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A wellbeing diagnostic tool
designed to help elevate your
people to their full potential.

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01

AWARD WINNING TECHNOLOGY THAT ANSWERS
THE QUESTION:

'ARE YOUR PEOPLE MOTIVATED, ENGAGED,
HEALTHY AND HAPPY?'

IF NOT, WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?

We are a measurement tool that combines psychology, behavioural profiling,
neuroscience, organisational design and technology.

We have done the hard work for you. We know what the success measures of flow,
performance and wellbeing look like.

We have the science and you have the people to measure. It is a perfect marriage

02

OUR APPROACH
AND KEY BENEFITS

Momentum108 is different than the numerous wellbeing surveys that exists. It combines both the need for high performance, with the need for high levels of wellbeing.
‍
Organisations can expect higher levels of productivity, engagement, lower levels of absenteeism and ultimately higher returns.

We help data driven leaders with:

Have visibility over exactly where your people are at with the wellbeing needs they require to be at their very best.

Measure and evaluate progress over time and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Immediately identify those who need support with their mental health & ensure they are directed to the appropriate support channels / programs, such as an EPA.

Anonymous Data collection also available.

Money is tight, that is a reality. Most organisations do not have the endless Wellbeing or People & Culture dollars to spend.

Momentum108 helps organisations direct their spend towards programs whether those programs are engagement programs, EAPs or other.

Use data to understand what initiatives you have implemented have gained a return on investment. Learn what works, what doesn’t and how that differs across the business.

Our award winning and dashboards allow you to split results into any business unit, role, location, leader, demographics or variable set by you.

03

'90% OF EMPLOYEES AGREE THAT MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES PREVENT PEAK PERFORMANCE' - HEALTH SHIELD

04

OUR MODEL

The Momentum108 point of difference is the addition of validated scientific measures. The measures
we use are aimed at understanding the person, both at work and at play.

You will know what is happening in real time and the real reasons behind it. You will know EXACTLY
where to spend your limited budget and how.

We diagnose using elements such as:

Positive emotion is much more than mere ‘happiness.’

Positive emotions are a prime indicator and they can be cultivated or learned to improve wellbeing.

When individuals can explore and integrate positive emotions into daily life (and visualisations of future life whether that be about the individual or promoting organizational strategies), it improves habitual thinking and acting. Positive emotions can undo the harmful effects of negative emotions and promote resilience.

Increasing positive emotions helps individuals build physical, intellectual, psychological, and social resources that lead to this resilience and overall wellbeing.

The existence of positive emotions is one of the strongest indicators of our wellbeing.

Have you been so into what you’re doing and the world around you fades away? This is the true meaning of Engagement.

It’s as if everything is in sync. Deep thinking, innovative creating and fully participating are easy and enjoyable. Engagement is also referred to as “flow.”

According to Martin Seligman, engagement is “being one with the music.” It includes the loss of self-consciousness and complete absorption in an activity. In other words, it is living in the present moment and focusing entirely on the task at hand.

Flow, or this concept of engagement, occurs when the perfect combination of challenge and skill/strength is found and the person becomes innately satisfied.

People are more likely to experience flow when they use their top character strengths. Research on engagement has found that individuals who try to use their strengths in new ways each day for a week were happier and less depressed after six months.

The concept of engagement is something much more powerful than simply “being happy,” but happiness is one of the many by-products of engagement.

The difference between the PERMA and a traditional engagement survey is that we are measuring the flow of an individual, not the flow or strategy within an organisation and how engaged people are within it.

Relationships encompass all the various interactions individuals have with partners, friends, family members, colleagues, bosses/mentors/supervisors, and their community at large.

Relationships in the PERMA model refer to feeling supported, connected and valued by others. Relationships are included in the model based on the idea that humans are inherently social creatures and being out of social order can cause severe neurological distress.

The social environment has been found to play a critical role in preventing cognitive decline, and strong social networks contribute to better physical health among older adults. In fact it is documented that loneliness is now the biggest killer of humans above other killers like heart-disease and certain cancers.

If relationships aren’t important in a workplace, then it becomes much easier to quit, call in sick, not show up as we connect ourselves to the job in the absence of relationships and the job has to be variable and sustaining.

“Why do we wake up every morning?” The answer to this question points to our sense of purpose in life, our Meaning. This gives us direction and a sense of connecting to something greater than ourselves. If we know the answer to this, we are definitely ready to perform at ‘flow’.

Another intrinsic human quality is the search for meaning and the need to have a sense of value and worth. Meaning gives us a sense of belonging and/or serving something greater than ourselves which humans intrinsically need to do. Having a purpose in life and at work helps individuals focus on what is really important in the face of significant challenge or adversity. If they believe their role does not fit into the greater purpose of the organisation, then it will affect their score.

A sense of meaning is guided by personal values, and people who report having purpose in life live longer and have greater life satisfaction and higher organisational engagement scores and fewer health problems as proven scientifically by Kashdan, Mishra, Breen, & Froh in 2009.

Accomplishment is also known as achievement, mastery, or competence .A sense of accomplishment is a result of working toward and reaching goals, mastering an endeavour, and having self-motivation to finish what you set out to do. This contributes to wellbeing or peak performance because individuals can look at their lives or work with a sense of pride.

Accomplishment includes the concepts of perseverance and having a passion to attain goals. Think of an athlete, they hardly strive to remain the same but rather than improve in order to win.

Achieving intrinsic goals (such as growth and connection) leads to larger gains in wellbeing than external goals such as money yet organisations believe the measuring of money in engagement surveys somewhat ticks this box.

BLOGS

PROOF THAT POSITIVE WORK CULTURES ARE MORE PRODUCTIVE.

  • Managing People
  • Content By Emma Seppälä Kim Cameron

THE POWER OF
ENVISIONNING.

SUCCESS IS A MINDSET.

  • SAFE AT WORK
  • CONTENT BY MOMENTUM108
  • JUNE 22, 2021

1 — 3

  • MANAGING PEOPLE

PROOF THAT POSITIVE WORK CULTURES ARE MORE PRODUCTIVE

Originally from hbr.org

Too many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success. But a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.

Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.

First, health care expenditures at high-pressure companies are nearly  50% greater than at other organizations. The American Psychological Association estimates that more than $500 billion is siphoned off from the U.S. economy because of workplace stress, and 550 million workdays are lost each year due to stress on the job. Sixty percent to 80% of workplace accidents are attributed to stress, and it’s estimated that more than 80% of doctor visits are due to stress. Workplace stress has been linked to health problems ranging from metabolic syndrome to cardiovascular disease and mortality.

The stress of belonging to hierarchies itself is linked to disease and death. One study showed that the lower someone’s rank in a hierarchy, the higher their chances of cardiovascular disease and death from heart attacks. In a large-scale study of over 3,000 employees conducted by  Anna Nyberg at the Karolinska Institute, results showed a strong link between leadership behavior and heart disease in employees. Stress-producing bosses are literally bad for the heart.

Second is the cost of disengagement. While a cut-throat environment and a culture of fear can ensure engagement (and sometimes even excitement) for some time, research suggests that the inevitable stress it creates will likely lead to disengagement over the long term. Engagement in work — which is associated with feeling valued, secure, supported, and respected — is generally negatively associated with a high-stress, cut-throat culture.

And disengagement is costly. In studies by the  Queens School of Business and by the  Gallup Organization, disengaged workers had 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents, and 60% more errors and defects. In organizations with low employee engagement scores, they experienced 18% lower productivity, 16% lower profitability, 37% lower job growth, and 65% lower share price over time. Importantly, businesses with highly engaged employees enjoyed 100% more job applications.

Lack of loyalty is a third cost.  Research shows that  workplace stress leads to an increase of almost 50% in voluntary turnover. People go on the job market, decline promotions, or resign. And the turnover costs associated with recruiting, training, lowered productivity, lost expertise, and so forth, are significant. The Center for American Progress  estimates that replacing a single employee costs approximately 20% of that employee’s salary.

For these reasons, many companies have established a wide variety of perks from working from home to office gyms. However, these companies still fail to take into account the research.  A Gallup poll showed that, even when workplaces offered benefits such as flextime and work-from-home opportunities,  engagement predicted wellbeing above and beyond anything else. Employees  prefer workplace wellbeing to material benefits.

Wellbeing comes from one place, and one place only — a positive culture.

Creating a positive and healthy culture for your team rests on a few major principles. Our own research (see here and here) on the qualities of a positive workplace culture boils down to six essential characteristics:

  • Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
  • Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
  • Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.
  • Inspiring one another at work.
  • Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.
  • Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust, and integrity.

As a boss, how can you foster these principles? The research points to four steps to try:

1. Foster social connections. A large number of empirical studies confirm that positive social connections at work produce highly desirable results. For example, people get sick less often, recover twice as fast from surgery, experience less depression, learn faster and remember longer, tolerate pain and discomfort better, display more mental acuity, and perform better on the job. Conversely, research by Sarah Pressman at the University of California, Irvine, found that the probability of dying early is 20% higher for obese people, 30% higher for excessive drinkers, 50% higher for smokers, but a whopping 70% higher for people with poor social relationships. Toxic, stress-filled workplaces affect social relationships and, consequently, life expectancy.

2. Show empathy. As a boss, you have a huge impact on how your employees feel. A telling brain-imaging study found that, when employees recalled a boss that had been unkind or un-empathic, they showed increased activation in areas of the brain associated with avoidance and negative emotion while the opposite was true when they recalled an empathic boss. Moreover, Jane Dutton and her colleagues in the CompassionLab at the University of Michigan suggest that leaders who demonstrate compassion toward employees foster individual and collective resilience in challenging times.

‍3. Go out of your way to help. Ever had a manager or mentor who took a lot of trouble to help you when he or she did not have to? Chances are you have remained loyal to that person to this day.  Jonathan Haidt at New York University’s Stern School of Business shows in his research that when leaders are not just fair but self-sacrificing, their employees are actually moved and inspired to become more loyal and committed themselves. As a consequence, they are more likely to go out of their way to be helpful and friendly to other employees, thus creating a self-reinforcing cycle. Daan Van Knippenberg of Rotterdam School of Management shows that employees of self-sacrificing leaders are more cooperative because they trust their leaders more. They are also more productive and see their leaders as more effective and charismatic.

‍4. Encourage people to talk to you – especially about their problems. Not surprisingly, trusting that the leader has your best interests at heart improves employee performance. Employees feel safe rather than fearful and, as research by Amy Edmondson of Harvard demonstrates in her work on psychological safety, a culture of safety i.e. in which leaders are inclusive, humble, and encourage their staff to speak up or ask for help, leads to better learning and performance outcomes. Rather than creating a culture of fear of negative consequences, feeling safe in the workplace helps encourage the spirit of experimentation so critical for innovation. Kamal Birdi of Sheffield University has shown that empowerment, when coupled with good training and teamwork, leads to superior performance outcomes whereas a range of efficient manufacturing and operations practices do not.When you know a leader is committed to operating from a set of values based on interpersonal kindness, he or she sets the tone for the entire organization. In Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant demonstrates that leader kindness and generosity are strong predictors of team and organizational effectiveness. Whereas harsh work climates are linked to poorer employee health, the opposite is true of positive work climates where employees tend to have lower heart rates and blood pressure as well as a stronger immune systems. A positive work climate also leads to a positive workplace culture which, again, boosts commitment, engagement, and performance. Happier employees make for not only a more congenial workplace but for improved customer service. As a consequence, a happy and caring culture at work not only improves employee well-being and productivity but also improved client health outcomes and satisfaction.In sum, a positive workplace is more successful over time because it increases positive emotions and well-being. This, in turn, improves people’s relationships with each other and amplifies their abilities and their creativity. It buffers against negative experiences such as stress, thus improving employees’ ability to bounce back from challenges and difficulties while bolstering their health. And, it attracts employees, making them more loyal to the leader and to the organization as well as bringing out their best strengths. When organizations develop positive, virtuous cultures they achieve significantly higher levels of organizational effectiveness — including financial performance, customer satisfaction, productivity, and employee engagement.

Read full Article

1 — 3

  • MANAGING PEOPLE

PROOF THAT POSITIVE WORK CULTURES ARE MORE PRODUCTIVE

Originally from hbr.org

Too many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success. But a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.

Although there’s an assumption that stress and pressure push employees to perform more, better, and faster, what cutthroat organizations fail to recognize is the hidden costs incurred.

First, health care expenditures at high-pressure companies are nearly  50% greater than at other organizations. The American Psychological Association estimates that more than $500 billion is siphoned off from the U.S. economy because of workplace stress, and 550 million workdays are lost each year due to stress on the job. Sixty percent to 80% of workplace accidents are attributed to stress, and it’s estimated that more than 80% of doctor visits are due to stress. Workplace stress has been linked to health problems ranging from metabolic syndrome to cardiovascular disease and mortality.

The stress of belonging to hierarchies itself is linked to disease and death. One study showed that the lower someone’s rank in a hierarchy, the higher their chances of cardiovascular disease and death from heart attacks. In a large-scale study of over 3,000 employees conducted by  Anna Nyberg at the Karolinska Institute, results showed a strong link between leadership behavior and heart disease in employees. Stress-producing bosses are literally bad for the heart.

Second is the cost of disengagement. While a cut-throat environment and a culture of fear can ensure engagement (and sometimes even excitement) for some time, research suggests that the inevitable stress it creates will likely lead to disengagement over the long term. Engagement in work — which is associated with feeling valued, secure, supported, and respected — is generally negatively associated with a high-stress, cut-throat culture.

And disengagement is costly. In studies by the  Queens School of Business and by the  Gallup Organization, disengaged workers had 37% higher absenteeism, 49% more accidents, and 60% more errors and defects. In organizations with low employee engagement scores, they experienced 18% lower productivity, 16% lower profitability, 37% lower job growth, and 65% lower share price over time. Importantly, businesses with highly engaged employees enjoyed 100% more job applications.

Lack of loyalty is a third cost.  Research shows that  workplace stress leads to an increase of almost 50% in voluntary turnover. People go on the job market, decline promotions, or resign. And the turnover costs associated with recruiting, training, lowered productivity, lost expertise, and so forth, are significant. The Center for American Progress  estimates that replacing a single employee costs approximately 20% of that employee’s salary.

For these reasons, many companies have established a wide variety of perks from working from home to office gyms. However, these companies still fail to take into account the research.  A Gallup poll showed that, even when workplaces offered benefits such as flextime and work-from-home opportunities,  engagement predicted wellbeing above and beyond anything else. Employees  prefer workplace wellbeing to material benefits.

Wellbeing comes from one place, and one place only — a positive culture.

Creating a positive and healthy culture for your team rests on a few major principles. Our own research (see here and here) on the qualities of a positive workplace culture boils down to six essential characteristics:

  • Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
  • Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
  • Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.
  • Inspiring one another at work.
  • Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.
  • Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust, and integrity.

As a boss, how can you foster these principles? The research points to four steps to try:

1. Foster social connections. A large number of empirical studies confirm that positive social connections at work produce highly desirable results. For example, people get sick less often, recover twice as fast from surgery, experience less depression, learn faster and remember longer, tolerate pain and discomfort better, display more mental acuity, and perform better on the job. Conversely, research by Sarah Pressman at the University of California, Irvine, found that the probability of dying early is 20% higher for obese people, 30% higher for excessive drinkers, 50% higher for smokers, but a whopping 70% higher for people with poor social relationships. Toxic, stress-filled workplaces affect social relationships and, consequently, life expectancy.

2. Show empathy. As a boss, you have a huge impact on how your employees feel. A telling brain-imaging study found that, when employees recalled a boss that had been unkind or un-empathic, they showed increased activation in areas of the brain associated with avoidance and negative emotion while the opposite was true when they recalled an empathic boss. Moreover, Jane Dutton and her colleagues in the CompassionLab at the University of Michigan suggest that leaders who demonstrate compassion toward employees foster individual and collective resilience in challenging times.

‍3. Go out of your way to help. Ever had a manager or mentor who took a lot of trouble to help you when he or she did not have to? Chances are you have remained loyal to that person to this day.  Jonathan Haidt at New York University’s Stern School of Business shows in his research that when leaders are not just fair but self-sacrificing, their employees are actually moved and inspired to become more loyal and committed themselves. As a consequence, they are more likely to go out of their way to be helpful and friendly to other employees, thus creating a self-reinforcing cycle. Daan Van Knippenberg of Rotterdam School of Management shows that employees of self-sacrificing leaders are more cooperative because they trust their leaders more. They are also more productive and see their leaders as more effective and charismatic.

‍4. Encourage people to talk to you – especially about their problems. Not surprisingly, trusting that the leader has your best interests at heart improves employee performance. Employees feel safe rather than fearful and, as research by Amy Edmondson of Harvard demonstrates in her work on psychological safety, a culture of safety i.e. in which leaders are inclusive, humble, and encourage their staff to speak up or ask for help, leads to better learning and performance outcomes. Rather than creating a culture of fear of negative consequences, feeling safe in the workplace helps encourage the spirit of experimentation so critical for innovation. Kamal Birdi of Sheffield University has shown that empowerment, when coupled with good training and teamwork, leads to superior performance outcomes whereas a range of efficient manufacturing and operations practices do not.When you know a leader is committed to operating from a set of values based on interpersonal kindness, he or she sets the tone for the entire organization. In Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant demonstrates that leader kindness and generosity are strong predictors of team and organizational effectiveness. Whereas harsh work climates are linked to poorer employee health, the opposite is true of positive work climates where employees tend to have lower heart rates and blood pressure as well as a stronger immune systems. A positive work climate also leads to a positive workplace culture which, again, boosts commitment, engagement, and performance. Happier employees make for not only a more congenial workplace but for improved customer service. As a consequence, a happy and caring culture at work not only improves employee well-being and productivity but also improved client health outcomes and satisfaction.In sum, a positive workplace is more successful over time because it increases positive emotions and well-being. This, in turn, improves people’s relationships with each other and amplifies their abilities and their creativity. It buffers against negative experiences such as stress, thus improving employees’ ability to bounce back from challenges and difficulties while bolstering their health. And, it attracts employees, making them more loyal to the leader and to the organization as well as bringing out their best strengths. When organizations develop positive, virtuous cultures they achieve significantly higher levels of organizational effectiveness — including financial performance, customer satisfaction, productivity, and employee engagement.

Read full Article

3 — 3

  • OPINION

THE SCIENCE OF PEAK HUMAN PERFORMANCE​

Originally from time.com

The science of ultimate human performance has a bad name–literally. “Flow” is the term used by researchers for optimal states of consciousness, those peak moments of total absorption where self vanishes, time flies, and all aspects of performance go through the roof.

Unfortunately, even though research in this area holds considerable promise, unless you’re studying toilet bowl dynamics or lubrication theory, “flow” doesn’t sound like a sober scientific topic. And who hasn’t used the term colloquially, thinking that “going with the flow” was more hippie holdover than a technical description of actual experience.

Yet, it was University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who selected this term, and he did so for a reason. In the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi embarked upon what would soon become one of the largest psychological surveys ever, running around the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best.
‍
He started out with experts—chess players, surgeons, dancers, etc.—and moved on to the everyone else: Italian farmers, Navaho sheep herders, Chicago assembly line workers, elderly Korean women, Japanese teenage motorcycle gang members…this list goes on.

And everyone he spoke to, regardless of culture, class, gender, age or level of modernization, felt and performed their best when they were experiencing the state he named “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi chose this term because, when interviewing research subjects, “flow” was the word that kept popping up. In the state, every action, every decision, led seamlessly, fluidly to the next. In other words, flow actually feels flowy.

The bigger issue was why—but that’s not a new question. Flow science dates back to the early 1900s, when researchers like Harvard’s William James began documenting the ways the brain can alter consciousness to improve performance, and legendary physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon, James’ student, discovered a link between mind and body—the fight-or-flight response—that helped explain this amplified performance.

The great psychologist Abraham Maslow prodded the topic again in the 1940s, finding flow states (which he called “peak experiences”) a shared commonality among all successful people. The theories got a little fuzzier with the human potential movement of the 1960s, but seemed to land on much firmer ground with Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s. Unfortunately, this solid foundation didn’t last.

Flow was a black box, an astoundingly intriguing phenomena accessible only through subjective recall. Certainly, psychologists made a good show of it. Csikszentmihalyi identified three causes for flow and seven characteristic features of the state. A blizzard of other researchers came in and validated and extended these ideas, but no one really figured out how to replace the anecdotal with the empirical. The neurobiology of the state remained a mystery. And, in many cases, these early attempts at unpacking this mystery only exacerbated the problem.Perhaps the best example is the endorphin question. In the 1980s, as “runner’s high” replaced “flow” as the hip descriptor of peak performance, researchers were certain that endorphins were the secret sauce behind the high. But endorphins are damn tricky to measure in the brain and no one could prove the point. This frustration reached a crescendo in 2002, when then president of the Society for Neuroscience, Huda Akil, told The New York Times that endorphins in runners “is a total fantasy of the pop culture.”

In the wake of Akil’s statement, researchers began to shy away from the field. The New Age/self-help movement rushed in to fill the vacuum. Flow, an already turbulent topic, became nearly taboo. And, as far as most are concerned, that’s where things still stand today. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Over the past decade, scientists have made enormous progress on flow. Advancements in brain imaging technologies have allowed us to apply serious metrics where once was only subjective experience. We have learned plenty, including the fact that Csikszentmihalyi was dead-on in his word choice: “flow” is the exact right term for the experience.

The state emerges from a radical alteration in normal brain function. In flow, as attention heightens, the slower and energy-expensive extrinsic system (conscious processing) is swapped out for the far faster and more efficient processing of the subconscious, intrinsic system. “It’s an efficiency exchange,” says American University in Beirut neuroscientist Arne Dietrich, who helped discover this phenomena. “We’re trading energy usually used for higher cognitive functions for heightened attention and awareness.”

The technical term for this exchange is “transient hypo frontality,” with “hypo” (meaning slow) being the opposite of “hyper” (i.e., fast) and “frontal” referring to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that houses our higher cognitive functions. This is one of the main reasons flow feels flowy—because any brain structure that would hamper rapid-fire decision-making is literally shut off. In 2008, for example, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Charles Limb used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of improv jazz musicians in flow. He found the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain best known for self-monitoring, deactivated. Self-monitoring is the voice of doubt, that defeatist nag, our inner critic. Since flow is a fluid state—where problem solving is nearly automatic—second guessing can only slow that process. When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex goes quiet, those guesses are cut off at the source. The result is liberation. We act without hesitation. Creativity becomes more free-flowing, risk taking becomes less frightening, and the combination lets us flow at a far faster clip.

Changes in brainwave function further this process. In flow, we shift from the fast-moving beta wave of waking consciousness down to the far slower borderline between alpha and theta. Alpha is day-dreaming mode—when we slip from idea to idea without much internal resistance. Theta, meanwhile, only shows up during REM or just before we fall asleep, in that hypnogogic gap where ideas combine in truly radical ways. And, of course, both effects grease the decision-making skids that much more.

Finally, there’s the neurochemistry of flow. A team of neuroscientists at Bonn University in Germany discovered that endorphins are definitely part of flow’s cocktail (so was Akil wrong) and, as other researchers have determined, so are norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, and serotonin. All five are pleasure-inducing, performance-enhancing neurochemicals, upping everything from muscle reaction times to attention, pattern recognition and lateral thinking—the three horsemen of rapid-fire problem-solving. In other words, Csikszentmihaly was more right than he could have known. Not only does flow feel flowy; neurobiologically, it actually is flowy.

And beyond settling the terminology question, what all this neurobiology tells us is that—for the very first time in history—we have begun to crack the code of optimal performance. This is a big deal. Researchers credit flow with most athletic gold medals and world championships, major scientific breakthroughs and significant progress in the arts, but this might only be the very beginning of the revolution. As flow science finally has a mechanistic toe-hold, the same level of incredible performance now possible for the few may soon be in the offing for the many.

Read full Article