Enter the zone - eSports theory approach

Introduction

Parts of the art used in this image belongs to RIOT GAMES INC.

What is the "flow" state or "the zone"?, often when I ask this question people tells me things such as "It's when your brain functions to its maximum potential" or "It's a state that makes your brain perform to a 120% or more"... well people is not 120% wrong, it has to do with performance, yet not with overperforming, but with underperforming.


The brain has many parts, each one has one or more functions, and many functions need more than 1 part of the brain to work well, but for example, what do we need time perception for when we play?, what do we need the limbic system (emotional brain) for when we play?, what if we could learn to turn off that parts we don't need so we make better use of the parts we do need?, well that's entering the zone, more or less.

Flow conditions

There're many theories about the required conditions to reach flow, however, many of those are very restrictive and not achievable in a real situation, so I've summarized the 3 main conditions to get into the zone; Stability, Skill, and Awareness.

1. Stability

This is by far the most important condition, and the one you need to train more in order to ease the process to get into the zone; physiological stability, emotional stability, environmental stability, and mind stability, this last one is heavily conditioned by the first three.

2. Skill

Image rights to THE FLOW GENOME PROJECT

Your skill has to match the challenge level, if it's too hard, you'll get frustrated, if it's too easy you'll get bored, however, this condition can be flexed because your "current skill level" depends on how good you're performing in that specific situation, and how good you perform depends on the first and third condition, so it's relative.

3. Awareness

You must know what you're doing, how you're doing it, and be aware of your skill level and level of challenge. If you observe the situation you'll be able to adapt and eventually improve your performance.

How flow works

Unlike you might think by now, flow is not a switch you can turn on and off, is a cycle of 4 phases you've to go through everytime you want to be in the zone, you can't stay forever in the flow phase, however you can train the ammount of time you spend in each phase.

Image rights to THE FLOW GENOME PROJECT

1. STRUGGLE

When you start an activity you're not inmediately focused, you need a period of adaptation to start turning all your attention towards the goals of what you're doing. In this part of the cycle, the brain produces BETA waves, this kind of waves represent normal brain activity, shows that the brain is busy processing stuff, in a state of alertness. The hormone predominant in the blood flow is “cortisol”, the stress hormone. Cortisol is related to many health problems such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, depression, etc, so imagine how bad this hormone is.

2. RELEASE

When you start feeling relaxed and inmersed into the activity. In this part of the cycle, the brain produces ALPHA waves, this kind of waves represent a state of relaxation and daydreaming. During this phase the brain produces nitric oxide that enhances memory and behavior as well as regulates the blood pressure. We're in a similar state when we're idle or meditating with eyes closed. Let's say that this is the hall of the flow state.

3. FLOW

Just after feeling a sensation of full self-conciousness and awareness beyond normal, we start performing at our best, and we experience an enhanced intuition and higher processing capabilities. The waves predominant in this state are the THETA / GAMMA waves that represent neural conciousness and sensory perception. In this state you'll experience an increased focus, increased processing speed and the main compounds predominant in the blood flow will be dopamine, that improves attention and cognition; endorphins, that reduces stress and helps to relax, and anandamide, which is like the natural brain marijuana.

4. RECOVERY

When the brain focuses on wiring the concepts and focuses on memory consolidation, here's when all that you experienced during the flow state is being stored for a future use and a better adaptation in the STRUGGLE phase. In this state the predominant waves are the DELTA waves which represent a better learning curve and improved memory. The main molecules that can be found in the blood flow during this state are Serotonin and Oxytocin that enhances relaxation, well being, and some kind of “sleepiness”, as well as enhances trust, self-esteem, and optimism.

Training basics

To talk about how to train in a dialy basis, first we must know a bit more about the conditions listed at the beggining.

What defines how good or bad we do depends on what we do and how we do it, right?,we could say then that what defines our performance is our behavior.

A coaching approach turns its attention over behavior, conditioning the behavior will improve performance (theoretically), but we're just scrapping the surface of the improvement.

Image rights to Iván "Mushy" Prats

What if we go deeper?, the behavior is conditioned by the thinking, a player does what he does because of what we thinks, so if we change the thinking, we can change the behavior from a deeper layer, but this 2 layers; behavior and thinking, are the observable attributes of a player, and in a way are not reliable because both are subject to deeper levels of behavioral causality.

Understand and control the inner levels of causality is what gives us power to change the behavior from the deepest level; what a player feels it's what conditions the upper levels, if you feel frustrated, you will act differently than if you feel encouraged, but we can go even deeper, feeling one way or another depends heavily on the emotion; boredom, anger, deatachment, content, etc.

But how can we change an emotion if it's something that we feel unconciously and hardly understand ourselves?... If we control the deepest layer, we'll be able to manage everything else, manage our emotion, our feelings, our thinking... if we control our physiology, we'll control our behavior.

Controling our physiology

First we have to understand that the factors that influence our physiology are many; heartbeat rate and pattern, blood pressure, hormones, etcetera, so we'll go over the most important.

1. Hormones

You probably have been into that situation prior to an important match, event, audition, or something like that and your father, coach, or whoever tells you: "Don't worry, just relax, breathe deep and calm down", yet you might have heard exactly the opposite "It's okay to be nervous, this will help you to be psyched up", so which one is it?, relaxation or excitation?.

The answer is none, and both. What determines the quality of our emotional output is the "neuroendocrine system" (NE) not our "autonomic nervous system" (ANS), then we can determine than both, relaxation and excitation define the intensity of the emotion (ANS) and the type of hormone (NE) determines whether it's a positive or negative emotion.

Note that positive emotions are underpinned by a range of anabolic hormones such as DHEA or "vitality hormone" and the negative emotions are related with catabolic hormons such as Cortisol, which we mentioned previously.

2. Heartbeat pattern

Unlike the heartbeat rate, the pattern defines the variations along a period of time, the rate is an average that doesn't let us see how stable our heartbeat is, if we monitorize our heartbeat pattern we can find that in an state of calmness, our heartbeat pattern is consistent, and in a state of anxiousness or frustration our heartbeat pattern is erratic, yet the rate would be consistent because it's an average.

Practical training

Resuming, we've got 3 conditions; Stability, Skill, and Awareness.

1. Training emotional and physiological stability

To train physiological stability and emotional stability we need to learn how to breathe. I'll be going over that topic deeply in my next article, but learning how to regulate the air flow will heavily stabilize our physiology, therefore our emotional state.

2. Environmental stability

We can't train this kind of stability, tho we can find a propicious situation to do a given activity.

There're 2 types of environmental distractions, percieved by our senses, the first one is a sensorial distraction, like it could be loud noise, the smell of the meal your mum is cooking, etc, and the other is emotional, also percieved by our senses, but with emotional charge.

To get closer to the zone we've to avoid distractions, we've to be able to focus freely without any disruption.

An example of a sensorial distraction with emotional charge is when you hear someone nearby calling your name or nickname, you'll feel bound to the voice of that person who mentioned you, and you'll be unconciously distracted trying to listen what is the conversation about, what did he or she say, why are they mentioning you, is it good?, is it bad?, emotional distractions are the hardest to deal with, and the best way to deal with that is to prevent the possible distractions.

3. Training our skill

This has nothing to do with brain performance, but it's an important factor, the higher your skill is, the harder challenges you may take, therefore training your skill in the game will open you more possibilities to reach flow.

4. Training our awareness

This has to come with force of will, our ability to observe and mantain focus is an important part of staying in the flow state. In the near future I'll be making a new article about how to improve focus, resistence to distractions, etc, with training routines I've developed like the "fruity focus" or the "visualization exercise", based on meditation.

Thanks for reading!

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