7. Fear & Flow
Show Notes
Big 3 Ideas from this episode:
What is the Flow State?
A comparison of Fear with Flow - It is my personal hypothesis that they are very similar states in your brain.
How can artists get past blocks and find the balance between anxiety and flow?
RESOURCES:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Father of Flow: https://www.cgu.edu/people/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi/
TedTalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_u-Eh3h7Mo
V. S. Ramachandran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Ramachandran
The right hemisphere as an anomaly detector: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12030510/
James Baldwin on 4:00 a.m.: https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/04/23/james-baldwin-nothing-personal-4-am/
Dorothea Tanning: https://www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work
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Episode 7: Fear & Flow
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[00:00:00] The metaphor mindset is a podcast for artists and creative thinkers, entrepreneurs and leaders who want to explore ideas around creativity and commerce.
[00:00:09] Think like an artist work like a boss.
[00:00:13]
[00:00:22] And this is episode seven, fear and flow.
“If I don't draw for a while. I get crazy depressed and suicidal. If I don't get to draw. I don't work in terms of conscious messages. I can't do that. It has to be something that I'm revealing to myself while I'm doing it. It's hard to explain, like, Which means that while I'm doing it, I don't know exactly what's about, you just have to have the. The courage to take that chance. You know what? What's going to come out. What's coming out of this. “
[00:00:55]
[00:00:57] that's Robert Crumb talking about his process. In the 1994 documentary Crumb.
[00:01:03] Today. I want to talk about the flow state. That moment when time stops and you are in the zone. We often know what this feels like because we've experienced the opposite.
[00:01:12] Fear of the blank page, the creative block.
[00:01:15] So to get to flow, I'll start on one side of the bridge and walk over.
[00:01:21] Early one morning in the middle of winter, in the middle of the pandemic. I woke at 4:00 AM. From a nightmare that felt like half terror, half bliss.
[00:01:31] The feeling reminded me of one of the world's most famous paintings, the scream. By Edward Munch.
[00:01:38] When he was about 30 Munch was in Oslo walking at sunset with friends to an outlook
[00:01:43] on one side of the wooden track was the view of the city. On the other side, far below a huge lake.
[00:01:49] In a moment alone. He suddenly stopped. And experienced what we would now recognize as a panic attack.
[00:01:56] I felt a gust of melancholy. He said, I stopped leaning against the railing as the flaming skies hung like blood and soared over the blue, black Fjord in the city. And I felt a vast infinite scream through nature.”
“…And the color shrieked.”
[00:02:12] This experience allowed Munch to go from that state of fear. Into a state of flow to capture this moment. “My fear of life is necessary to me.” He said “my sufferings are part of myself and my art.”
[00:02:26] He went on to create four different versions over the years, two in pastel, two in paint, on cardboard of all things.
[00:02:32] and one of these is now one of the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction. For $120 million in 2012.
[00:02:40] The scream is so simple. Many would say rustic, primitive, even unskilled. But monk is not painting a scene. He's painting an emotion.
[00:02:50] In my opinion, humans have two major basic fears, the fear of death and the fear of rejection.
[00:02:57] He was painting all of them. Abandonment, terror, existential angst.
[00:03:03] Which comes from the old Saxon word for narrow, tight, and constricted. The basis of the word anger. It's a visceral feeling when you can't breathe in your body constricts. Munch was standing on that outlook. Taking it all in the rush of city life on the one hand. The vast abyss of the lake on the other and above the chaos and unpredictability and terrible beauty of nature.
[00:03:26] This bright painting full of pinks and yellows with a green face brings all of his senses together. Other Symbolists, including Baudelaire the poet also talked about being in synesthesia. Or the experience of the senses getting mixed up, Hearing color and seeing sound.
[00:03:42] After my 4:00 AM dream that time that James Baldwin calls. “devastating hour with a fearful knowledge. That one day one's eyes will no longer look out onto the world. The light will rise for others, but not for you.”
[00:03:58] Munch could have written that.
[00:03:59] To comfort myself. I picked up my phone. I typed creativity into the search box and started watching TedTalks. I came across one that resonated with me in ways that I hadn't felt since I listened to late night radio mystery theater as a kid.
[00:04:13] In it, Hungarian psychologist, Mihai Csikszentmihalyi, talked about being a teenager on holiday in Zurich. He went there to ski.
[00:04:22] But there was no snow and he had no money to go to the movies. So when he heard about a lecture, about little green men, he thought flying saucers for free. The speaker, instead of talking about aliens suggested that some people traumatized by the war were having visions of flying saucers as a reaction to the trauma.
[00:04:41] That speaker's name was Carl Jung. And Mihaly went on to study psychology and conceptualize the idea he was inspired by that night.
[00:04:50] Calling it flow.
[00:04:52] Mihai says in flow, we experienced the transformation of time merging of action and awareness, a clarity of goals. That's how I felt in my dream. I was curious at how the stress response in my dream head felt so close so similar to that state of calm focus.
[00:05:13] We talk about fight or flight.
[00:05:14] But the stress response actually has more options for action. When adrenaline is released, we respond in a few different ways.
[00:05:20] And I'm sure you have experienced all of them. When you step out into the street and a car roars by you freeze; when your boss yells at you, you fawn. Or what they call friend, like seeing a tiger and saying nice kitty. Or as a kid, you give a book report and standing up in front of the room. You feel like a cooked noodle.
[00:05:40] You flop.
[00:05:40] So in fear. We can react several ways. Fight flight. Freeze friend. fawn or flop.
[00:05:51] When I first spoke that into my phone autocorrect. Changed fawn, F A W N to phone. And yes, phone should be added to the list. the more I dug, the more I realized that fear and flow do have striking similarities. Here are two tales of fear and flow. ,
[00:06:09] a Fear:. a, car pulls out in front of you. You see bright lights, you feel a crash. It's like time stops. You realize you're not hurt. So you jump out of the car and run to the other car. You feel like the same time detached and hyper-focused, you know, what you need to do.
[00:06:27] The person in the car is knocked out, but the engine is on fire. You seem to feel super human strength. You throw up in the door and pull the person from the car just as it bursts into flames. A flash of heat warms your body. You're panting. You're sweating.
[00:06:44] A, rush of relief comes over you and you start to tremble.
[00:06:47] Now a tale of flow.
[00:06:49] You're walking home from the store, not thinking about much. When you look down and see an ant climbing up a blade of grass. Suddenly you feel a rush of heat to your face? You remember a poem you are working on that you had been blocked on for weeks. And you suddenly feel time. Stop. As you watched the tiny ant bend the grass.
[00:07:08] As it climbs up and over. The ant seems huge and you see a connection. Between the ant, the grass, the light, the shadow. A line for your poem comes into your head. You rush home with a feeling of power and focus like you haven't had in weeks. You know what you need to do. You sit down and you start to write, you feel a sense of joy and relief flowing through you.
[00:07:31] You've just felt. A, sense of focused concentration. A, sense of being outside yourself. An inner clarity, you know what you need to do. You see patterns all around you. You know what you can do and you feel strong. A sense of calm comes over. You. Time stops. These two states are both created in a little labyrinth in our brains called the amygdala. In fact, we have more than one. And it occurs when neurotransmitters are released.
[00:08:02] Adrenaline helps to get us going. Cortisol a pain reliever releases, glucose to put us into a state of ecstasy. The states are practically the same.
[00:08:12] The science of creativity says that creative people have more sensitive amygdala. . And that's why highly creative people can be neurotic. Our brains are always looking for things to fear and finding things to connect.
[00:08:26] One of my favorite neuroscientists V. Ramachandran calls this the Anomaly Detector. Our right brain is always looking for something that is out of the ordinary.
[00:08:37] That's why creative people can be more sensitive. Because their right brain is literally a detector for the weird, the new and the strange.
[00:08:44] The left brain on the other hand. Says. Nothing to see here. It smoothed things over.
[00:08:49] In the flow state. We combine challenge with our current skills. When both challenge and our skills are high and stimulated flow kicks in.
[00:08:59] If you're in flow. Our two sides of the same bridge that meet in the middle. When you're standing on that middle of the bridge, you have a better view. Your insights are heightened. And sometimes though we can mistake flow for fear. They have almost exactly the same characteristics after all.
[00:09:20] Munch felt he truly stood in the middle of that bridge. He felt his flow state was necessary. And his fear. He said, "My sufferings are part of myself and my art. They're indistinguishable from me and their destruction would destroy my art.}”
[00:09:39] For some, this fear drives their art towards exploration. That edge of challenge and skill. One of my favorite artists and one of the most prolific of the 20th century, Dorothy, a tanning said. Any true artist is going to explore the medium as long as she can draw breath. It would be grotesque to paint the same way over and over all your life. It's a kind of freeze.”
[00:10:05] So when you feel fear and you freeze. Fight flight. Flop or fawn. Or feel like buffering by scrolling on your phone.
[00:10:14] You're not alone. But don't be afraid of that blank page or blank canvas.
[00:10:19] And the next time you experience a sense of focused concentration. You feel like your outside reality? You have an inner clarity. A, hyper-focus you see patterns in everything around you. You know, your skills are up to it.
[00:10:36] You have a sense of serenity and timelessness, and intrinsic motivation. You may have entered the flow state. Go ahead and walk over. To the middle of that bridge. From fear to flow.
[00:10:50] Thanks and have a great week.
[00:10:52] If you're an artist who wants to sell and market your work more effectively, join us in the metaphor mindset studio, an online program for artists who want to love their business as much as they love their art
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