The Secret Ingredients to Amplify Your Creativity
What if shelter at home were conducive to creativity? If it were the right time to write that book, or imagine exciting stories to tell your children, or invent a new product or business, or launch that project that’s been on the back burner? Here are a few hacks to amplify your creativity.
Even before the notion of shelter at home existed—before having to take charge of everything at once—work, homeschooling the kids, cooking every meal, cleaning up, and all those new contacts with family, friends, colleagues—83% of people surveyed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said they didn’t have any time set aside in the day for relaxation and just thinking. Matthew Edlund, M.D., author of The Power of Rest: Why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough, explains that people think of themselves as machines. “They over schedule, overwork, and overdo.”
What can we do to be more creative?
Being stuck at home could be a good time to pull oneself together and change category, setting up good habits to be a little more human and boost your creativity while you are at it.
Time Alone
Take out your calendar. Look closely. Have you scheduled breaks? Or are all your time slots filled up, as if you were a machine running 24/7? I’m not just talking about with work, but all your activities.
The first step consists of making time for oneself. Being alone is perfect for creativity, and if one is not, carving out moments of solitude will catalyze the imagination. Afterwards, it helps to work with others to shape the new ideas into something coherent and real.
Time for Non-thinking
In addition, the brain, which I remind you is part of the body, needs breaks, moments when it does not have to concentrate, when the mind can wander. In his book Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try, the neuroscientist Srini Pillay points out the lasting positive benefits of adding deliberate mind-wandering into your schedule on a regular basis. He demonstrates how specific kinds of planned non-thinking activities can stimulate a cognitive calm that kickstarts productivity, strengthens innovation, and inspires creativity.
Time to Forget
Highly creative people know the trick of giving the brain time to find the answers. One asks a question, and then does something to completely forget about the question (walk, play, sleep, or whatever) and at some point, the answer emerges. It’s not magic. It’s simply the unconscious mind doing some pattern recognition in the background.
Time cycles
Experts agree on the importance of giving the brain a break several times a day. There may not be a foolproof prescription, yet Stew Friedman, Ph.D., director of Wharton Work/Life Integration Project (University of Pennsylvania) and author of Leading the Life you Want, suggests taking a break every 90 minutes or whenever you begin to feel fatigue, loss of concentration, or can’t find an answer. Some sources say every 50 minutes works even better. Experiment and see.
Beware of distractions during those 50 to 90 minutes. It’s hard to create something of value when your attention is fragmented by distractions and interruptions, like several or even a single notification (text, email, Facebook, etc.). However, when the brain doesn’t have outside stimuli, it creates its own—that’s creativity.
Click here to find out more about fragmented attention and its negative impacts.
Time to Stop
To get the most out of those breaks, it helps to schedule both “distraction breaks” to manage your distractions, notification, emails, etc., and real breaks when stop means stop. Only during those moments, between working hard and being distracted hard can one find the space-time needed for the mind to revitalize and come up with fresh ideas. They are times of respite for the brain. Take advantage of them to tinker, explore something completely new, draw, move… without checking your email.
Start right away, for example, by letting your mind wander to integrate what you just read.😁
Hacking Creativity
Here are a few tips to prod your imagination
Get up in the morning. The science is clear. We do better work in the morning, and according to a study in the Journal of Neurophysiology, the creative mind is bursting with ideas early on in the day.
Wait to drink your coffee. What?!? Yep, your cortisol levels are the highest when you get up in the morning. If you drink coffee right away, the body, with its innate tendency toward laziness, hands over the responsibility of that morning boost to coffee, and will make less cortisol. If, on the other hand, you wait an hour before adding coffee, you benefit from both bursts of energy.
During the day, plan 7- to 20-minute breaks every 50 to 90 minutes. Take advantage of them to rest your eyes (by looking into the distance) and rest your mind.
Full out of ideas? No worries. Change your physical state. Do some physical activity, or go outside, because increasing your heart rate and boosting vitamin D will tickle your cognition. Or, try a cold shower.
Change your posture. Toss your shoulders back, hold the head up straight, your eyes wide open, a smile on your lips. This technique physically takes you out of any feelings of fear or ambiguity, which hamper creativity.