Brad Stulberg

And if I just listen to these five steps, I can figure out all my life's problems.

So I can't even pump my gas without something getting in the way of me and what I'm doing, of thinking my own thoughts and pumping the gas.

And I think distraction has become really ubiquitous.

And often we talk about distraction, but I think underneath distraction is the sense of alienation or a lack of intimacy in our lives.

Yes, I think 100% there's a separateness from your values and who you really are.

And then at a more practical level, there's also just a distance between you and whatever it is that you're doing.

And in many ways, I think that excellence is, the pursuit of excellence is pretty similar to intimacy.

Because you get really close to something, you pay attention, you're endlessly curious about it.

And we often think about intimacy with another person, but you can also have intimacy with a craft.

And if we are constantly being distracted or interrupted, it's hard to find that intimacy.

It's hard to get into the slipstream or the pocket of a creative project or training for a marathon.

You've cited this on the show.

There's data that shows that Americans are having less physical intimacy, literal intimacy, because their phones are in their bedroom.

So it's just this constant bombardment of external noise that separates us from our inner values and from the things that we portend to care about being present for.

Shitty flow is a subtype of flow.

So as you were saying, flow has all of these hallmarks of a peak experience.

So you lose a sense of self, you lose a sense of time, you're totally immersed in what you're doing.

But flow is inherently values neutral.

So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi didn't say that flow needs to be pointed towards something great.

So you can experience flow when you're falling in love or when you're writing a book or if you're a transplant surgeon and you're in an eight-hour case and you're just totally in the zone.