Dr. Tommy Wood

speaker

1,133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Dr. Tommy Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Huberman Lab · Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

Like you said, you're like right at the edge of your capabilities, but you're still managing to maintain function, whatever skill it is that you're performing at.

The thing that really frustrates me is that

Because of that, or some version of their definition of flow, people are like, well, I've always got to search for flow.

Everything happens in flow, and we need to be in flow all the time, which doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

There's two different parts to this.

So one is that people assume that for optimal performance, you need to be in flow.

That is not true.

Flow is one version of being able to perform at the best of your abilities.

If we think about this in terms of sports performance,

there might be broadly two states associated with top-level performance.

One is flow states.

The other is clutch states.

And so a clutch state, you are still at the optimal level of arousal, right?

If we think about the arousal curve and performance, which we can come back to.

So at the optimal level of arousal, which is required for you to perform the skill that you're trying to perform,

But when you're in a clutch state, it still feels like hard work, right?

So you could talk to any athlete about a time that they performed well, they won, they did the best of their abilities, but it was hard cognitive work, it was hard physical work, it was a slog, but they still managed to perform well.

That's a clutch state.

And people can perform at the best of their abilities in clutch states.

And, you know, even though they're not in flow, it's not all coming to them easily, right?

Showing 241–260 of 1,133 · page 13 of 57