It is interesting that I first heard about this concept only after eleven and a half years of running with music—from a twenty-seven-year-old national champion in paddleboarding. When I described to him what I experience during my morning runs, he simply said: “Flow.”
The English word translates to stream, flux, or current. This term was popularized and given a new meaning in the early 1990s by the American psychologist of Hungarian origin, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—a name that is as difficult to remember as it is to pronounce. His book, Flow, published in 1990, became widely successful and introduced psychology to a new concept.
My Personal Experience with Flow
I first began experiencing flow within just a week of that memorable summer in 2013, when I started running every morning with music. At that time, I had no idea what was happening to me, let alone that what I was experiencing had been named twenty-three years earlier in the United States.
I simply felt spontaneous joy, enthusiasm for the activity, and an unprecedented level of engagement. This was followed by a deep concentration on the activity itself, which eventually helped me run around the world once and now complete a third of my second lap. Flow is what has fundamentally changed my life.
For me, flow is not only induced by running with music, but also by listening to music on its own and, more recently, by playing the piano—especially the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
What’s Missing in the Book?
However, after reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, I realized that something was missing. It occurred to me that an important part of the topic was the experience of a “test subject” in an ongoing study spanning over eleven years—in this case, myself.
Before Csikszentmihalyi completed his book, he conducted extensive research in the 1970s and 1980s, studying how people across different cultures and professions experienced flow. The research relied on surveys and self-reported data, meaning it captured people’s subjective feelings, but not what was actually happening inside their brains on a biochemical level.
Scientific advancements in this field have only taken place in recent years. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter with the greatest influence on the experience of flow, was discovered in the mid-1950s by the Swedish neurobiologist and biochemist Arvid Carlsson, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for this discovery.
Flow and Exogenous Substances
Csikszentmihalyi does not address the impact of exogenous substances on flow in his book. Here, I must contribute with my own personal experience.
When I started running at the age of fifty-six, I realized that the incredible feelings I was experiencing during my runs were something I had last felt as a child. Back then, I enjoyed running—for example, chasing after a soccer ball. However, during puberty, due to my genetic predisposition to alcoholism, I occasionally drank alcohol.
This effectively shut down my ability to naturally produce dopamine, endorphins, and other wonderful chemicals for about forty years.
In the summer of 2013, during my first week of running, I was still running with traces of alcohol in my system from the previous evening. But after just seven days, I quit drinking permanently. It was only after that moment that I fully unlocked the state of flow.
This suggests how harmful alcohol truly is. That is why I do not miss it at all.
I firmly believe that any discussion about flow should also consider the impact of exogenous substances on this state.