Mental Health Hygiene for Self-Actualization
Baseline High Performance Recipe
Notes by Natalie Ola
4 min read · 10.7.2025
Steven Kotler shares in his book Mapping Cloud Nine,
“And when I think about all this stuff, when I think about what this means for Cloud Nine and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience, and I think about all the discoveries of positive psychology, I think of their discoveries as baseline high performance.
“This is like mental health hygiene.”
Altered States of Consciousness
If you are on the spiritual side or the high performance side, it’s going to involve altered states of consciousness. These are fast moving experiences.
Altered states of consciousness, these non-ordinary states—we are talking about flow states—are really serious.
We’re not talking about mindfulness stress reduction, we’re talking about a serious tantra practice, a serious flow practice, a serious psychedelic practice or, as usually is the case, all these things mixed together into a life.
There’s a lot of energy moving through that system.
And if the foundation isn’t stable, if you don’t have that positive psychology baseline you are going to mess yourself up.
Nietzsche said, self-actualization is not for everyone.
Flow is a dangerous thing to play with; it will continuously increase your risk profile.
The other thing is, these are 5 of the most potent addictive neurochemicals the brain can produce. These are very very very addictive states. And if you have a high flow lifestyle and it changes, and you are suddenly locked out of flow, you are going to be miserable, it is going to destroy your equanimity.
If you want to come to a Flow Genome Project event, the first thing we ask you is do you have psychological problems. If you have problems with depression or mania, we are going to make you worse; we are not going to make you better; we ask that you go get help with your psychological problem, and then come back to us. This is probably good advice across the board with high performance.
In his book The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler writes,
“To handle the massive amplification the state provides, we need an exceptionally stable foundation. A car that hits a wall at ten miles per hour will dent a fender. Hit that same wall at a hundred miles per hour, and it’s a hell of a lot more than a fender that’s dented. The same is true for flow.”
Baseline Positive Psychology Recipe
⇀ Positive Thinking
Power of positive thinking: what to pay attention to.
Self-monitoring and adjusting self-talk.
The amygdala is the brain's danger detector.
What that means is: your brain takes in ~400 billion bits of info per second, this is the most recent estimate, comes from the book The User Illusion—fantastic book on consciousness.
But consciousness—stuff that you are aware of, stuff you use to create your reality—2,000 bits.
So the vast majority of what the brain does at the first level is filter down information. And since the first order of business for any organism is survival, the first stop of all incoming information has to be in an organ that is primed to look for danger.
Now the amygdala is, technically, primed to look for novelty and salience but it is privileged towards the negative because it’s looking for threats.
The amygdala will pick up 6 to 9 bits of negative information for every positive bit that comes through. Research on positive psychology tells us that we need 3 positive thoughts to counter the negative.
⇀ Gratitude
Daily gratitude practice.
The reason you are doing this is you are tilting the brain; the brain will start noticing.
Because when you are grateful it sets off the brain’s bs detector.
You are not grateful for imaginary things that might happen in the future; you are grateful for stuff that has already happened. It’s real; we know it’s real.
Being grateful for what happened reminds me of the basic need and that it got met, and probably will get met in the future.
So what happens with daily gratitude practice, very quickly, we start to tilt the ratio; we are starting to take in more positive information.
Now this is fundamental for a lot of things.
It is fundamental for high performance and creativity because novelty—I’m ready to take in new information or view this old information in new ways—that’s the foundation of creativity; you need novel information, and if the brain is only hunting the negative, it’s not going to find you the stuff that you need.
⇀ Mindfulness Practice
You are doing this for stress reduction and you are doing this to get into that gap. There’s a gap between when thoughts arise and we tag them with emotion. And emotion is meaning.
Once we’ve tagged a thought with emotion it’s got so much energy we can’t do anything with it; it’s already too late most of the time.
What we want to do is we want to intercept that thought before it gets the emotional weight; and that you get from any kind of mindfulness practice. So that’s really really really fundamental.
⇀ Cultivate Your Core Strengths
The last component in the positive psychology recipe; it is also one of the first real flow hacks we are going to talk about. Book by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues.
What they realized is that if you are interested in living a high flow life, you want to make that jump from the 1st level of a happy to engaged life. One of the easiest ways to do it is to cultivate your 5 core strengths. A career that is at the intersection of these 5 core strengths that’s a high flow career.
References:
Steven Kotler. Mapping Cloud Nine: Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. Audiobook. 5.10.2022.
Steven Kotler. The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer. 19.1.2021.