A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Flow States and Performance
Authors: David J. Harris, Kate L. Allen, Samuel J. Vine, Mark R. Wilson
DOI / Source: https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2021.1929402
Date: 27 May 2021
Reading level: Intermediate
Why This Matters for Freedivers
Freedivers talk about “getting in the zone” all the time—calm mind, sharp focus, everything feels easy. This paper shows that flow is reliably linked with better performance across sport and gaming, but also reminds us that flow isn’t magic and doesn’t explain everything. That’s useful because it nudges you toward practical training: build the conditions for flow (clear goals, feedback, challenge matched to skill), but don’t depend on it for safety-critical decisions.
Synopsis
“Flow” is that rare feeling where you’re completely absorbed in what you’re doing: your attention is locked in, self-doubt goes quiet, time feels weird, and performance can feel almost automatic. In sport, people often assume flow causes peak performance—but the research has been messy, scattered across different sports, different flow questionnaires, and different ways of measuring performance.
This paper pulls the whole field together using a systematic review (collecting all relevant studies in a structured way) and a meta-analysis (combining results statistically). The authors searched multiple databases, applied strict inclusion rules (only peer-reviewed studies, only objective performance outcomes—not just “how well I think I did”), and ended up with 20 articles (22 studies) covering a wide range of sports and computer games.
The main result is simple and important: across all these tasks, there’s a moderate positive relationship between flow and performance. In other words, when people report higher flow, they tend to perform better—on average. But “moderate” also means flow explains only part of performance. Lots of other factors still matter: skill level, physical capacity, tactics, fatigue, environment, luck, and so on.
Where it gets really interesting is what the paper can’t prove yet. Most studies measure flow after the performance, which makes causality hard. Did flow cause the good performance, or did doing well make people remember the experience as more flow-like? The authors point out that even immediate post-event ratings can be biased by the outcome (when you win, you often feel like everything was smooth and focused). They also note another possible confusion: more skilled performers might both perform better and be more likely to experience flow, which could inflate the relationship unless studies control for baseline ability.
The paper also reviews proposed “how it might work” mechanisms—like better attentional control, more automatic movement execution, less self-focus, and the motivating effect of enjoying the activity. But it finds that direct evidence for these mechanisms is still limited because few studies properly test mediation (i.e., showing that flow improves attention, and attention then improves performance).
Bottom line: flow and performance are connected in a real, measurable way—but the field still needs better study designs to show what causes what, and what the true “active ingredients” of flow are.
Abstract
Flow is an optimal experience that has received particular interest within sport because of a possible relationship with enhanced athletic performances. Yet, the strength and direction of the putative flow–performance relationship remain unclear. Consequently, a PRISMA guided systematic review was conducted in May 2020 to examine the empirical evidence for a flow–performance relationship, to examine potential mechanisms, and to assess the quality of current evidence. Peer-reviewed articles that examined the relationship between flow and performance in sport or computer gaming tasks were searched for using five online databases. The results were collated into a narrative synthesis and a meta-analysis. Twenty articles met the inclusion criteria, featuring 22 studies that were appropriate for meta-analysis. The overall quality of the studies was fairly good, with a mean quality assessment score of 76.5%. The pooled effect size indicated that across a range of sport and gaming tasks there was a medium-sized flow–performance relationship. However, current evidence is unable to determine the causal direction of this relationship or the mechanisms that mediate it. A number of conceptual and methodological challenges facing the study of flow are discussed and recommendations for future work are outlined.