Be Very Cautious About These Flow-Destroying Types of Leisure

…And Focus On These Instead

In a flow state, life becomes simple. You tap into an intrinsic motivation to act rather than focusing exclusively on your work’s rewards.

The tension is that many culturally encouraged forms of leisure change us in ways that make flow states harder to access.

Avoid these habits if you want to be in flow more often than you feel scattered, bored, and dead inside.

Notification Hunting, Goal-less Social Media-Scrolling, and other Life-Force-Killing Practices

If you’ve trawled the personal development space for longer than an afternoon, you know that notifications hurt your capacity to delay gratification. When you become accustomed to instant rewards, slower-burning pursuits feel exponentially more challenging.

At the same time, notifications and other dopamine-releasing agents compromise your interest in simple pleasures like journaling, playing music, or strolling through parks on a sunny morning, all of which give you the zest you need to pursue meaningful goals.

Instead, consider deleting social media from your phone, so you don’t have such easy access to it. Use it on your computer alone, and choose a specific amount of time you’ll spend on it each week or day. Gradually work your way down if it’s currently a significant habit.

The best replacement for social media is a hobby that requires delayed gratification but offers the potential for deep satisfaction over time. A few examples are learning guitar (or piano, or flute, or the drums). You might also consider learning additional languages.

When you become lucid or proficient with other forms of expression, you’re going to feel a deep sense of power that makes you 10X less reliant on (or even desirous of) instant forms of entertainment.

Watching Television, Netflix, and Other Media that Require Little Thinking

“Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation.” -Terence McKenna

The central issue with mainstream entertainment is you can’t control or predict the programming you’re getting from it. The messages laced into mainstream media often worm their way into your mind, installing limiting beliefs into your subconscious.

If you’ve watched television since childhood, these beliefs become so deeply conditioned that they become presuppositions. They become invisible cages through which you mold for yourself an increasingly constricted lifestyle based on the illusions that you can only do, believe, and think the way toxic media has programmed you to.

Many people say, “I only watch television for half an hour a day. What’s the problem?” But imagine if you were to write, sing, or run for the same amount of time. Eventually, those efforts would compound. Similarly, when you’re ingesting military-grade propaganda for 30 minutes a day it quickly becomes part of who you are.

Self-sabotage coach Jason Christoff uses the term “fire programming” to describe people who regularly consume mainstream media.

When you’re constantly imbibing gory, violent films, hearing about infectious disease or violent crime, while simultaneously drinking nervous system stimulants loaded with caffeine, you’re going to be constantly on edge, seeing conflict and danger everywhere you go.

The antidote is seeing your consumption as a way of imbibing nutrients: just as you take vitamin D or vegetables in to support your strength and vitality, see consumption as a method of nutrient intake.

This isn’t to imply there’s never any place for leisurely consumption: but limit it to stuff that’s supporting your growth in some way. When building a flow-based life, you want to avoid content that (even unconsciously) feeds into futility-based thinking that causes you to focus on competition or other forms of limitation.

Constant, Unrelenting Consumption of Any Kind

This is a related point to the previous, but equally vital. During certain stages of your journey, it becomes easy to use motivational content as a surrogate Netflix. You ingest marathons of empowering, inspiring material (but never take action on it).

The issue is that information overload adds bloat and sluggishness to your thinking, no matter how positive it may be. Our daytime attention runs on ultradian rhythms, 90-minute cycles in which we’re capable of high performance. After these 90-minute rhythms, we need purposeful bouts of decompression where our minds can rest.

If you’re constantly consuming information, you’re not giving yourself time to internalize what you’re learning. Not only will it be harder to use that information to your advantage later on, but you’ll also degrade your performance.

Our performance and our rest periods are two sides of the same coin. For optimal results, the intensity of your performance should always mirror the intensity of your rest.

Whenever you absorb ideas, give yourself at least 20 minutes to sit with them. During this restful period, you’ll absorb new information. Then it can inflect your thinking and support your capacity to remain in flow.

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