8 Ways To Step Into A Creative Flow State Easier

You may have heard of the concept of flow?! That moment where everything around you seems to disappear from view and into insignificance, when time stops still, fears or plans in mind take backstage, and it’s just you and the moment.

We all experience this flow state in our life from time to time, but we enter this state the most when we seek to learn something new or aim to improve in something we already know further.

What Is Creative Flow?

Creative flow often sets in when we find something that interests us, that piques our curiosity, but flow tends to happen the most when we are also challenging ourselves too.

Think of when you play a musical instrument and you get lost in the flow, just playing by feel rather than by focusing too much on what you have to do. Well, creative flow works because your mind is allowed to explore without restriction, and without distraction. It’s unconscious acquisition and conscious learning at the same time.

It’s this balance of being focused enough on something so that other things around us don’t distract us, but not too focused that we are overly logical or set in how we must do something. We have to leave an element of free exploration, of just working things out openly. As soon as we give ourselves a fixed objective that has no room for manoeuvre our brain essentially gets bored and becomes more prone to being distracted by outside influences.

What Creative Flow Isn’t (Beware Of Modern Comfort Thinking)

A word of caution though. The idea of ‘flow’ has become likened to almost every other modern answer towards health and productivity, namely relax and comfort your mind.

Actually, and to be brutally honest (and factual) this is usually misguided hearsay advice made by inexperienced wellness and life coaches who have heard of the word a few times and then think they are qualified to preach it.

To save you the disillusion I’ll change my name to Frank for a second. If you think gaining a creative flow state is all about finding a calm, ‘zen’ state within then you’ll be wrong. It’s an initial part of it, but that’s where it ends.

You see, you need to go beyond the instant gratification and into the delayed gratification to really feel the benefits of flow. Getting into the moment might sound like an instant state, but it actually takes practice to achieve, and the result isn’t about finding instant calm and comfort in what you are doing, but it’s actually about building perseverence towards a delayed sense of progress.

Most of the time in our day-to-day life we don’t go into this deeper flow of mind. We stay living on the surface (on autopilot), and we do a task just to get it done.

We also have become so used to instant gratification, with everything so readily available to people today. We may be used to coming home after another repetitive, passive day at work and then repeat the same patterns at home and passively park ourselves in front of the TV.

We too often waste our moments because we don’t really know how to be totally present with them, and not even in a meditative thoughtful way, but through this ‘flow’ of action.

That’s because we simply aren’t training our adaptive muscles to do any different, and so we don’t learn how to keep at something consciously enough to drift into this deeper state of progressive action.

The Importance Of Keeping In The Moment (For Creative Flow)

None of us can live in the past or the future, only right now. Yet, we often set our minds to future goals and past experiences, and whilst it is good to have goals to strive towards, and whilst we can also learn from experiences, we can only ever live in the exact moment we are in.

One hour ago is now history. What did you do? Was it just another uneventful moment? Can you even remember it? Most of our life is littered with these uneventful moments because we tend to get so withdrawn into urgent matters, whether they are actually worth doing or not, but when acting on the urgent we lose that moment, and therefore we don’t gain momentum.

To enter a state of creative flow we have to be in that moment, and then build momentum towards unearthing ideas, tangents, and direction within us we didn’t know were there before.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you want to get in the flow whilst playing guitar, but you haven’t really played beyond rehearsed songs before and so you find it hard to keep yourself going. However, it’s when you persevere and set yourself a challenge to keep going (beyond repetition) that you uncover this state of almost trance-like playing, where you don’t just play songs you know but you improvise and create new ones as you go.

It’s also at this point where you’ll feel like you want to quit too because you doubt your ability to keep going in something you haven’t done before, but by persevering you build this skill to push beyond your limits, and it’s there you find this flow. Do this enough times and ‘flow’ comes to you much easier.

This is why you should ignore advice that tells you to just calm your mind and flow will come. A mind free of distractions will help, but you need that challenge to push you beyond your current limit.

How To Get Into The Present Moment Easier

Flow takes practice but one thing you can do quicker is learn how to get into the present moment. This isn’t about setting your mind to goals or challenges, or even about being away in your own little world, but it’s about simply being more mindful about the actions you are consciously doing at this moment.

So, for the next ten minutes, just try to be in the moment.

ACTION: Take your mind away from what you think you 'need' to do, and instead just give yourself time to focus on something that matters to you. Call a friend you haven't spoken to in ages. Look over notes on a project you really wanted to do but never did. Go for a run. Just do something that makes you aware of being in that moment, and enjoying it the best you can.

Then, strive to create more moments like this. It’s not easy to just be in the moment all the time. We all get busy and distracted by life, but some manage to be a lot more mindful than others simply because they are consciously making an effort to. We just occasionally have to remind ourselves to be more aware as it’s easy to fall into routines.

If you do the same you will find you will open up more opportunities to find a state of creative flow.

8 Ways To Step Into A Creative Flow State Easier

Once you are used to being more present in the moment you will find that your mind is more open towards potential creative impulses. These following tips and techniques will help you engage in the kind of focus and flow that will help you discover your unique potential and reap the benefits of delayed gratification.

1) Tap Into Your Creativity At Optimal Time

Your optimal creative time will depend on your personal lifestyle habits. Often those who follow a typical circadian rhythm will find it first thing in the morning, but some highly proficient artists have found they are in the deepest state of flow in the middle of the night when there are no distractions around them, yet groggy in the morning.

The key is to find what works best for you to help your flow, and again remember this doesn’t mean finding the most comfortable time, but the time where your creative states are heightened.

With heightened creativity you feed on ideas so much easier. You don’t force them, they come to you. Note, this can happen at any time (not just when you are deliberately practicing it), so a good tip is to carry a notebook and pen around to note ideas down (a phone notebook can do too but writing onto paper without digital waves distracting you subliminally is more effective for making ideas stick).

2) Use A Trigger Alarm

You can use a trigger, such as a unique alarm sound that you set to twice a day (or whatever suits), and then associate this alarm sound with ‘creative flow time’.

This works so long as you consciously allow yourself to let the trigger send you into a focused state when the alarm sounds. You can also write down what you did after each flow episode, as this can also serve to trigger positive states when you read them back.

If you can’t get into a flow state straight away then keep with it and your focus will find it.

3) Visualise Success Before You Start

When you prime your mind for what is to come you put yourself ahead of surprise. Your fears are subdued and you’re free to roam and explore more.

This method is well known but it really is helpful towards getting things done. When you wake up instead of instantly droning out into daily routines, take the time to visualize what you would really like to get done in your day BEYOND the routines. Tip. Do it now, or as soon as possible. Here’s why.

4) Implement Something As Soon As You Learn About It

How often have you been reading an article or watching a webinar to then never take it further than a few notes?

Active implementation is so important to help bring out new electrical connections in your brain.

We may think we only have to learn something by reading about it, but we really have to implement it in action for it to stick. If not then days later you will have forgotten about it.

All of us have probably learned a topic in the past only to have left it on the proverbial shelf gathering dust for too long, and then returned, expecting that we should know all about it only to be stuck around the first few hurdles again.

When you implement something straight away you cement the learning, and then later you can call upon it, and start from that checkpoint, rather from the start again. It makes getting to the finish line a lot easier in checkpoints and chapters, rather than expecting to run a full race flawlessly without fail.

Flow works when you have your focus fresh in mind.

5) Hyperspeed Your Learning

This one takes practice but if you want to get into a creative flow state quicker then you need to train yourself to be quicker. Can you learn to read quicker? What could you do to help you do so?

You could increase the speed of audiobooks you read. You could actively read instead of passively. You could read visual forms of books to take in the gist and allow your imagination to fill in the blanks (no wonder kids are so creative). You could also set yourself a challenge of reading a certain amount before the hour or faster than a friend etc.

You can easily see ideas on Youtube for tips on learning something faster. It’s a popular life hack of today.

When we are in a state of flow we help bring out the genius in us.

6) Create Yourself An Accountable Challenge (Not Deadline)

Friendly competitions and challenges certainly give us a push to do things. If you want a tip to get your kid to do something, then turn it into a game or challenge. They will tidy their room up in no time.

We simply don’t respond well to demands. It doesn’t bring out our adrenaline. It forces our brain to shut down and conserve energy as it dreads wasting it on something it didn’t choose to do. So, setting deadlines in a corporate sense doesn’t help us.

What does is ensuring we make ourselves accountable because we WANT to improve. So setting a deadline as a challenge reframes our mind to think about the task differently. It also means that deeper flow and focus is easier to get into because we have unlocked the burden of delayed gratification, it’s now fun to go longer and push further.

To add to this, when we become accountable to other friends who depend on us we can also motivate ourselves to not let them down (although this can also lead to guilt trips if we fail and therefore work both ways).

7) Do What Flows, Not What You Love

This idea that you need to do what you love at all times frankly leads many people to either become miserable most of the time they aren’t able to, or are just too stubborn to do anything else. Of course, people want to do what they love and we naturally end up gravitating towards that anyway (although we also gravitate towards what is easier for us).

When we focus on what flows we will be able to do what we love anyway but won’t block out doing things we might have to do (but don’t want to) in order to get towards what we do want to do.

8) Grazing & Resting Are Your Friend, Fasting Pretends To Be

You may have heard about the benefits of fasting to unlock your creative juices. There is some truth in this as when our body is running on empty we do tend to find that extra mile within us. It’s our survival instincts kicking in, like how our body switches to starvation mode to protect itself and we suddenly have to eat a lot less to sustain our energy levels.

However, do this for too long and it’s dangerous. You can confuse your healthy system into thinking it doesn’t need to eat or sleep, and rhythmic patterns can go all over the place along with a plethora of health risks.

A healthier way to reach the fasting effect is simply to graze through the day eating little bits rather than a lot at one sitting. You can also implement power naps into your day if you didn’t get efficient sleep during the night but don’t overdo the power naps or they too can mess up your natural rhythm.

Of course, there are healthy foods that will heighten your creativity too.