Jonny Bairstow played the “innings of a lifetime” when he scored the second fastest century by an England cricketer in a Test match to help his team beat New Zealand, currently the world’s top-rated Test team. To find an English cricketer who scored a Test century more quickly you have to go back to Gilbert Jessop in 1902.

Anyone who watched Bairstow bat could see that he was “in the zone”. But what does this mean? How do we know that someone is in the zone – or, more technically, experiencing “flow”? And how do they get there?

Within sport, athletes achieving top performances often report being “in the zone”. The feelings that they report involve a change in the perception of their senses. Tennis players report seeing the ball as “big as a beach ball”, long distance runners can complete a race with little perception of time passing. Athletes also report being free from distractions – in a state of extreme focus – and will often say how good they feel when performing in this state.

Hungarian-American psychologist Mihali Csíkszentmihályi was the first scientist to recognise, and name, flow. This is a mental state where someone becomes so immersed in the moment, so completely absorbed in a task, their senses so heightened and their perceptions so clear, that they reach a level of optimal performance.

In defining flow, he outlined nine dimensions: having clear goals, a balance between challenge and skill, a sense of control, total concentration on the task at hand, unambiguous feedback, a loss of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness, undergoing an intrinsically rewarding experience and experiencing a transformation of time.

Looking at Bairstow’s performance, we can see many of these dimensions at work. The England team was faced with a challenging situation and Bairstow had the skill level to perform in those conditions, was able to get feedback from every shot and found the performance rewarding.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/cricket-what-happens-when-an-elite-player-like-englands-jonny-bairstow-is-in-the-zone-185244