Finding Flow, Not Friction

The Noise We Stop Noticing

“The greatest threat to our focus is not distraction but our tolerance for distraction.” — Unknown

You click, scroll, type, wait. Nothing responds the way it should. The form resets. The button does nothing. You go back, reload, guess again. Your body tightens.

We all know this feeling. It’s small, but the friction is real. We’re used to it by now. The internet is filled with small design failures, and somehow we treat that tension as normal. This is what it’s like to move through an experience that isn’t designed to understand you. 

Most of us never notice that we are constantly pushing through friction. Each day, every day, for our entire lives, we slog through it. The irony is that it isn’t just interfaces that do this. Our minds do too.

Thoughts pop up like pop-ups. They interrupt us and steal our focus and we’ve trained ourselves to keep clicking through without ever noticing how exhausting it is.

That Moment Everything Clicks

“When you have to stop and think about how to do something, you are not doing it naturally.” — Don Norman

And then, once in a while, you’re using an app or a website trying to get something done and everything just works. The page loads instantly. The path is clear. The system seems to know what you meant.

You exhale. You continue on with a sense of lighthearted, peaceful exploration. You’re at ease. You’re not thinking about how to use the interface, you’re just using it. You’ve felt for just a moment a flow. It’s when your movements and actions are in complete harmony within your environment; when you move through an experience effortlessly.

This type of flow is discussed in the interactive design world, but not exclusively. But no matter the venuw, all flow states are first entered from a normalized state of not flow.

If flow feels effortless, then the state we live most of our time in could be called friction.

The Invisible and The Still

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” — Ram Dass

In user experience (UX) design, the properties that make an interface easily understood are called affordances. When they line up with you so perfectly that the interface seems to disappear, that’s the shift from friction to flow.

In life, the same shift happens. It’s when awareness meets reality exactly as it is. No delay, no commentary. It’s when you accept what is in front of you completely, with no stories or added meaning. 

The difference between design and life’s transitions from friction to flow is that in design, those moments of clarity are rare, like little islands of delight in an internet of noise.

Because the mind’s constant chatter creates friction, the moments of no-thought become our natural flow states. 

Think of the moments that left you silent. It might have been a sudden rush of love, a breathtaking view, or a single, wordless awe.

Those kinds of moments when the thought machine (aka your mind) goes still, when the noise quiets… that is your natural flow state. That space is when you are fully present to the world, simply being.  

The Happening

​​“Simplicity is not the absence of clutter; it is the presence of clarity.” — Jony Ive

Designers talk about invisible interfaces, when interaction feels so natural that the system seems to vanish and you’re not aware of tapping, scrolling, or waiting anymore. You’re simply inside the experience. 

In just being, or in flow, the same thing happens with the mind. The interface that is your mind, and your interactivity with its thoughts, falls away with your sense of time, identity, and narrative.  

The story of “me” navigating “now” dissolves, and what’s left feels timeless. There’s still action, awareness, and perception, but no mental distance between you and what’s unfolding.

Both moments share that rare quality of total immediacy: no buffer, no lag, no thought about what’s happening. Just happening itself.

That state isn’t rare. It’s simply overlooked. It’s available anytime, waiting beneath attention itself through what Eckhart Tolle calls portals to presence.

Designing for Flow

“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.” — Don Norman

Recognizing what makes flow happen is, first and foremost, a benefit to being our most natural, human selves. 

For the designers reading this, it could follow, then, that the better we understand finding flow ourselves, the better we will understand flow in other humans, and the better we can design experiences that inspire flow for users. 

Available and Waiting

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our power and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl

So while transitions to flow in design are rare and occur by chance, In awareness, portals are always open. Here are a few to explore on your own. 

Connect with your inner body. This is the easiest for most people, as it takes only directing your focus inside your body. For example, close your eyes (always a good idea)  and send your awareness to your hand. Keep focusing on your hand and after a moment you’ll begin to feel the energy within it. It might feel like heat, a slight tickle, or a throbbing. Then try it with other body parts, and then your entire body all at once. 

Listen to silence. To do this, try to pay attention to the space between sounds, between someone’s words, or sounds around you. Listen to it as though it were more important than any sound.  This one is my personal favorite, as it seems impossible to have a noisy mind while listening to silence.

Stuck watching a page reload? Notice what else is reloading. Your mind, your patience, your pulse. That too can be a portal if you let it.

Flow is not separate from ordinary consciousness. It is what remains when noise fades. The mind’s chatter is another interface, busy and familiar but unnecessary. The more you look past it, the more you will see the portals everywhere, quietly waiting to be used.

So the next time you are caught in a spinning loader, remember that another kind of loading is always happening in the background. The mind keeps refreshing the story of you. Step out of it for a moment, as often as you can. 

When was the last time you noticed the difference between thinking and seeing?