Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream

As it’s the weekend, I thought it would be a good time to talk about creativity. Hopefully you’ve been able to stay in bed a while longer this morning. Hopefully your mind is not crammed with to-do lists. Hopefully you don’t have any major commitments or obligations to fulfil.

If that’s the case, then put down your iPhone, iPad or MacBook. Leave Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr alone, just for a while. And most definitely switch off the TV – sucking on the glass teat, as Stephen King would say, is the death of creativity. 

Now, allow yourself to de-focus and become aware of your peripheral vision. Gaze at the bedroom ceiling, or out of the window. Have a long, long bath or shower. Let your mind meander. Drift into a daydream. 

Without putting any pressure on yourself to have a “lightbulb moment”, just be with whatever arises in the now. As time passes, you become less aware of time. And then, the wisp of a creative insight might arise. 

Make sure you have a pen and paper by your side, because you’ll need to write this down. There’s no way your regular, messed-up thinking mind is going to remember the creative stuff.

What you’re getting is a communication from beyond your ego – that part of yourself that you might call your inner wisdom, or true self. It doesn’t shout, like some of your thoughts do. In fact, it whispers – so you need a quiet mind to hear it. 

Once you have allowed the voice of your inner wisdom to speak, and you have honoured it by writing down what it has to say, you can break your reverie. Then and only then can you take action to produce something unique from your insights.

The science kind of backs this up. In a study published last year in the journal Thinking and Reasoning, researchers found that imaginative insights are most likely to come to us while we’re groggy and unfocused. The mental processes that inhibit distracting or irrelevant thoughts are at their weakest in these moments, allowing unexpected and sometimes inspiring connections to be made. 

Also, if you’re a morning person, the best time for you to be creative is in the evening. And if you’re an evening person, your creative peak is when you’re stumbling around in a fog of sleepiness.

So get into a creative rhythm. Treasure your bleary-eyed moments. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream – you may find much more than flotsam and jetsam there.