Some activities don’t just pass the time — they dissolve it. Here’s where I lose myself completely: on the road, in my breath, and in the work I’ve built.
What Activities Do You Lose Yourself In?
There are moments in life when the clock stops mattering. When the mind stops narrating, and you simply… are. I’ve been chasing those moments my whole life — on roads, on the mat, and inside the silence of my own breath.
Someone asked me recently: “What do you do to disconnect?” I told them honestly — I don’t disconnect. I go so deep into certain things that there’s nothing left to disconnect from. The noise of the world just falls away on its own.
Psychologists call this a flow state — that zone of complete absorption where self-consciousness disappears and time bends. Athletes call it being “in the zone.” Yogis have described it for thousands of years as dharana — total concentration that becomes meditation without effort.
I experience it in more than one place. Here’s where I find it.
01 — Running: When the Miles Count Themselves
The first 3 kilometres of any long run are a negotiation. My legs complain, my mind lists everything I should be doing instead, and the road feels like a chore. Then something shifts — usually around kilometre 5 or 6 — and the negotiations end.
I’ve run through Coimbatore’s early mornings when the air is still cool and the streets belong to the serious people — the vendors, the factory workers, the other runners. There’s a certain silence at 5:30am that doesn’t exist anywhere else in a city of 2 million. And in that silence, with my cadence settling into its rhythm and my breath finding its pattern, I disappear.
I don’t listen to music on long runs. The breath is the music. The footfall is the beat. The road is the only story worth following.
I’ll look up and realize I’ve covered 14 kilometres without a single conscious thought. No planning, no worrying, no doing. Just movement. That quality of absence — that’s the thing I keep running for, far more than any finish-line medal.
02 — Breath & Yoga: Dissolving Inward
If running is losing yourself outward — into space and distance — Pranayama is losing yourself inward. Completely differently, but just as completely.
There’s something about the vibration, the nasal resonance, the way sound moves through the skull that creates an almost immediate withdrawal from external awareness. Scientists talk about vagal nerve stimulation. Yogis talk about pratyahara — the drawing inward of the senses. Both are describing the same disappearing act.
In the space between the inhale and exhale, time genuinely stops. Not metaphorically. There is simply no sense of duration. You exist without the usual coordinates.
The breath is the only thing you can do consciously that also runs automatically. Which means it’s the only door between what you control and what you are.
Surya Namaskar adds another dimension to this. I didn’t understand it for a long time — it felt mechanical, count to 12, repeat. But after enough repetitions, something changes. The sequence stops being steps you perform and becomes something that performs itself through you. When the body knows the form well enough, the mind finally lets go of supervising. And in that space — somewhere between the third and eighth round — it’s pure movement. No Hussain. Just breath and shape and gravity and earth.
03 — Business: When a Problem Pulls You In
Not every day at work gives me flow. The routine calls, the paperwork, the logistics — that’s work. But there are moments — solving a tricky sourcing problem for a client, building a pitch for a new product line, working out a negotiation strategy — when time collapses the same way.
When a client has a very specific requirement and I’m mapping which supplier can actually deliver — dimensions, lead time, price, reliability — there’s a puzzle-solving absorption that takes over. The variables stack up, the options narrow, and suddenly an hour has passed and I haven’t looked at my phone once. That kind of focus doesn’t feel like effort. It feels like the problem is pulling me forward.
The same happens when I’m building something new — a product launch, a distribution pitch, a content strategy for the brand. When the right idea arrives, it doesn’t let go. You follow it. Everything else waits.
The thread connecting all three — the long run, the breath, the business problem — is not skill level. It’s not even enjoyment, exactly. It’s the quality of attention the activity demands. Each one requires enough of you that there’s nothing left over to be anxious or scattered.
Don’t ask what you enjoy. Ask: what demands enough of you that you forget to be anywhere else?
That’s where you lose yourself. And paradoxically — that’s where you find yourself, too.
I used to think rest meant stopping. Now I know that the deepest rest comes from absorption — from being so fully present in something that the restless commentary of the mind finally goes quiet. That’s not escape. That’s arrival.
