A Flow State of Mind: what yoga does to your brain

by Kate Oversby, neuroscientist, GLYS grad 2025

Why does yoga feel so good?

When I first began practising yoga asana, I expected nothing dramatic. Yet within weeks I was sleeping better and noticing a regular calmness that lingered for hours or days after class. I was genuinely surprised, and as a neuroscientist, I couldn’t ignore it: how could this simple format of movement and breath be reshaping my nervous system so profoundly?

Modern neuroscience offers a framework that begins to unlock how this happens. The Free Energy Principle (1,2) and its applied form, active inference, describe the brain not as a passive receiver but as a prediction-making organ (3), constantly anticipating the causes of its sensations and updating its model of reality to minimise the gap between expectation and experience. In this scheme, yoga becomes a living experiment in prediction and feedback: a dialogue between body and brain that fine-tunes how we perceive and regulate ourselves from moment to moment.

The Predictive Brain

The brain ensures we survive by constantly trying to minimise surprise. It predicts what the world and body should feel like and acts to make those predictions come true (1,4). When expectations are wrong, we can reduce the error in two ways: change our internal model (“my shoulder is tighter than I thought”) or change the world (adjust the pose). Most actions are a blend of both.

This constant negotiation happens across a boundary separating us from the world, a Markov blanket, the statistical interface between “me” and “not-me.” (5,6) Each cell, organ, and system maintains its own boundary nested within the larger body (7), mirroring the yogic concept of the koshas, or sheaths of being. Both perspectives describe living systems that sustain themselves by balancing separation and connection to the world (5).

How Movement Trains the Mind

Movement, too, begins as prediction (8–11). The brain forecasts the sensory consequences of a posture; the stretch of muscle, the change in balance, and compares them with feedback from proprioceptors (12). When the match is good, movement feels effortless; when it isn’t, the brain adjusts.

Over time, regular practise refines this loop until prediction and sensation align almost perfectly. The same mechanism governs interoception (13–15), the sensing of breath, heartbeat, and visceral tone. Slow rhythmic breathing provides predictable internal signals, reducing uncertainty across multiple systems. The result is a calm, coherent body whose internal and external states are in harmony. Asana, seen this way, is not about strength and flexibility but about calibrating perception: the body teaching the brain what is true.

Asana as a moving meditation: the psychology of flow

Psychologist M.Csíkszentmihályi called this state of high synchrony “flow”, where action and awareness merge, self-consciousness fades, and time distorts (16,17). Flow arises when skill and challenge are balanced so that attention is fully absorbed yet unstrained (18–21).

From a predictive-coding lens, flow represents a brain running with focused attention and consistently low error (22). Normally, errors are corrected by updating beliefs or acting on the world; in flow, sustained periods of minimal error triggers high confidence in our predictions (20). Known as precision weighting (3,23,24), this high confidence allows higher-level cognitive systems to quieten while sensorimotor layers handle rapid corrections locally (7,12,22,25). The body seems to move by itself because, neurologically, it almost does.

As self-referential, higher cognitive processing reduces, the sense of “me doing this” dissolves (22). Awareness relocates into movement itself, echoing yogic ideas such as asmita ksaya (the fading of self-identification) and advaita bhava (non-duality). With fewer self-referential thoughts our brain can no longer plan into the future or think about the past leading to a sense of being in the immediate present (22,26). What practitioners describe as stillness of mind arises not through effort but as the natural outcome of a well-tuned predictive system.

Flow states engage the brain’s reward systems. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter of prediction and learning, is released not when outcomes are certain but when small surprises are successfully resolved. (27,28) In flow, this happens continuously: micro-errors appear, are corrected, and each success produces a gentle pulse of reward. The result is not a euphoric high but a steady current of pleasure and focus, the blissful and calm clarity many practitioners describe (29).

Physiologically, sustained periods of well-regulated prediction error promote autonomic balance, lowering sympathetic drive while maintaining alertness (15,30). Breathing slows, stress hormones drop, and the nervous system learns what calm competence feels like. Over time, these experiences recalibrate our sense of “normal,” making it easier to return there off the mat. Flow can therefore be considered a restorative practice, teaching the brain that stability and ease are viable defaults.

Teaching for flow

While flow arises within each practitioner, good teaching can facilitate access. Anything that reduces uncertainty helps. Rhythmic cues such as breath counts (31) or music (32–34) entrain neural timing; clear and well-paced instruction free the practitioner from the need to plan, allowing attention to stay in the present rather than thinking about what comes next. The balance between challenge and skill is crucial (22): too easy and attention drifts, too hard and uncertainty returns. This is one reason why teachers should provide options for different levels of skill or experience. When environment (35,36), rhythm, and instruction are coherent and familiar, the brain trusts its predictions, and the body slips naturally into flow.

Flow vs. Meditation

Superficially, flow shares features typical of meditative states, both dissolve self-consciousness, quiet inner speech and distort the experience of time, but under the hood they differ profoundly. In flow, precision weighting on prediction is set high: the brain has high trust its model, predicting and correcting rapidly changing goals at high speed. Flow gratifies the predictive mind.

Conversely, meditative states are typically realised through focused attention practices, where the practitioner focuses on simple sensations (such as breathing) during extended periods of non-action (sitting still). This type of activity minimises sensory surprise and the need for prediction and error correction. Maintenance of focused attention without reliance on a strong predict-compare-correct loop is very difficult for the human brain (37); it enforces low importance to prediction errors throughout the Markov hierarchy. For a brain built to predict, this is a radical act, one reason stillness can feel so difficult (38,39).

In other words, flow silences the self through confidence; meditation silences it through suspension of the self. Flow gratifies the predictive mind; meditation teaches it to let go. Both are ways of coming into harmony with uncertainty. The art, perhaps, is knowing when to move with the rhythm of prediction and when to resist it in stillness.

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