71. How to Master Your Brain and Engage in the Flow Cycle with Dr. Ann Tsung

00:05 Dr. Ann Tsung Are you struggling to advance your career and sacrificing time with your loved ones because of endless to-dos, low energy, and just not enough time in the day? If so, then this podcast is for you. I am your host Dr. Ann Tsung, an ER critical care and space doctor, a peak performance coach, a real estate investor, and a mother of a toddler. I am here to guide you on mastering your mind and give you the essential skills to achieve peak performance. Welcome to Productivity MD, where you can learn to master your time and achieve the five freedoms in life.

00:52 Hello. Welcome to Productivity MD, and I am your show host Dr. Ann Tsung. We are doing a flow series today. We’ll be talking about the four cycles of flow. And just before you get to the four cycles of flow—the struggle, the release, the flow and recovery—there’s like you even need to engage, right? Some people don’t even get to the engagement part, don’t even start the protocol because they’re just distracted. So this is what we’re going to be focusing a ton on — the engagement, the pre-struggle phase, the pre-flow phase. How do you even get to that loop in the first place? Because it is so hard right now. And we’ll be talking about the four phases in a little bit more detail. We’ll be talking about eliminating the top three super stimulators. Then we’ll be discussing how to make breaks boring so that your work will actually feel like it is really fun, and you actually want to do it. And then we’ll be talking about the engage protocol. All of this is from the teachings of Flow Research Collective from Rian Doris and Steve Kotler. So let’s go ahead and dive in.

01:59 Why are we even talking about the four phases of flow? It’s because, if you know where you are, you know how to get there. Right? So if you know you’re in the struggle phase, then you know you’re going to get to the release phase. If you know you’re in the release phase, you’re going to get into flow state pretty quick. And then you know after the flow, you get tired. There’s time to recover, and then the cycle starts again. And so in the initial struggle phase is where you release cortisol, norepinephrine. It’s called the squirm in your chemistry is what Rian Doris calls it and Steve Cutler calls it. That’s when you like really don’t want to do it. You have that internal sense of really wanting to distract yourself from it. That you feel like it’s hard, you just want to get out of your seat. You want to do anything else but that. But now you know that is a prerequisite for your flow, and you’re actually on the right track. It is pushing the boulder up the hill at this point. In the next episode, you will hear about how to actually get through the struggle phase faster and to stop distracting yourself from the struggle phase. But that is the struggle phase. Once you get through that, you’ll get to the release phase, the relax phase and a bit of parasympathetic phase. That’s when the boulder is actually at the very top of the peak just for a very short time. Then after that, it is the flow phase. That’s when the boulder is coming downhill. You’re kind of unconscious. The self inner critic quiets down. You’re just kind of flowing with the work. You’re not really thinking much about it. So this can happen even if you’re working, a knowledge worker or if you’re in sports. Now, after the flow phase, then you have the recovery phase. This is, for example, like, you’ve expended a ton of cognitive energy or maybe physical energy, and you need to replenish it. That’s ice bath, sauna, et cetera. Now, how do we actually get into these phases? How can we enter the circle in this loop? Because most of us are actually not even engaging. We are procrastinating. We’re not even starting the work.

04:08 There’s different types of procrastination. There are three types. One of them is inertia, which is when you don’t even start it. You know what you have to do. You blocked out time to do it. You just don’t start, right? You’re getting paid to do it, but you don’t start. Number two is that you’re distracted. So you started it, but you distract yourself from it after you start it. Number three is chronic procrastination, where there is a life goal that you have—like starting a practice, writing a book, starting a different practice like a coaching practice and getting another education or coaching certification or fellowship, et cetera, whatever it is, learning a skill—but you chronically delay it and you just don’t start it. So it’s just lost potential, right? So in order to eliminate these delays, procrastinations, there’s the avoidance conflict, right? Because you feel like there’s going to be pain when you approach it, and so you rather do something that’s short, that can stimulate your dopamine, get a big hit quick. So the tactic against it, the reason why we’re talking about this is that we want to resensitize our brain for dopamine. So what I mean is, we’re distracting ourselves with quick hits of dopamine with other things like our phone or screen, whatever, TV, whatever. We want to eliminate those things that stimulates dopamine release super easily.

05:40 So there’s the three Ms. We want to decrease it or eliminate it. So there’s three Ms. There’s the molecules. Those are like caffeine. Well, caffeine, it depends on how heavy you use it. So it can definitely worsen your sleep if you have it too close to your sleep. So this is what I’m talking about molecules, like molecules caffeine before six hours before bed. It can be alcohol, which is very detrimental to your sleep, right? It can be like other types of nicotine, et cetera. That’s molecules. You want to identify what is your top molecule that you go for for a dopamine hit and replace it with something else if possible. The next one is media. A lot of times, we distract ourselves with Netflix. We could binge on multiple podcast episodes perhaps and we never actually — like instead of binging on podcast episode, try to read a book, like a physical book or try to read an audio book that is more structured in a way, that gives you a large piece of knowledge synthesized in a shorter period, if that makes sense. Think about the type of media that you resort to when you want to get distract yourself, and see if you can either eliminate it or perhaps just switch it or replace it with something else. The third type of super stimulator is the munchies. So the munchies, we distract ourselves with food all the time, right? Planning food, shopping, whatever, deciding what to eat if you don’t already have it decided for you. Like for us, we have somebody who cooks our food or the toddler’s food and the baby’s food so that we don’t have to think about it. Everything’s in the fridge. But it takes a lot of cognitive resources. Especially if you’re

craving things like salty, high fat, high sugar, that’s a big hit of dopamine. So think about what your top munchie super stimulator is, and either move it earlier in the day, or replace it with something else. Like for example, if you like chips or alcohol in the evening, ice cream, whatever, let’s see if you can swap it for something like yogurt, not sweetened, like naturally sweetened yogurt with some fruits, et cetera. Or if it’s chocolate, then maybe some higher quality chocolate that is lower in sugar. Perhaps like I do the 80% dark chocolate, 90% dark chocolate. You’ll really get used to it after you don’t have sugar for a while and things are sweet for you. These are three things to eliminate and replace so that you can resensitize yourself to dopamine, so your work, whatever you need to focus on, is going to seem awesome and exciting and you actually crave it. Right?

08:25 The next step we’re going to be talking about is making the boring rewarding. So what I mean is that what seemed like was boring before could seem rewarding to you, right? Essentially, when you’re in these flow blocks or work blocks, first, you want to save your stillness and kind of embrace them in between. If you are in between meetings, instead of diving into the phone and checking messages, maybe go outside and take a walk. Look at some sun. Look at some water, et cetera, if you have it. The point is to activate the parasympathetic system. Whatever you’re doing in your break needs to be more boring than the work that you’ll be doing. If you take a break and you look at your phone and look at social media, it’s going to activate the dopamine. It’s more engaging than the next work, the next work block that you’ll be doing. So you don’t even want to get there. You don’t even want to engage. So stare at the walls, whatever. We talk about the favorite. What you want to do in those in-betweens is to starve yourself of dopamine so that you cannot wait to get back to work because it is so exciting than what you were doing before, right?

09:37 Then just do one thing at a time. If you’re going to eat, you eat. If you’re going to drive, you drive. If you’re going to walk, you walk. If you’re going to work, you work. So single focus will be able to get you into flow states easier. You want to practice your attention span muscle. Maybe this flow block, you’re going to do 30 minutes. The next time, you’ll do five minutes more, then five minutes more, then five minutes more. I remember, when I first started, I did the Pomodoro technique. I needed the kitchen timer, the 25-5. Then later on, I found I was a lot less distractible. I was able to go for like about 90 minutes without getting fatigued, where I need to take a break. 90 minutes. Sometimes 120 minutes. So practice your attention muscle. Then just keep those in between. Like if you’re waiting in line, in between spaces, if you’re waiting in line, instead of reflexively taking your phone, look around. I looked around at this tea place I go to. Never read the words on the walls until I really didn’t take out my phone. Because I usually take out my phone to actually do work or respond to messages from my virtual assistant. But this time, I didn’t do that. I stay still. I read the words on the walls about how different teas are made for the first time, and I gained some knowledge. I was like, oh. That’s like a different, really beautiful design. Look at that. The lights, the fixtures, interesting. Never noticed. So really keep, do boring breaks essentially, right?

11:12 Now, how do you actually engage? Now that you are resensitizing your brain for dopamine — what that means is that you’ve eliminated things that are super stimulating, and now your work can become more stimulating for you and exciting for you — how do you engage? The engage protocol. So what you do with the engage protocol is that, first, you need to identify a certainty window, the way you could be not distracted and you could definitely finish a task. Whether that is 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, establish a certainty window. Because without certainty, it’s hard to also get into flow. Say, tomorrow, I have 30 minutes and, number two, establish very clear goals. Tomorrow, it’s not like finish a slide show presentation because I have a review of a slide show presentation. It’s not about that. You want to like, specifically, the title of the presentation, there’s about a thousand slides to review for me and I wrote down, “Finish 150 slides within one hour.” So it’s that specific. The process, write down the process. The outcome is that you gain the knowledge of whatever you’re trying to achieve. And then process though, that’s what’s going to get you there. So have very, very clear goals. Let’s say, if you need to review your books, let’s now review expenses, review QuickBooks, da, da, da, da, da, all the things you need to review. Super, super clear and specific. Then lower the bar. The third piece is lower the bar for you to actually begin. Right? So whatever it is, like for example, if I’m going through a slideshow, my slideshow the night before would have already been open, ready to go first thing on the laptop. Like right when I sign in, it’s already ready. So I’m not fudging around and trying to find the links to the slideshow that I’m supposed to review and trying to find where I stopped, et cetera. So it is all ready to go. Lower the bar for engagement for this specific task. Again, this task is whatever you can accomplish in that specific certainty time.

13:20 So we talked about a lot. We went through all four phases of flow in this episode, specifically talking about how to actually get there, how to actually engage and get into the cycle. Because, a lot of times, we distract ourselves with dopamine, other things that stimulate us, and we don’t even engage. And so we want to eliminate the top three super stimulators. That’s media, munchies, and also molecules. And after you eliminate that, then you want to keep the boring rewarding to you. Take very boring breaks. You observe things around you. You might be surprised by what you observed. It might be pretty rewarding to you. Who knows? Then the work, later on, the work that you do and your flow blocks will be much more exciting to you. Right? You don’t want to take any breaks that stimulates your dopamine system even more. Right? Then we talked about the engage protocol, where you’re going to have a certainty time frame, time window. You will find a task that will fit within that timeframe window. Be very clear, specific about the task you are going to perform with numbers perhaps, or specific steps, one, two, three, four, five. Then lower the bar for engagement, where you actually do one micro step. Start one page. Wash one plate in the sink, et cetera, whatever you need to do.

14:41 So after this, pick an action that you are going to eliminate, a super stimulator perhaps that you’re going to eliminate or replace. Then I also want you to, for the next week perhaps, whenever you are online waiting for something, whenever you are driving, just drive and don’t listen to something. Whenever you’re online, observe the people around you. Most people are on their phones looking down. Observe the lights. Observe the tables, whatever. Observe your surroundings. And so, again, all the resources I’ve talked about is going to be on productivitymd.com. And if you are interested in getting on a one-on-one coaching qualification call with me—this is a one-year coaching—and to see if you’re the right fit, you can go on productivitymd.com and book a 15-minute qualification call and submit an application. Just remember that everything that we need is within us now. I thank you for your kind presence and attention.

15:44 Disclaimer: This content is for general information purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine. No doctor or patient relationship is formed. The use of this information linked to this content is at the user’s own risk. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical conditions they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. The views are personal views only and do not represent any university or government institution.