How to Hack the Default Mode Network and Enter Flow State, Neuroscience Explained

Ep 104. Unlock the Science of Flow State: The Truth About the Default Mode Network (DMN)

What if the biggest thing standing in the way of your full potential… was your own brain? Meet the Default Mode Network (DMN) — a critical part of your brain that gives rise to your sense of self, your inner monologue, and the feeling of being separate from the world around you.

In this episode, we dive deep into neuroscience-backed research that reveals how the DMN shapes your everyday consciousness — and how quieting it can unlock heightened states of performance, creativity, and flow.

When the prefrontal cortex quiets — a state known as transient hypofrontality — you enter the flow zone. Time slows. Action and awareness merge. This is the state elite athletes, artists, musicians, and innovators tap into when they're in the zone.

Whether you're looking to enhance productivity, creativity, athletic performance, or simply understand how to feel more connected to the present moment — understanding and hacking the DMN could be your key.

🧠 Science-based insights
 🎯 Real-world applications
 🎵 Flow in music, sports, art, and beyond
 🌌 How to lose yourself to find yourself

May the flow be with you — and walk well

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 104 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, Ph.D. in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at a local community college.

And what we're going to be discussing today is going to be something I've talked about on the podcast before. And that is the state of flow. Now, whenever we speak about flow and being in the zone, being in that state, we're speaking about high performance, peak performance, generally speaking, having to do with sport or an activity that we consider a little more physical generally. And you can have flow whenever you're doing art and making music and all that good stuff. There, there's a state of flow involved with that. And there is a very kinesthetic involvement there. So very specifically we have.

kinesthetic involvement. That means our body is in a sense of feel as much as our mind is in a sense of flow, so to speak. So within that zone state, there are some states that occur, there are little shifts that happen within our physiology and they do have to do with self-regulatory skill that can help us in our everyday stuff. But

most folks don't talk about it or don't know how to write really well about it because often it's the third person of Zerber or somebody that's writing a narrative like a biography versus the autobiographical experience and having the limitations of language. So what we're going to touch upon today is going to be that default mode network. And this is something that

If we think about things, generally speaking, that's the part of our brain that is our day-to-day setting. If we look at frequency of brain waves, we're looking at beta level brain waves. And this is our normal waking day to day. I'm thinking about stuff, higher cognitive prefrontal cortical dominance. And we would call that hyper frontality. means you have more blood flow, more glucose happening in the front part of your brain doing what we call our thinking and weighing and reasoning and this sort of thing.

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as exist moment to moment, pointing out of ourselves and experiencing in our environment and categorically putting things in categories and in quotes in boxes, not the out of the box experience, but putting things in the box so we can make sense of them. So this is what we call default mode network. Now there's some qualities that go along with this as well. During the sense of thinking moment to moment, doing our day to day stuff, when we're living our lives on the run, that consciousness

is one of efficiency and effectiveness. One effectiveness being, you know, the outcome. It's either 0 or 1, 0, didn't get it, 1, I did it. And black and white reasoning, concrete, very lacking in abstract, and also one that is outcome measured, if you did it, if you didn't, if you were able to accomplish or not. So pretty simple to make sense and organize in that sense.

Now there is a quality that occurs whenever we're moving in the direction of flow and we'll get to that in a moment, but first we'll go to the extreme whenever we're not in flow, but rather we're in survival state. And the five flight response we've talked about that did several episodes just recently on the

growth of the idea of the fight-flight state and the subcategories within that where we have fight-flight, freeze, feed, and fornicate as one, but also wherever we flop or collapse or pass out and even just sit there shuddering in the freeze state thinking about what we need to do, but we can't act on it or decide. A lot of that has to do with that hypo-frontality where we don't have the requisite wherewithal or glucose in this case that is blood flow to allow us to make the thing

can happen.

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at the decision maker perspective level, wherever we're deciding with a higher cognitive process, this is better for me. So I better go away versus going into fight flight state where I might be shaking, shuddering heart rate going up autonomically. And I have no conscious control of that perceived conscious control. I'll say that because that is qualifiable at certain levels. so what is it whenever we're in that state of hypofrontality and we're in fight flight, we have the least amount of capability to categorize and

label and name and organize and make sense of stuff at the higher levels when we're more safe. When we're most hyper frontal, when we're able to think and reason is whenever our assumption of safety is met. That's whenever our body, regardless of environment, feels safe or able to navigate and capable of choosing the direction one is going to go despite what the suggestion of the environment may be safe, unsafe or indifferent. So

Keep that in mind.

Now back to the idea of what we would call the default mode network. And whenever we're in our default mode, that means our day to day, every day, not peak experience, not peak fright, not anything where I feel threatened or wherever I'm in any way feeling outside of our normal range. And some would say it was kind of vanilla side, kind of dull, kind of low frequency in the sense as there's not a whole lot of new novel things going on and low frequency of new things. Mind you, coming into the life.

versus the day-to-day frequency, everything in every way that is common and is expected and predictable in a large sense. Now the default mode network is also the aspect that gives us that sense of separateness.

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me versus them, I am here, they are there. And there's that sense of dichotomous dualistic thinking is what the Zen Buddhist and the Taoist would call this mindset of the day to day, or what we call not only the mask of the marketplace, but also the mind of the marketplace that actually underlies that act wherever I'm wearing that mask of the marketplace where we get along to get along. So why is this default mode network important?

To identify this whenever we're in a state of flow or moving towards flow, have to identify whenever we become a little more, I would say trans-personal. It's not so much that there's ego death, but there's that lesser sense of occupying one's mind and attention with me. This idea of in quotes me, I, I am while I'm doing and being immersed.

in what is called the autotelic experience by Mikhail Shaksentmihi and also anthropologist David Verdi. They speak of autotelia in experience and these are things that occur within the body.

that have to do with flow that arise as qualities when we're experiencing. So default mode network, once again, the quality of separateness and meanness and I-ness and I end at the skin. So from the inside of me to the edge of my skin, that's my internal environment, my endogenous internal self versus the external environment that starts from the skin out from air temperature and coolness and the little things that cause

my little hairs to go into pylorexion, my little hairs stand up on the back of my neck, that sort of thing. From the skin out, once again, is the impact of the environment. And being able to separate that in a very distinct way, without necessarily having to always be thinking about it. And this default mode network gives us that sense of separateness, of distance, of otherness, so to speak, in our environment. Now,

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whenever we are moving in the direction of, say, doing a skill, let's start with something physical, let's say like a bike racer or even someone that does speed skating or even skiing. When people are on that wavelength, so to speak, in that sense of knowing, being, allness, connectedness, whenever one is experiencing a peak experience, as Maslow would call, there's also that sense of connection with everything, that oneness with everything at that moment, because that sense

of ego falls away in a sense it doesn't fall away in the complete sense I think it's just like really almost like a real stat dialed down in my experience anyway whenever I've experienced such things and it's there but it's not it almost becomes like I don't know like

maybe like a screen door where the screen holes where the air flows through get much larger and they're there but they become less of a resistance to the air coming through that would be our experience our peak experience where we can feel more connected with the outside by having that screen door there but it's still kind of there but we pay less attention to it if you will so that's the analogy for now so the default mode network

The more it dials down, the more we experience that sense of connectedness with other, with the universe, with oneness, as we're flying through the air, as we're riding a bike at speed, whenever everything seems predicted, but not necessarily by a thought process that I can cognitively say, I chose to think this and weigh it and decide based on the data that I'm gaining. Data is coming in and our neurons are firing and adjusting, but it becomes very much what we would call the edge.

of a spiritual experience almost to the point of spiritual if not crossing over into that non barrier state where everything is not separate but connected in all one and that is also kind of going back to how children see when they're little whenever we take little ones to the zoo for instance and they say that's my mom my dad my giraffe and then they cry when they leave the zoo because they can't take it with them and they have an experience of distance but some

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a sense of the world is theirs and not only that the world is them and they are the world and they don't have this concept of a true differentiation of self so the default mode network isn't completely online so to speak but is being educated but whenever we experience flow I do believe that we start moving back into that childlike state not childish but childlike in the state that we become less filtered and less socially

awkward because we're not socializing by rules and guidelines. We are merely doing whatever it is that feels most natural and most fluid at that point in time. So a very deep thought to think if anything, but it's definitely a very deep experience to have when you have it and something that'll definitely bring pause when whenever you do experience it if you have. So important stuff once again. So what does this have to do with flow?

Well, it has a whole heck of a lot to do with flow and that these states have been studied and studied incredibly in various things from day to day experience to sport, to work.

and also whenever it spontaneously occurs and you don't expect it, I had one of those for instance. I think I've mentioned it before, but I remember I was going to college and I was driving this horrifically large and white 1972 Ford Ranchero. If you look it up in the internet, you might laugh a little bit. And the reason is because it was an ugly car. If there are El Camino lovers out there, the Ford version, the Ranchero was big. It was truly a boat and my

former employer used to jokingly call it the tuna boat and that kind of prompted me to call him Moby because he was all white and it was old paint from 1972 and the only air conditioning it had was when I opened the windows. The heater however did work. It didn't work really well and whenever it rained it would leak like a sieve so it wasn't fun to drive when it was raining but I will tell you that whenever I drove it and parked it in a parking lot going to class I was about an hour and a half early so I was going to drop by the library

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do a little research and writing and stuff for other classes and just be caught up before I got there. But soon as I closed the door and I had my backpack on my shoulder and my books under my arm and I stepped onto the sidewalk and the sidewalk in front of my the front end of my vehicle

was right under a moderately sized live oak tree and live oaks, drop acorns and little oval-esque leaves. And at that moment, when I got on the sidewalk and turned the direction of the library I was going to, just at that moment, there was no prompting. There was nothing that I did in particular that was special, but I was just doing my everyday stuff and time stopped.

There was a leaf and an acorn literally suspended in there moving very, very slightly and slowly, almost like somebody was dragging them down or holding them up and slowing them down from falling. And this lasted maybe a flash of a moment, but it seemed like an eternity at that moment. That is an autotelic experience. That is a peak experience. That is also a flow experience, but it was also a time distortion experience. Wherever everything turned back on after that, I'm like, wow, what was that? And I don't do drugs. I don't drink.

I wasn't under the influence at that point in time, other than just doing what I usually do. But it was such a blessing of an experience. And it took me into the direction of perceptual psychology in particular, and studying the neuronal structures in the brain and figuring out, well, what is that? How did this happen? And I had been training in martial arts up until then. And I had had, I guess, if you want to call it a mystical experience on occasion before, but never won as

I was doing my day-to-day movement throughout my regular default mode network way. So very important to point out is that

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These experiences, not so much that we want to encourage them and bring them on, can be experienced as we're open to them by doing our best and allowing ourselves to gain skill. When we gain skill in things, we tend to get better at things and things become a little more autonomic, a little less consciously. I have to push pedal A down and then let pedal B go up this sort of thing and making sure I'm doing certain things. Whenever I get the pattern of what I'm doing down, whenever I'm doing the physical things and

It becomes secondary. Second nature in the truest sense is wherever you practice and you don't have to think about those things. And that's an important thing. Things become natural. They become fast and powerful, but they can also become dangerous if there's an addictive quality where we've practiced as an example. And then all of a sudden we wonder why we can't stop. Part of it is because it's so darn powerful and fast and at the non-thinking level that we have to slow things down.

to where we can do thinking interventions.

But when it comes to performance, it's equally as strong, equally as fast and as equally as exciting whenever it's a positive peak experience, because there've been times wherever my sons and I, whenever we do drills with, practice, knives and sticks with the intent of actually trying to touch as if harming, to bring about that, that realistic experience. They have told me is like, I don't know how you got there. And all I've done is just move from.

Point A to point B and I can't say that I consciously did I just kind of followed where my body went But they told me how'd you get there? and they said I saw you here and then all of sudden you disappeared and then you're there and I Didn't feel like I was particularly fast, but I got somewhere particularly not

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Percept, Percept, perceivable to them. So that that's funny to me, but also kind of cool because it definitely gave me an idea as to what happens sometimes on, on my end while they're still perceiving things a little more.

Mystically in the sense of you just disappeared where the hell did you go and that that's hilarious But at the same time this is how good you can get at things that we may not be able to think or remember the stuff that happened in between but we just kind of did what we did naturally and that's where things become powerful and become exciting and become mystical in the truest sense even to the point of becoming spiritual or on the edges or peripheries of the spiritual where there's true meaning involved in there that will give you something that that will

Be a great boon to your individual self not to give you more ego But rather in the sense of an experience that gives you a joy and comfort and those are important things to have Now the default mode network network is where we started and that is once again our day-to-day consciousness now a couple of other details is that we've realized that whenever we're

more able to get away from that default mode network. We moved closer towards those flow states and experiences. We have more hypo-frontality, HYPO, where we have less activity in the frontal parts of our brain and our lower brain and our midbrain are actively doing what they do viscerally, not only feeling, but experiencing and having the time of its life, so to speak, whenever we're doing things and we're letting it drive without us necessarily having

to goad it or guard it or guide it or stop it and start this sort of thing. It's where we let our conscious mind kind of get out of the way a little bit so we can experience and just experience and enjoy that. And it's not always going to be this superfluous, I'm always, you know, feeling one with God experience, but rather it could be one

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bit of quality that you experience where things are just joyful and easy and that sense of ease and oneness is a great experience to have. But the less we think about things, when people tell you don't overthink it, that's the external experience and observer telling you don't overthink. And it's giving you a stepwise what not to do, but it's not showing you the how not to. I'm talking about the how not to, and part of it is allowing yourself to move into peripheral visual mode, wherever we don't hyper-focus or hard focus forward, but at

ourselves to be able to see things in our peripheries and sometimes a little exercise would be able to stick your arms out to your left and right behind your shoulders and wiggling your fingers while looking forward and not turn your eyes left and right or turn your head left and right and that allows you to know that your vision is relaxed enough therefore your nervous system is relaxed enough to be able to perceive generally versus hyperfocally where you're looking really hard like keeping your eyes on the ball when something's moving it's easier to do when it's not moving but being able to perceive without looking

at it, but still seeing it because it's in your vision without having to see the details. And that allows for a little more flexibility and a little more comfort in motion and reception of things being thrown at you. You will realize you're much faster by default because you start responding to the root emotion whenever it begins. The first third of the initiation emotion versus the last third. Once the ball is thrown and you catch it right in front of your face at the very last instant. And if you have good practice, chances are it'll happen.

But if you're able to intercept that early, it's always a very graceful move It seems almost like things slow down and you have like oodles of time to respond with them And that is a great feeling to have especially when someone's rushing a stick or a practice knife or a real knife for that matter or even a punch or a kick at you you realize that your body just moves out just enough but it your body is efficient it wants to just get out of the way and it does and it neutralizes the impact because well you're not quite where they expect you to be and then it gives you

opportunity to come back in kind and give them a gift and be Santa Claus and come come back with extra generosity of Smackdown if you want and I laugh because that's kind of a fun game to play but in all seriousness what I'd like to do today is just encourage you to to experiment a little bit with this default mode network recognize whenever it is that you're most being your ego self moving through your day to day that self-image and realize that it comes back then go

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where people say ego death is big old experience of it's gone, it never comes back. There's definitely dissolution if you're doing it by drugs, that's something totally different. But if you practice meditation, there's a sense of quiet that occurs whenever there is no sense of I got to find my boundary. That's where I end and it starts, but rather just immersing yourself in the fact that we are here we're now. And it's a very timeless quality and it's a lovely space to be.

So that's going to be it for today. That's all we're going to be covering. And I certainly enjoyed discussing the default mode network and flow states and know that there is definitely a physical sense to that feeling whenever you are there. So don't just pay attention to the thinking part of it, but rather the visceral experience of it. What does your heart rate feel like? What does your breathing feel like? What does your skin feel like?

What does it feel like versus I feel like whenever I am there and remember that and that becomes not only a resource, but a tool that you can use. And these are ways to learn how to regulate self self-regulate, not by dominance and in doing discipline from the outside, but rather becoming self-disciplined and very self skilled in those areas of managing how it is that I am when I am.

where I'm at doing what it is that I'm doing. So that was a whole lot of fun speaking, but if you have any feedback for me, please send it to the Gmail at running man, get skills project at Gmail. I'd love to hear from you. And those of you that are listening to me all over the world. Thank you. Please share this podcast. I'd love to hear from people that you have shared it with them because you know, it helps them and it'll be a good thing for them and their friends as well. And.

have a presence on YouTube like follow and share there if you can and spread the wealth please God love to see that channel grow I am moving towards the interview format here soon and I will let you know when we do that some of that will be video and we'll still be doing the audio podcast as well and thank you for being here with me today for 2125 the day after Easter the Easter Bunny came and went and we'll see him next year I guess but I hope I see you all soon within the next

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week or two and thank you again for your time. Take care. Walk well.