You’ll Struggle to Get Into Flow (If You Don’t Understand This)

When was the last time you were so immersed in a task that time vanished?

What felt like 15 minutes was 3 hours?

When your ideas clicked effortlessly, and you couldn’t pull yourself away from what you were doing.

You weren’t thinking about what you were doing, criticising yourself or wondering what you were going to have for lunch.

It was just you and the task at hand.

That is flow.

And if you are a creator, solopreneur or high-performer who wants to better your life and achieve your goals, you need more of it.

Flow is your unfair advantage.

It’s what turns work into art, pressure into purpose and effort into ‘effortless effort’.

But there’s a problem.

Most people don’t understand flow or know how to access it.

They might think it’s a switch (you’re either in it or you’re not) or they have to have the ‘perfect’ conditions to enter it.

They wait for the pressure to build up or to have the right tools.

This is a trap.

A trap I fell for time and time again.

I had tried countless productivity and focus tools over the years. Some were useful and others were a waste of time.

But something was missing, and that was my lack of understanding of the Flow Cycle.

Until you understand what the Flow Cycle is and learn how to navigate it, you’ll continue to procrastinate, delay and block yourself from accessing flow and achieving your goals.

Let’s change that in this newsletter.

Flow Is Not A Switch, It’s A Cycle

The biggest mistake holding you back is thinking that flow is something you have or you don’t have.

You either fall into it or you don’t.

You hope you’ll get into flow, but it never happens.

If you want to take your performance to the next level, you need to ditch chance.

Stop waiting for it.

Start designing it.

You can design your conditions of flow by understanding that flow is a predictable outcome when you follow the 4-stage cycle.

When you understand what each stage is and how to move through the stages, you can enter flow at will and stay in it.

Let’s break down each stage.

Stage 1: Struggle

Imagine the task you want to work on like a boulder you are going to push up a hill.

If that’s got you feeling a certain way, good.

This is what the struggle phase is about.

Starting a task is often a struggle. You want to do something, anything else. Your stress is increasing, your thoughts are all over the place, and focus has never felt harder to reach.

This isn’t your sign to stop and run away. It’s your sign to keep at it.

The first stage of flow is the struggle.

When you look at a task or problem and it feels like you have to use so much effort, willpower and energy to do it.

You’re feeling a lot of resistance and discomfort.

Steven Kotler, author and co-founder of the Flow Research Collective, says the struggle phase is when,

I want to emphasise this is not the stage to give up or run away. Because if you do, you’ll never get into flow.

By avoiding the struggle, you reset the entire system.

You train your brain to associate discomfort with giving up. You train it to avoid struggle, and this becomes your new norm: to avoid struggle.

Then when you are faced with situations where you have to face a struggle, it takes so more effort and willpower to do it because you never built your capacity to deal with struggles.

But there is a silver lining.

If you can stick with the difficult task, if you can be comfortable being uncomfortable, if you can face the struggle instead of avoiding it, something happens at 23 minutes.

Research shows that it takes 23 minutes for you to get past the struggle and enter focus.

If you can persist, you unlock the door to the next stage.

Stage 2: Release

Once you make it past the 23-minute threshold, you begin to transition from struggle to the subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind steps in to handle the task for you and does the heavy lifting.

It’s like getting the boulder to the top of the hill, and you can finally pause to look at how far you’ve come.

Neurologically, your brain shifts from beta waves, which are associated with alertness, problem-solving and focus, to alpha waves, which are associated with relaxation, calmness, daydreaming and reduced anxiety and stress.

With your subconscious mind engaged with the activity, ideas begin to click, and your pattern recognition is high.

To access the release stage, take a short break after that stage of struggle. But this break has to be… boring.

What I mean is:

• Sit in stillness for 5–10 minutes

• Walk without your phone

• Do light stretching or breathwork

• Stare out the window and do nothing

Avoid bringing in distractions or stimulation to let your conscious mind step aside and let the subconscious take over.

This is the reset before the main act.

Stage 3: Flow

This is when you simply push the boulder and watch it roll down the hill. As it rolls, it gains momentum and its speed compounds.

What this looks like for you is full immersion.

Time moves differently.

You forget yourself, and there’s no separation between you and the task.

You aren’t using effort, but you’re executing and getting things done.

You’re in the zone.

Physiologically, your brain has moved into higher alpha waves. This means your creativity spikes and you’re having more insights and connections.

This is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the father of flow research — called:

This is the magic of flow and what every person wants to feel.

It’s energising, fulfilling and often leads to us producing our best work and making quantum leaps in progress.

Once you’re here, it’s almost impossible to pull yourself from the task or get yourself to stop. This is the reward of the struggle you persisted through in the first stage.

Full immersion with your work.

Stage 4: Recovery

Everything that goes up must come down. This is when that racing boulder slows down and comes to a stop.

Flow is a high-energy state.

It releases a cocktail of powerful neurochemicals (dopamine, norepinephrine, and anandamide) which deplete your system.

And when you deplete anything, you want to replenish it.

This is crucial for your performance. If you don’t recover after entering flow, you risk burning out and blocking your ability to access flow again.

It’s important to note that with this kind of rest, it’s active. Not passive.

This means you don’t rest by watching YouTube or Netflix.

Though these activities are relaxing, they are not recovery.

True recovery replenishes your cognitive and physiological systems.

This could look like:

• Breathwork

• Sauna

• Cold plunge

• Nature walks

• Taking a nap

• Meditation

• Journalling

• Sitting in silence

And this is the flow cycle. Once you practice moving through each stage, getting into flow becomes predictable.

Rian Doris, co-founder and CEO of the Flow Research Collective, has a great analogy for the flow cycle. And it relates to surfing.

He says:

Why You’ve ‘Struggled’ To Get Into Flow

There is a common and overlooked reason you’ve struggled to get into flow:

You quit before you even began.

You’ve learned that the first stage of the flow cycle is struggle. But if you never get into the ‘struggle’, you’ll never enter the cycle.

Instead, you procrastinate, distract yourself or avoid starting.

But struggle is the beginning of everything you want. It’s the beginning of ‘effortless effort’.

You know what you need to do, but you default to distractions and low-effort tasks that don’t align with your goal.

The only way to get to the top of the mountain is to climb it.

The only way to get into flow is to engage with the struggle.

Procrastination is usually avoidance and the inability to start a task.

But once you get into the task, break past the initial struggle, you drop into the zone.

Now, you don’t want to stop.

Now, you’re in flow.

So don’t avoid the struggle and discomfort of starting, embrace it and fully engage with it. On the other side of that is the flow you want.

Now that you understand the flow cycle, it’s time to engineer your system for entering flow on command.

How to Engineer Flow (In 5 Steps)

1. Pick 1 High-Impact Task

Choose a task that is meaningful to your long-term goals. This should be a “needle-mover.”

You want to be as clear as possible on what the outcomes of the task are and what you’re doing.

Vagueness kills action. Specificity activates it.

Examples:

• “Write” → “Write 500 words”

• “Edit” → “Edit the video script”

• “Outline project” → “Outline section 1”

2. Protect Your Time And Focus

Block out 90 minutes for the task. You want this time to be a time when your mental energy is at its highest.

You want to cut out all distractions and avoid task-switching.

Focus on 1 task and 1 task only.

3. Match the Challenge

A key factor that either lets you get into flow or keeps you out of it is the difficulty of the task and your skill level.

This is what Csikszentmihalyi called the Skills-Challenge Equation:

If the challenge > your skills → anxiety.

If your skills > challenge → boredom.

The trick is for the challenge to be slightly above your skill set or outside your comfort zone.

This is the Challenge–Skill Balance — also called the “Flow Channel.”

Steven Kotler says:

Ask yourself,

“Is this too easy?” → Add pressure, constraints, or deadlines.

“Too hard?” → Break it down into micro-tasks.

4. Link Struggle to Reward

This links back to the first stage of the flow cycle: struggle.

Don’t avoid struggle — reframe it as a signal you’re on the right path.

This is how you build your persistence muscle — and with it, your attentional capacity.

Stay in discomfort longer than you want to.

Because on the other side of that is the reward.

5. Recover Intentionally

After being in a state of flow and working on your task, it’s time to recover.

• Move your body

• Go outside

• Reflect or journal

This trains your nervous system to reset for the next cycle.

You don’t need more hours in the day.

You need more hours in flow.

Because when you're in flow:

• You create better work

• You enjoy the process

• You protect your energy

• You move the needle faster

Most importantly, you stop trying to force focus and start falling into it.

The more you practice this, the easier it gets.

No more complex tools.

No more longer hours.

No more hustling.

No more forcing

Just more flow.

Thank you for reading.

I hope it helped.

See you in the next one.

— Shana