How to Get in the Zone for Writing (and Stay There Past Paragraph One)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent years interviewing climbers, surgeons and writers about the hours when work stopped feeling like work. He called that state flow, and in his 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience he listed what those hours had in common. If you want to know how to get in the zone for writing, his list is the place to start.

How to get in the zone for writing, according to flow research

Three of his conditions do most of the work at a desk. You know what you are trying to do next. You can tell, line by line, whether it is working. And the task sits at the edge of your ability. It is hard enough to hold you, easy enough that you can move. Too easy and you drift to your phone. Too hard and you stare at the cursor.

Decide the next sentence before you stop

The blank page is hard because it has no clear goal. Hemingway's fix was to never leave himself a blank page. In his 1958 Paris Review interview he said he wrote "every morning as soon after first light as possible," and that "you write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop."

Stopping mid-scene means tomorrow's session opens with a job you already know how to do. For an essay, end each session by writing the first few words of the next paragraph, or a one-line note of the point it has to make.

Put the phone in another room

Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has timed how people move between screens since the early 2000s. In 2004 her team measured average attention on one screen at two and a half minutes. Her more recent measurements put it at 47 seconds. In a 2008 interview with Fast Company she said that once you are interrupted, "it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task."

A second line of research makes the cost worse. Sophie Leroy, writing in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2009, called it attention residue: when you switch away from an unfinished task, part of your attention stays with it, and you perform worse on whatever you switched to.

So the practical rules are blunt:

• Phone in a different room, or at least face down in a drawer.
• Email and messaging apps closed, with notifications off on the laptop.
• One document open. Research tabs go in a separate window you only open in a break.
• Send the reply you owe before the session starts.

How to get in the zone to write an essay

Essays add a deadline, and deadlines push people into editing the first sentence for forty minutes. Split the two jobs. Write the whole draft badly, then edit.

A timer gives the drafting a hard edge. Francesco Cirillo built the Pomodoro Technique in the late 1980s as a university student, using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer: 25 minutes of work, then a short break. For an essay, run a 25-minute sprint where the only rule is "keep typing." Rough words are far easier to fix than none.

If you can't even start, try a warm-up. Julia Cameron's morning pages, from The Artist's Way (1992), are three pages written longhand first thing in the morning, unfiltered, read by nobody. They get your hand moving and your inner critic bored before the essay begins.

Use the same start ritual every time

Haruki Murakami described his novel-writing routine to the Paris Review: up at four a.m., five to six hours of work, a 10 km run or a 1,500 m swim in the afternoon, bed at nine. Every day, without variation. "The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism," he said.

You don't need a 4 a.m. alarm to borrow the principle. A ritual is a cue. Do the same short thing at the start of every session and, after enough repetitions, the cue and the work become linked. Some writers make the same coffee or put on one album. The ritual should be quick and impossible to confuse with anything else in your day.

Ours is one spray of Dragon Breath. It is a mouth spray made from chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a root from Central Mexico. You spray once, and for a second it tastes earthy and a little peppery. Then, within about ten seconds, a bright electric buzz spreads across your tongue and mouth. Your mouth floods with saliva. When it settles into a clean, fresh feeling you're sitting at the desk, switched on and present, cursor blinking, ready to write.

It works the same way for the essay due at 9 a.m. or the chapter you've avoided since Tuesday. One spray, the buzz, then the first sentence.

The buzz comes from affinin (also called spilanthol), measured by HPLC at 6.9 to 8.5 mg per gram of chilcuague root. The plant grows in the Sierra Gorda of Guanajuato, Querétaro and San Luis Potosí, and Mexican ethnobotanists (Cilia-López and colleagues) record the root chewed and used as a spice. You can read more about the plant in our guide to chilcuague, the golden root of Central Mexico.

One customer, in a reaction video moments after one spray, said two words: "Definitely energized."

A spray makes sense as a desk ritual for practical reasons. The 50 ml bottle holds 250+ sprays and lives in your pocket or pen pot, one spray is all it takes to start, and the extract stays sealed in Miron violet glass, away from air and light. Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, some people go up to five.

How to get in the zone for work

The same conditions apply to a report, a proposal or a week of emails. Write the goal for the block on a sticky note. Close everything except the document. Set a 25-minute timer and draft before you polish. Keep the start cue identical, whether that's a spray, a song or the same mug. For the rest of the workday, read our notes on how to lock in when your head is all over the place.

Dragon Breath considerations

If you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it.

Questions people ask

What is a writing flow state?

It's the state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named flow: full concentration on the work, with time passing faster than you notice. In his research it showed up when people had a clear goal, quick feedback and a task matched to their skill.

How long should a writing sprint be?

The Pomodoro Technique uses 25 minutes followed by a short break, and it's a good default for drafting.

Why do I lose the zone so fast?

Interruptions are expensive. Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to an interrupted task, so one notification can cost most of a sprint.

What does Dragon Breath feel like?

Earthy and a little peppery for a second, then a bright electric buzz across the tongue and mouth within about ten seconds, and your mouth waters fast. It finishes with a clean, fresh feeling that lingers.