In our 2022 fantasy football draft kit and guide book, I wrote about cognitive biases and how they can deter you from the goal of accumulating useful fantasy football knowledge. I encouraged the idea of returning to a “Beginner’s Mind.” A beginner necessarily thinks slow, examines new material, seeks evidence to confirm beliefs, tries and fails, before advancing to some level of expertise. Intentionally invoking this mindset should have been helpful in reading countless articles, reviewing several different draft strategies, and tweaking Jake’s rankings/projections. Considering that you, after all these years of playing, still have something to learn about fantasy football puts you in a position to take advantage of the glut of information.
Now, however, it’s time to draft. All of my season-long redraft leagues, except the famous Scott Fish Bowl (#SFB12), will be drafting in the five days leading up to the Bills at Rams opener, Thursday, September 8. The last thing you want on draft night is a beginner’s mind. You don’t want to second-guess yourself, and you certainly don’t have time to think slow, using all the logic and rational tools that hopefully served you well leading up to this point. No, you want to draft in a flow state.
Flow is a scientific term for what we’ve long known colloquially as “being in the zone.” It was coined by phychologist Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, who recognized it as “the key to happiness.” Research in multiple disciplines, including neuroscience, has demonstrated a few key facets of flow, from what its requirements are to what its benefits are. While flow isn’t a switch you can simply flick on or off as you like, understanding what contributes to it and why it’s desirable might make it easier to achieve during your draft.
What is flow? It’s a state characterized by intense absorption and success in a goal directed, challenging task. Learning and memory are both enhanced during flow, and the brain’s reward and motivation centers are activated. Dopamine and norepinephrine neurotransmitters are released at higher rates, stimulating almost the entirety of the brain. This serves to bring a feeling of pleasure to the person in flow, and also to increase the attention devoted to the task at hand. In fact, a person in the flow state is consumed by their challenging yet rewarding task to the exclusion of external and internal distractions. They forget about their notifications, they lose track of time, they don’t feel in the least self-conscious. At the end of a flow state, the neurotransmitter serotonin is released, contributing to an afterglow of well-being.
Flow is only achievable when a task presents a moderate to high level of challenge, and when the skill set of the person is also moderate to high. When challenge is high, but skills are low, a person is more likely to feel anxiety and embarrassment. When challenge is low but skills are high, a person will be bored. Flow is optimized when we are mindful, paying particular attention not to the past or the future, but to what we are doing in the moment. Stress, which, by definition, requires attention to past or future events, is counterproductive to the flow state. Furthermore, we are more likely to achieve this desirable state of flow when we are hopeful for success in our endeavor rather than fearful of failure.
Another contrast with the beginner’s mind concerns the parts of the brain that are active during flow. Research studies have recorded brain activity during flow states and manipulated brain activity by stimulating certain regions. Though these are mostly correlative studies, they can help us build models of how our brains experience flow. During flow, parts of the prefrontal cortex are silenced. This is a part of the brain that is unique to humans, and plays a role in what we call our executive functions: planning, strategizing, reward evaluation, self-control, and self-referent thinking, among others. Reduced activity in this part of the brain aids flow by preventing us from being self-conscious of our actions, from focusing on the past or future, and from focusing on what we might get out of the activity we’re doing. Instead, we are left with the ability to enjoy the activity for its intrinsic merits, getting lost in the experience.
We also suppress attention to outside stimuli irrelevant to the task at hand. At the same time, subcortical structures like the locus coeruleus and midbrain are releasing dopamine and norepinephrine, which keep us motivated and feeling pleased with our performance. The release of these neurotransmitters interacts with systems that release neuropeptides like endogenous endorphins and cannabinoids, which reduce any feelings of pain and enhance feelings of well-being. Thus, during flow, you don’t feel fatigued, cramped, or uncomfortable even though, as a gamer, you might have been sitting in the same position for hours. Since our skills are high, we rely heavily on muscle memory and automated motor patterns to carry out our actions during flow. The video gamer isn’t thinking consciously about which button on the controller to push and the violinist isn’t actively planning each stroke of the bow during flow.
Flow can be achieved in many domains — athletes, musicians, artists, mathematicians, video gamers routinely experience flow… why not fantasy football drafters? Imagine being in your draft room, live or online, and seeing every logical, high floor, upside player you want fall to you like the formulas appeared to Russell Crowe as mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. You know exactly what to do when your turn comes, you are calm, relaxed, confident, and you succeed in putting all of the knowledge you’ve earned this summer to good use. Sounds pretty good, right? To get there, you might want to revisit some of your draft plans.
People always ask me if it’s a good idea to drink alcohol during your draft. Well, at least one person always asks me that. OK, it’s our own Nando Di Fino who wants the justification to have a beer. In truth, I have often enjoyed a drink or two during a draft, particularly if it’s in person with friends and/or family. However, alcohol will counteract your attempts to enter a flow state. Yes, it is a depressant substance, and it does inhibit the prefrontal cortex, but it also affects the parts of the brain that are conducive to flow, such as the midbrain dopamine neurons and the norepinephrine producing cells in the hindbrain. In high enough quantities, it can relieve us of our inhibitions and self-consciousness, but that lack of control is far from the flow state I’ve defined. To achieve an ideal flow state, you should avoid drinking and drafting.
One of the key elements of flow is the ability to ignore distractions. I like to joke that when my dog, a yellow lab, gets onto the scent of something good, his ears completely stop working. He is so focused on his olfactory experience that outside stimuli are easily ignored — it looks a lot like flow. In online drafts, you can set yourself up in a quiet room and turn off the chat to increase your probability of entering the flow state. In person, you might have to actively ignore your friends. This is probably the biggest reason most people are not drafting in this ideal frame of mind, because who wants to miss out on the social aspects of a draft? Not me. Some of my online drafts involve friends and former students who now live around the world, and fantasy football draft chat is one of the only times we get to catch up. The whole reason for doing in-person drafts is to talk, laugh and have fun with the people in your league. So, it wouldn’t be a popular move to just ignore everyone else at the table.
The good news is that experts have moved away from a definition of flow that views it as a binary switch — either on or off — to a definition that recognizes a spectrum of flow experiences. Depending on your own draft circumstances, then, it might be possible to float in and out of a mild-moderate flow experience and still engage with the group in a reasonably social manner. If you’re lucky enough to pick at the turn, you can definitely spend some time “in the zone” and some time being social. Even if you don’t apply this concept of flow to your fantasy drafts, maybe you’ll recognize the opportunity for, or experience of, flow in other regular activities. Let us know in the comments if you’ve been in a flow state and what got you there!
(Top photo: Sam Navarro-USA TODAY Sports)
"flow" - Google News
September 02, 2022 at 01:29PM
https://ift.tt/FY49x5o
Fantasy drafting in a flow state: Ignore distractions, avoid alcohol and more ways to get into the zone - The Athletic
"flow" - Google News
https://ift.tt/UAN5JQh
https://ift.tt/Sf1IPbZ
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Fantasy drafting in a flow state: Ignore distractions, avoid alcohol and more ways to get into the zone - The Athletic"
Post a Comment