Do you participate in passive or active leisure time?

Written by Stuart Haden on August 30, 2017

According to a recent study (in the US) teenagers find flow…

13% of the time they spend watching TV.
34% of the time they spend participating in hobbies.
44% of the time they spend playing sports/games.

They key word here is spend. Time is an investment, and we need to spend it wisely. Compared to watching TV sports/games are 3 times more likely to engineer a flow state. But here’s the kicker, the teenagers in the study actually spent 4 times more time watching TV (passive) than

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The science of flow, flight, fight & freeze

Written by Stuart Haden on August 16, 2017

Many of my postings describe what flow is; that effortless state where time dilates allowing learning and creativity to accelerate. However, this posting brings forth flows nearest neighbours – flight, fight and freeze.

These three are common experiences before we kick into flow. They can form part of the struggle phase that builds our ‘fitness for flow.’ We respond by wanting to hit the ejection button, get out as soon as we can even if the way down poses risks. Or

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How do you release tension?

Written by Stuart Haden on August 2, 2017

The state of optimal performance doesn’t come out of thin air. Instead it operates as part of a cycle. Sometimes we get lucky and stumble across it, but I’d much rather engineer this cycle so that I can perform optimally almost at will. The cycle consists of 4 stages…

Struggle
Release
Flow
Recovery

We have plenty of struggle to overcome, so today I want to take a somewhat comical look at release. Here we need to decompress and break away from the norm. Otherwise we

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