal posits that our life doesn't have enough of this cycle in general, and we would all be better off if it did.

Agree.  Trying so many times and finally achieving sucess in video games is super satisfying.  I don't feel like the simulation part of it takes anything away from the experience, or causes depression.  Cheesing exploits and glitches are a huge part of the fun. But the vast majority of games now only exploit this cycle.  The new standard since the move to mobile and always online/free to play games is to stack as many addictive mechanics as they can get away with. They hide how they use systems to make the grind meaningless, so that a small number of whales - easily exploited people who pay thousands to support their addiction - will pay money to win. All documented and well known stuff.  Very possible you know all about it of course!  It works.  

I am not sure how people picture the average gamer, but they're not someone doing a 1CC run of DoDonpachi, murking the marauder with ease in Doom Eternal, or getting a hitless run in Noita. It's someone playing simple mobile games on their phone. They want a casual experience. If we're talking about people that actually do achieve the flow state in games, it's a relative few.

Sam Gileadi wrote:

Agree.  Trying so many times and finally achieving sucess in video games is super satisfying.  I don't feel like the simulation part of it takes anything away from the experience, or causes depression.  Cheesing exploits and glitches are a huge part of the fun. But the vast majority of games now only exploit this cycle.  The new standard since the move to mobile and always online/free to play games is to stack as many addictive mechanics as they can get away with. They hide how they use systems to make the grind meaningless, so that a small number of whales - easily exploited people who pay thousands to support their addiction - will pay money to win. All documented and well known stuff.  Very possible you know all about it of course!  It works.  

I am not sure how people picture the average gamer, but they're not someone doing a 1CC run of DoDonpachi, murking the marauder with ease in Doom Eternal, or getting a hitless run in Noita. It's someone playing simple mobile games on their phone. They want a casual experience. If we're talking about people that actually do achieve the flow state in games, it's a relative few.

Yeah, ok, we are really in tight agreement.  I think I tend to automatically classify "do you guys not have phones" games as casinos. They have more in common there than with what I think of as games. Structures to disrupt one's sense of time passing, multiple stages of currency conversion to obfuscate spending, paying for random chances to get the experience you want, annoyance mechanics that are smoothed by paying... it's all out of casino playbooks. 

Who is the average gamer is kinda like asking here who is the average climber.  Threads here say .11 is average for anyone who tries at all... but reality is probably 5.7 weekenders.  The nice thing about games, and climbing (which are *way* more related than folks like to acknowledge) is that you can always find a rewarding proximal challenge.

I've been busy with school, but just wanted to pop in and say this is a top-shelf thread. I look forward to reading more and eventually responding.