The Zone
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
All of us have had a brush with the Zone, that rare place or moment of mental perfection, physical clarity, and performance, when all your cylinders are firing in perfect harmony, when there’s absolutely no disconnect between your mind, body, and emotions. It’s when time stops and there is the freedom of complete absorption in the activity at hand.
Wouldn’t you love to find yourself in that place more often? What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the breath—in its power to bridge mind and body, to clear the mental chatter that can be deleterious to how we perform, to focus powerful energies when and where we need them in ourselves—may be the key to increasing the frequency of those Zone occurrences in everything we do.
We see examples of the Zone all the time in sports world. Portland Trail Blazers basketball fans were brutally reminded of what an athlete can do when he finds the Zone in the first game of the 1992 NBA finals against the Chicago Bulls. As Andrew Cooper wrote in the Shambhala Sun, “As he turned and headed back up court, Michael Jordan looked over at network announcer Magic Johnson and shrugged, as if to say, ‘It’s beyond me. It’s just happening by itself!’ … His Airness had just sunk his sixth consecutive three-pointer, and in that moment it appeared as though even he was overwhelmed by the immensity of his gift.”
Pelé, the great Brazilian soccer player who almost single-handedly introduced the sport to America, wrote of his Zone experience in his autobiography, My Life and Beautiful Game. “In the middle of a match,” he wrote, “I felt a strange calmness I hadn’t experienced before. It was a type of euphoria. I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any or all of their team that I could almost pass through them physically. It was a strange feeling and one that I had not had before. Perhaps it was merely confidence, but I have felt confident many times without that strange feeling of invincibility.”
In his autobiography, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man, legendary NBA center Bill Russell evokes the “mystical feeling” that would overcome him on occasion. “At that special level all sorts of odd things happened,” he writes. “It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball in bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, ‘It’s coming there!’—except that I knew everything would change if I did.”
A Mystery with Many Names
That’s the mysterious part. Finding this rarified Zone rarely happens by our sheer force of will. The Zone goes by many names. Science calls it an altered state of human consciousness, “peak experience,” or as a “flow state” that cannot generally be intentionally created. Athletes have dubbed it “runner’s high,” “exercise high,” the “groove,” or performing as if “unconscious” or “out of my mind,” and are as confused by it as anyone. Once out of it, they find it extremely difficult to describe, but usually lay claim to higher powers (God, Jesus, Zen, etc.), superhuman and heretofore unknown powers of concentration, inexplicable visualization, or alien body invasion.
Almost as quickly as it arrives, is can soon vanish, much to the athlete’s dismay. Added Aaron Cooper, about Jordan’s shrug for the TV cameras, “And that was the giveaway. [Jordan] had become self-conscious, and so he had lost that edge, that intensity of concentration in which limitations are forgotten and the spirit is set free to soar. . . . Michael Jordan is no common athlete, and his shooting display was certainly no common feat. But for all its spectacle, his experience—its nature, its inner life—is not that unusual, after all.”
In his excellent book, Body, Mind, and Sport: The Mind-Body Guide to Lifelong Health, Fitness, and Your Personal Best, Dr. John Douillard, an Ayurvedic and chiropractic sports medicine physician, writes, “The field of sports psychology, which was developed in part to help athletes reproduce the highly coveted experience of the Zone, has failed in its attempts. Dr. Keith Henschen of the University of Utah, who specializes in the field, recognizes the elusive nature and apparently irreproducible experience of the Zone, but at the same time he believes it can be randomly accessed by anyone. That is, it can come to anyone, but it comes when it comes, not necessarily when you want it to. Perhaps the most certain limiting factor, according to Henschen, is that ‘the harder you try to get there, the less likely it is that you will.’”
Surmises Douillard, “This generates an interesting paradox. Modern exercise theory revolves around one central pivot, the stress-and-recover cycle, which boils down to this: We must repeatedly push ourselves to our limits and then let the body recover; that is how we become stronger, faster, and so on. The Zone is defined antithetically: The harder you try to reach that state, the less likely it is that you will. Conventional training demands that we put out tremendous effort; the Zone is an experience of absolute effortlessness.”
Paradoxical indeed. But what does this have to do with breathing? You might not be able to summon the genie from the bottle at will, but you can take powerful steps to increase your odds in finding it. Most experts in the field of sports and performance psychology agree on several major components of the Zone—training, confidence, and focus—and, as we have learned in previous chapters, those are three areas that benefit directly from knowing and using the breath. By employing your perfect breath knowledge and awareness, even with something as simple as a Six-Second Breath, you stand a much better chance of pulling all of the Zone components together. They may not add up to a truly transcendent experience every time, but at the very least, you’ll come closer to achieving more consistency and better performance when you practice them. Think of it as a way to raise your performance bar up another notch.
And don’t think for a moment that this applies merely to athletics. We can’t stress strongly enough mastering even the simplest breath-awareness techniques. No matter whether you’re a singer or artist working toward a perfect performance or piece, a corporate executive looking to deliver the perfect presentation or motivate your charges, or even a frustrated golfer trying rid your swing of its little slice-inducing components, the power of the breath can carry you far in finding your center, achieving some balance, calming the body, controlling the mind, and helping you perform close to your best.
It Takes Training
There are no shortcuts to learning and diligently practicing the rudimentary skills for your pursuit, no matter what it is. Basic physiology tells us that these learned skills originate in the thinking part of your brain with nerves in the prefrontal cortex. As they become aroused, they in turn activate nerve cells connected to the limbic system, in the brain’s cerebrum, the area associated with emotion—anxiety, fear, elation, and satisfaction, for example—which in turn is tied to the motor cortex which controls the body’s muscles.
These physical skills are best handled by the cerebellum, the part of the brain that functions for our movements with a kind of speed and efficacy that the cerebrum can’t. These motor memories, if you will, exist outside of conscious awareness. Like learning to walk, ride a bicycle or swim, we’re unsure of ourselves at first, and for that we employ the cerebrum to first “learn” the movements, so the cerebellum can take over and coordinate those things. It’s why we can involve ourselves in a physical activity, but be thinking about other things concurrently. It’s actually almost harder to consciously concentrate on walking or riding a bicycle, and can cause more missteps than it can prevent. The mind often gets in the way. Understanding this is a big step toward finding the Zone, and stilling that noisy brain is generally best affected by using techniques such as Perfect Breathing.
In previous chapters we’ve talked about training, and how the experts utilize breathing and breath control in developing their physical attributes to better extract the most from each breath of air. But the breath is also the bridge to both worlds, the mind and body, out of which a great synergy and harmony can arise.
Build a Breath-Based Belief System
Psychologists agree that negative thought, predictions of failure, stress, and anxiety must be overcome to have any hope of finding the Zone. Instilling confidence is paramount to good performance. If you’ve trained hard and properly, in other words, if you know your game, whatever it is, you deserve to be allowed to play it to the absolute best of your ability, or to at least give it your best shot. You didn’t train this hard to fail. Right?
Golf great Tiger Woods, he of the superior mechanics, steely nerves, and pure creativity seems to live in the Zone. He has been quoted as saying, “My greatest gift is my creative mind.” In 2000–01, when he absolutely blew away the golf world by winning all four of golf’s major tournaments, and by far his most successful span of achievement, he spoke to the ability of “almost willing yourself into the zone.” Part of his success can be attributed to his father, Earl, who instilled in him the fierce sense of competition, in facing fear and ignoring distraction. He was, essentially, nurtured in a no-limits learning environment. “More than anything, Tiger is perfectly safe,” wrote Chuck Hogan in Tiger’s Bond of Power. “Psychologically and emotionally, his parents offered him unconditional acceptance. . . . Literally, he cannot know failure.”
That same applies to mortals like us. In essence, you have to give yourself permission to be great, to succeed. Again, there’s no stock in worrying about your failures of yesterday or your performance in a tomorrow that hasn’t even happened yet. In the moment, the one that you control with each conscious breath, it’s much easier to see yourself doing something exceptional and extraordinary. When the moment comes to actually perform it, half the battle is over. You know you can do it. It’s about believing.
The single biggest and most common barrier to finding the Zone, or quashing one while you’re in it, is listening to the inner dialogue, the self-talk, the marvelously distracting little voice or cacophony of voices we all possess in our heads. It may be the biggest distraction to Perfect Breathing we know. Until you learn how to quell that noise, you may find yourself filled with doubt, fueled by that chatter. At worst, it is debilitating and can easily keep us from any kind of success. At best, it’s a distraction that can keep you from ever finding your Zone or quickly drive you from one.
It can seem like an endless conversation with ourselves, but mostly it’s us processing events as they happen to us. Some studies put figures of this inner dialogue at a rate of three hundred to one thousand words a minute. In a Time magazine article, writer Alice Park cites Trevor Moawad, director of mental conditioning for IMG Academies, who claims that for a tennis player competing in an average two-hour match, only about forty minutes are actually spent on the court playing the match, leaving an hour and twenty minutes between points with little to do but “talk” to oneself. “Positive chatter can help the athlete stay focused, but if the conversation strays into fears of failing, then the self-talk can become counterproductive,” Park offers.
The trick is to either eliminate the chatter or replace it with something useful. Most athletes and performers claim that inside the Zone, it’s as if there is no thought, no distraction, and no annoying little voices. There’s a decided lack of that inner dialogue. And it’s a point where breathing can help. Recall the exercises we’ve taught to merely bring your conscious thought back to the breath. No yesterday, no tomorrow, only now. Practicing those techniques will set you up for using them when the noise grows too great. It’s one more way for you to be in control. Make no mistake: The voices will get loud at times. It’s human and it’s inevitable. But remember, by using your perfect breath, you’re in control.
Problems arise when your dialogue feedback loop becomes dominated by fear of failure, fear of disappointing coworkers or teammates, fear of being unworthy. That circuit will actually start to resemble the body’s classic fight-or-flight response. Your anxious thoughts trigger the release of adrenaline, the hormone that sets the heart racing, primes the muscles to run, and puts all of your senses on alert. The eyes slip into tunnel vision—the last thing we need in any competition or performance on the field, court, or stage.
Again, the trick is control. A little adrenaline goes a long way, and in and of itself is not harmful. Using the Perfect Breathing techniques will help you get out of your own way, strike a balance and allow you to more fully imagine the competition at hand, find your own groove, and absorb and actually live the moment on every level.
Finding Focus
So, it’s game day. You’re sure you’re physically ready and mentally confident. Your journey to the Zone can truly begin. But, in this moment you still face immediate distractions and impediments. Somehow you have to draw your focus down to the goal at hand. Theoretically, at this stage your timing will be such that you’ll be at the peak of your physical condition, your mind will be clear and emotions unfettered. But it requires more than that. It requires a harmony, a certain kind of bliss, the kind of seemingly paradoxical push for relaxation-during-competition that runner Alberto Salazar spoke of, and a synergy of everything of which you’re made. It’s that point of busting through the wall, where pain is irrelevant, where all systems are nominal and functioning at their peak. It’s that place where true focus, true clarity, true creativity can be experienced and thrive.
Done correctly, it will be a transcendent moment, or series of moments. It will feel as if you’re watching yourself perform, possibly in slow motion, but with fluid grace, as if every potential is in your sights, and you know with absolute certainty that you will deliver.
In a seminal work for our times, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-mih-high) wrote Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a work of great depth that theorizes that people are at their happiest when they are in that state of flow, the Zenlike sense of oneness between whatever your activity is and the given situation. It is full immersion, great freedom, fulfillment, and the sense that time and your ego have fallen by the wayside.
In a Wired magazine interview, Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
Csikszentmihalyi praises Eastern disciplines such as yoga and martial arts, studies of the ancient Greeks, Stoic philosophers and Christian monastics for devising methods, most often using the breath to enable focus and clarity, to find that junction of mind, body, and spirit. “Control over consciousness,” he writes, “is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will.” Later he adds, “The perfect society would be able to strike a healthy balance between the spiritual and material worlds, but short of aiming for perfection, we can look toward Eastern religions for guidance in how to achieve control over consciousness.”
It’s this focused attention that we’re trying to achieve, and not necessarily just at the competitive moment—at the starting gun, first tee, sound of the buzzer, or the moment as you step onstage. It’s a noble goal for any time, one that can be greatly aided by knowing how to breathe, to put yourself at that intersection of physicality, awareness, and potential to see an outcome. It’s the place where attention, motivation, and situation meet. It is a junction, a crossroads that you’ll meet many times in your life, and not necessarily all of them rife with huge dramatic result. It is a heightened sense of being, of great humility for your gifts and a profound sense of power for the potential of what can be achieved. This alone is a truly great meditation, but practically speaking, it is the moment for which you can prepare yourself by practicing daily.
In this state, you’ll eliminate all negative thought. Who needs it? It’s your moment. You can’t be bothered by such things. You’ll listen to your body. You’ll turn down the volume on your monkey-brain chatter until it’s imperceptible. You’ll be confident in your body’s abilities and put it in the cerebellum’s competent hands. That will free up your cerebrum to concentrate on the clarity, the focus, the creativity—the full potential—of what you hope to accomplish.
In addition to everything you’ve learned and are beginning to practice so far, here are two exercises that can help you find that Zone state. It’s yours for the taking, with simple breath awareness.
When the pressure is on, full focus is difficult to accomplish. The mental distractions are many, the body is pumping adrenaline gallons a minute, and the incessant monkey-brain voice that can derail you with mantras of fear, doubt, and confusion is working overtime.
When there’s no time to sequester yourself away to someplace quiet—and this can work for any athletic contest (even during a time-out), an artistic performance, the nerve-wracking minutes before a major presentation, or any situation when you need to collect yourself quickly—try this Game Day Breathing, on the first tee, the tip-off, the starting line, before the big presentation or stage performance, or any time you need to refocus.
Exercise: Alternate Nostril Breathing
If you have the luxury of time, try Alternate Nostril Breathing, a centuries-old yoga technique that proffers balance and creativity, and is said to produce optimum function to both sides of the brain (left side, logical thinking; right side, creative thinking). There is emerging scientific information about the body’s nasal cycle and how it fluctuates throughout the day, sometimes favoring one side over the other. There is then a correspondence to mental function, even on the effects of asthma and other ailments. At the very least, this exercise delivers a keen sense of balance and relaxation.
Initially, try to perform two or three cycles. As you become more comfortable with the technique, gradually increase the number of cycles you perform. If you feel any discomfort or nasal blockage, don’t force the technique. It should be practiced only if you are comfortable and breathing freely through both nasal passages.