3 Habits of People Never in Flow States

Reduce stress-inducing convolutions and become a freer version of yourself

“What’s the meaning of life?” is a question that never enters the flow state. Recognized in personal development conversations as the zone where challenge meets skill, flow is much more than a vector for achievement. It’s central to what drives meaning in life. It’s immersion itself: where we stop asking what we’re doing and instead simply do it.

Yet if you’re in the west, you live in a culture that encourages a disconnection between mind and body, a numbing of discomfort, and a prioritization of the destination over the journey. These are major flow breakers.

The disturbing reality is that some people only tap into the light-hearted focus and purposeful engagement that is flow a couple of times in their lives. They otherwise triple-check their email, honk in traffic, and slingshot rubber bands at strangers.

Caution: it’s easier to enter a flow-breaking lifestyle than you think. Below, I’ve collected three flow-destroying habits that quietly diminish the quality of your life. These habits are tricksters: they feel harmless and even pleasurable in the moment, but they gradually chew away at your self-concept.

Flow-breaking habit #1: When smartphones obscure inner messaging

“Self help can be summed up in two words: delayed gratification.” Naval Ravikant

So much of our beloved technology compromises the reward circuitry that encourages meaningful pursuits. Worse, they help us disassociate and numb, rather than confront and resolve, our anxieties. While most people recognize addictive dynamics with their phones, few acknowledge the level of emotional suppression that our rewarding devices truly offer.

To use me as an example: in anxious states, I’ll suddenly find myself scrolling through a YouTube news feed or email inbox. Turns out, this function was built into the design of many platforms. In Hooked, Nir Eval explains designers equip habit-forming apps with features that incentivize the user to check their phone before consciously recognizing what they’re doing. In lulls in activity or in stressful moments, the phone offers a potent detour from the inner space.

The fact that people regulate their emotions via their cell phone isn’t shocking: most of us are split off from the programs that drive our defensive structures. But here’s a lesson that might take a lifetime to integrate: there is no psycho-emotional free lunch. We can never make the discomfort go away by suppressing it; rather, we simply transmute it into a different form. For example, checking your phone to diffuse anxiety isn’t so different from the person who over drinks in an uncomfortable group dynamic. Sure, changing their consciousness smooths over felt conversational edges in the moment, but their anxiety doesn’t just disappear. It transforms into a pounding headache the next morning.

We already know smartphones can be sketchy. Who can forget the third-party surveillance, circadian rhythm hijacking, or empathy snatching. Yet I worry they parasitically feed on our capacity to enter flow.

When you grow accustomed to scrolling through your phone whenever discomfort looms, you weaken the neural pathways that support immersion and intrinsic motivation.

Look at it from this angle: How often does something truly satisfying feel that way at the first go? At the beginning of a workout, in the first stages of a marriage or designing of a website, we feel layers of resistance we must gradually peel back. Only afterward do we say hello to a wholesome feeling of reward.

The truth is this. Our discomfort, anger, and all emotions are compasses. Emotions are here to offer meaningful updates to the way we live. We have inbuilt reward systems, but that long sought-after sense of gratification is on the other side of pursuits with asynchronous rewards. Returning to a challenging yet nourishing activity, day after day, is key to unlocking a far-reaching sense of fulfillment. Yet we corrode our abilities around focus and persistence in exchange for the short-term, dopaminergic routes to pleasure represented in technologies that simplify our lives.

I invite you to join me in my skepticism of convenience. What are you losing by needing the voice of your favorite podcaster in your ear during every walk, every shower, or every washing of the dishes? Similarly, what sort of surprises might you expect from learning to navigate your city with no artificially intelligent map? Along with heightened trust in your perceptual lens, by relaxing your reliance on your phone, more and more each day you’ll learn to transmute your initial pangs of frustration into progress.

Flow-breaking habit #2: When the body ignores its own requests

“Be cautious of health books — you might die of a misprint.” Mark Twain

The western world has no shortage of industry stakeholders who manipulate human emotions to drive ambiguity around food. There’s a pervasive idea, for instance, that food is simply fuel. Major players in the sugar industry went as far as to “pay scientists to underplay” data around sugar’s health risks and over attribute health problems to lack of exercise.

This isn’t so different from gaslighting. Everyone knows what it’s like to suffer after eating. If you adopt the perspective that food is fuel and quality doesn’t matter, you’re likely to assume that stomach aches, exhaustion, and other painful reactions to what goes into the body are meaningless annoyances. You’ll believe they’re merely part of the territory of eating rather than useful data points. Ever hear people normalize the “afternoon slump”? These are just people who don’t adjust their diets along with the messages of their bodies. These are people never in flow.

Losing touch with your body’s signaling is a knife through your flow state because people rarely enter heightened states of consciousness when they’re apathetic or groaning in pain. Ignoring bodily data in favor of what special interests groups want you to believe is also a signpost along a growing lack of self-trust and connection with the hunches, inspiration, and leaps of faith that invite you to level up your focus.

If you monitor bodily feedback from what you eat and adjust accordingly, it’ll be easier to enter a near-automatic state of calibration—you’ll crave what will most energize and satiate you. No dogma like “Food is fuel” or “meat is bad and tofu is good” is required. This balance will promote trust, ease, and a quiet, nonjudgmental sense of discernment.

You can use this discernment to gradually adjust your diet until you’re guided to that which your body needs to perform best in a given season, context, or time of day. This isn’t just about food but also about sleep, when to speak and when to be quiet, and your trust in when it’s time to take a break. With increased attunement with your feelings, you’ll more naturally facilitate immersion (flow) and other joy-based states.

Flow-breaking habit #3: When obligation outpaces desire

“Your clients will be your clients because they’re out of touch with their unconscious.” David Snyder/Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, et al.

People start out seeking flow because of another goal. They recognize something they desire and go after it. After the initial burst of motivation, the obligations, the to-do lists, and excuses against particular tasks rear their heads. This is why people buy gym memberships or training programs yet struggle to use them. Their hesitations take over and silence the desires that first inspired their goals.

Bob Proctor has spoken about the terror barrier, a framework that explains this problem well. When you’re invited out of your comfort zone, the paradigm supporting it doubles down because its survival depends on your belief in it. The modes of assumption driving your paradigm worry for their existence. Their defensive strategy involves hitting you with stress, boredom, anxiety, and other convolutions that keep you remote from flow. I like the term “terror barrier” but others call it Resistance or imposter syndrome. In short, this is a force that plagues anyone who pushes against their limits.

Rather than allowing the terror barrier to act as a red velvet rope keeping you from where you’d like to be, see it instead as an obnoxious yet easily persuaded guard protecting the outskirts of flow. Everyone goes through it, and with persistence, it can be talked out of whatever it’s trying to convince you of. Whether your terror barrier speaks of your inadequacy, sees the tasks in front of you as “too hard,” or induces severe nausea, it’s ultimately weaker than the version of you who decided they were ready for a new-and-improved point of view. In other words, the barrier wouldn’t be visible if you weren’t already in the process of dissolving it.

The best antidote to the terror barrier involves shifting your focus away from the obligations surrounding your tasks and into the desires fundamentally driving them. What do you really want? Where’s the soft, bouncy layer beneath your “Should” statements? Some people get motivated through fear or regret: thinking of the misfortunes that will come of their inability to act. This might also work for you, though I find it counterproductive. I feel better when my attention primarily lingers on what I want. In this way, the journey and destination merge, and I find it easier to break a goal into pleasurable microtasks.

Although flow is a great facilitator of creative production, it’s more than that. We are by nature flow-based beings. It’s only years of accumulated trauma that squeezes us into nit-picky commentators on our lives. Culture beats the expansive, generative, flow-prone qualities out of us. This is a big reason why we often fail to meet our goals — we force or control our way into things, ending up on the sidelines railing against elements of our journey rather than becoming one with it.

When you’re prone to distraction, listening to your rambling mind instead of your body, or hyper-focused on results, take a step back. Did you arrive on this planet to force, cajole, and worry your way back into the sands of time?

Renouncing habits that keep you at odds with flow helps you become the receiver rather than the control-seeking driver of your experience. This transformation is necessary for tapping into a light-hearted, freer version of yourself.