Yoga Nidra and NSDR

I first heard about Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) and Yoga Nidra on The Huberman Lab Podcast. I tried it out the next day to relax and take a restful break, and I found it…enjoyable. I’m not sure I can speak to the long-term benefits, as my practice here has been intermittent at best, but as with some of the other new-fangled health advice I’ve come across (cold showers first thing in the morning, as an example) I find myself enjoying the practice.

Here is the meditation Huberman recommends. I’ve not used it for sleep—I read before bed, and that puts me out most of the time—but I have used it for a short break and to get back to sleep. It’s worked great with one issue; sometimes, a YouTube ad pops up, kinda mucking with the vibe.

How to achieve flow

One of the primary reasons I started this journal was to get back into a creation habit. And one of the reasons I want to get that habit of creation going again is so I can more easily get into a flow state.

Why flow? Well, it feels good, and it’s good for you. In his seminal book on the subject Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” Essentially, flow is a key ingredient in lasting happiness.

Csikszentmihalyi asserts that happiness can be achieved, practiced, and achieved easier over time as one learns to get into flow. In my experience, this is true, but it’s not the only benefit to getting into flow. It’s also a great way to get things done.

It’s been many years since I’ve read the book, and, candidly, I found it dry and difficult to read, let alone enjoy, but he does outline the “how to” in getting into flow. The following is a bit rough, but I have been taking some notes on flow as I’ve been reading Ikigai and refreshing myself on Csikszentmihalyi’s work.

Conditions needed to achieve flow:

1. Know what you’re doing. Note: this doesn’t mean you need to be a master, only that you know how to do what you’re doing. Learning can be a good way to get into flow.

2. Understand how well you’re doing through feedback. Essentially, noticing your progress.

3. Engage in a task that has you somewhat challenged, at least enough to absorb your attention in the task at hand. Ideally, such that your action and attention are working together.

4. Find a distraction-free environment and have control over what you are doing at all times.

Strategies for flow

• Choose something challenging but not too difficult. You want to enter the uncomfort zone but with something doable.

• Have a clear objective. You don’t need a map to your goal but a compass. You should know where you want to be and what to do, but you don’t need the course mapped out. Have a clear objective focusing on the process, but don’t obsess over the details or the finished product. The idea is to plan and then do the work. Reflect on what you hope to achieve: What is my objective for today’s session? How many words am I going to write?

• Concentrate on one thing at a time. Multitasking is not effective. Distractions are deadly. Concentrating on one thing at a time might be the most important aspect of achieving flow. People suck at multitasking, and you can’t multitask and also be in flow. Context switching drains energy, makes us less effective, more stressed, more error-prone, retaining less information, etc. This is especially true for complex areas requiring domain knowledge, deep thinking, and creative work.

• Look for “mircroflows”—the art of doing and enjoying simple tasks. Things like washing the dishes, painting, running errands, etc. Most of us do this, even if we aren’t aware of it.

• Cultivate a meditation practice. There's not much to say about this; it’s a great way to clear the deck and prepare yourself for flow. Looking back at 2022, a year I slipped out of the habit of daily meditation, I wonder how much that affected my inability to resist distraction.

• Embrace ritual. Rituals help flow by providing clear objectives and rules guiding people towards goals. An unclear expectation or goal is one of the hardest things to deal with in work-life. Rituals or processes—so often derided as a bad word—can help not only with the steps and subsets that give us a path to follow but in clearing up expectations, often to the realization that the goal is unattainable or otherwise not worth pursuing. In my life and projects, both work and personal, rituals of starting is often enough to unblock even the trickiest problems.

Flow can be trained, and one of the best ways to do that is to begin recognizing those things in your life that place you into a flow state. But that’s not all; in the book Ikigai, the authors assert that finding your flow(s) can lead to finding your Ikigai—your purpose in life. Another interesting tip from Ikigai is to leverage similar activities to those you enjoy. Especially if you are good at something, if painting gets you into flow, you can try photography.

Here’s a list of things that put me into a state of flow:

• Snowboarding

• Walking. But only if I’m only walking and not doing anything else. Walking is one of the things I feel ok multitasking, but only if the other thing I’m doing is the focus. Even then, it’s not nearly as effective or enjoyable as it would be on its own. But that’s a whole other topic.

• Writing, sometimes, if I’m either freewriting or the topic is clear in my mind.

• Making art. I’m not a good artist, but I find that making art can quickly put me into a flow state that lasts for a long time. It feels good to make art. Incidentally, this is one reason I don’t think AI art will ever replace human artists. Humans like to make art.

• Making maps. Probably the same as making art but a bit more specific.

• DJing. More than just listening to music, picking out the songs and syncing the beats can lift me into a flow state.

• Cleaning or yard work, but only if there is a fairly large job to do.

• Video games, but only for short-ish stretches.