Help Your Brain Flow With Creativity
When growing a business and a brand, it’s important to allow yourself time for creativity and productivity. Indulging in this time and mental space is not just a way to reset and prevent burnout. It also keeps our best ideas flowing and coming through. But what happens when your brain just gets stuck? How do you move forward with fresh inspiration?
Why Am I Stuck?
First, it’s important to know why you’re stuck. Rest assured, we all get blocked at some point. The brain constantly strives for predictability and order to make sense of things, so it can—and does—get set in its ways.
Being stuck with a lack of creativity most likely just means that your brain’s neurons are wedged into the routine neural pathways that have been carved out by your typical behavior. This also can result in “tunnel vision,” which filters out anything that doesn’t fit in all nice and orderly; therefore, impeding creativity.
By default, the brain doesn’t want to invent new ways of thinking. When the mind encounters something new or different, it’s wired to review the established rules and try to apply them to the new information. It would be mental chaos otherwise, so it’s good to have the desire to seek patterns and organize information.
While this order-seeking default can stop creativity sometimes, it also can encourage innovation as long as you actively question your presumptions and strive to establish new patterns. Actively changing your behavior, expectations, or thought patterns can break the stalemate of your thoughts and get your creativity flowing.
Doing this is a strategy called “combinatory play.” It allows you to zoom out, see the bigger picture, and spot the real patterns beyond what you might expect them to be. For example, Albert Einstein famously played the violin when he got stuck on a tough problem, often speaking about the influence of music on the way he thought about mathematics and science. Just like Einstein, we’ve all experienced those flashes of insight and those fleeting moments when solutions suddenly reveal themselves in unexpected places at unexpected times.
To tap into this “combinatory play,” here are some great creativity-flow hacks that I incorporate into my day and use when I work with my clients!
1. Flex Your Brain
Switching it up for your brain is kind of like an athlete doing cross-training. Athletes don’t only do just their sport. They pursue other physical activities that increase their endurance and strengthen parts of the body that will help their performance in their main activity.
The same goes for your brain. Try a new activity in your field or one somehow related to it. Doing so will flex and open your neural connections and strengthen your brain overall, perhaps sparking that creative inspiration you need.
2. Do Something Mundane
For the creative mind, inspiration is everywhere. Sometimes the key is simply distracting yourself long enough to notice it. That can boost creativity.
To that end, do something boring that doesn’t require substantial cognitive effort (e.g., washing the dishes, doing laundry, taking a shower). This leaves the brain free to wander. When the brain is “at rest,” it isn’t really resting. It is able to engage in daydreaming or mind-wandering because it’s not deliberately focusing on a mental task. This allows the conscious mind to let in the subconscious, enabling the brain to connect seemingly unrelated ideas in a creative way.
3. Sleep On It
If you’re feeling stuck on a problem, try going to bed. You might just have a more creative solution in the morning. Unconscious processes fuel creative thinking, and sleep lets you step away from your consciousness for a while.
In addition to simply refreshing your brain with new energy, while you sleep, often your subconscious is working on the problem because it is able to integrate unassociated information, which is crucial to creative thinking. Just think how bizarre and surreal dreams can be. This is creativity at work.
4. Draw Inspiration From Others
Most new ideas are just a remix or reinterpretation of something that has already been put into the world. Seek inspiration from what others have done then work to improve upon it. This does not mean straight copying or plagiarizing but rather gathering the information that’s out there to inspire advancements and improvements.
For example, if you’re suffering from writer’s block, read some other books or articles. If you’re not sure how to proceed, bounce scenarios off other people; sometimes talking it out and getting other perspectives is just what you need. If you’re stuck on a design problem, seek out similar products by competitors and figure out what they’re missing or have failed to address.
All these brain tricks can lead you back into that creative flow you want to achieve. So, the next time you’re “stuck in a rut” creatively, embrace one or more of these “creativity hacks” and see where your brain takes you and your business.
Need additional help getting unstuck? Book a free consultation today and get the creativity flowing again!