My Kind Of Creativity Boost

It seems that we’ve been doing it forever, but every so often we need to be reminded. Getting into The Zone, The Flow, to solve our problems. This latest piece of neuroscience advice is something I’ve known (and practiced – just seemingly a long time ago now) since childhood. It’s also pretty self-evident to most creative types.

Basically, the advice is to capture those “just shower thoughts.” Find opportunities to let your mind freewheel. If you’re like me and have a shorter memory span than 27 gnats, find a way to capture those brainfarts. It’s when you’re “tuned out” that your brain can expend the effort needed to forge a solution to whatever your life or your current project is missing.

When your brain is “resting” – it isn’t. That’s the long and short of it. That wise old monk on the highest hill meditating was right – meditation and mind blanking makes your brain work harder and answers come easier. For that monk, his problem was the nature of self and world and god, for me that would be the next article storyline, or some new product to make from recycled plastic. For you – think about something you currently feel blocked about – whatever.

So the article mentions “REST: random episodic silent thinking” or “mind wandering” – it’s basically like meditation but instead of insisting on mind blank you’re free to just let it flow along. Notice I’m talking about the mind as if it had a mind of its own . . .

And (again, a long time ago) I was better equipped to deal with my neurospicy brain and I could get it to do two things I needed to do. I could quiet it for up to thirty minutes at a stretch, or I could get into totally absorbing detail about some pleasant problem I had to solve or wanted to do.

I’d often be unable to get to sleep at nights. Now I know why, but back in my late teens it was the start of 5 hour nights that stayed with me for the rest of my life. Why I mentioned this is because I recently listened to a podcast about sleep and insomnia, and was struck by how much the INC. Aus. article I mentioned above mirrored the podcast. I should really sleep on this (hehehe see what I did there? If not, you soon will…) but I’m going to try and make this a piece of advice people can use for all sorts of situations.

Sleep, Meditation, Inspiration, And You

I’ve always been struck by how connected were the functions like sleep, thinking, inspiration, the subconscious, and dreams. For me, after a weird adolescent sleep disturbance syndrome that tried to kill me every few nights for four years, sleep was something I craved more than anything – and was able to attain only sporadically because I was terrified to go to sleep. It was the start of the five hours’ sleep a night sleep issue that I still have, but of course I’m also in my latter sixties now and as we age, our sleep becomes shorter.

But after the SRSRA abruptly ended (and that is how I knew what it was, it stops around age 23-25) I was left with a trauma I couldn’t get over. I’d go to bed and lay awake, just waiting for it to happen again. Finally by 2AM or so I’d pass out, wake by 6-7AM, and go to work in what was then a high(ish) pressure semi-professional job. Do it all again. The trauma eventually abated to a faint apprehension, but my sleep time remained short because by then I’d basically subsisted on that five hours’ average and my body didn’t want to change.

I found that the best way to silence all the random mind noise was to think about something I was interested in, and for me it was generally a project I was making, whether private or for work. I’d get all absorbed in the detail and – wake up five hours later.

I hear/d it mentioned in that podcast as “cognitive refocusing,” basically distracting your mind from the noise just as I’d learned to.

The other way to get me to sleep was to put on my favourite radio station and make to loud enough to be intrusive to me, to take over my focus and leave no room for the noise. I also had a third way – I’d grab the latest sci-fi monthly anthology and read my way from the front cover to the point where I fell asleep.

Eventually I managed to do that when was working, too. Focus into what I was doing, and things would progress at a pace. Get distracted and lose that focus and I could spend an hour fussing with getting all the screws and bolts lined up straight. That also worked for writing and jewelry-making, pretty much anything.

I’ve since heard creatives refer to it as being in a flow state, our programmers referred to “being in The Zone” and it seems to me these were all the same state of mind. In that first article I linked to the story, I understand they’re saying to let yourself get into that flow state or use those times when it naturally happens, and make sure you have some way to record what you come up with because those thoughts are often ephemeral.

And the other side of the coin is to get quality sleep. There are almost as many sleep-induction techniques as there are diets. I only touched on what worked for me, and can tell you a few that didn’t.

Drinking coffee several hours before bedtime? I’ve literally fallen asleep with my second or sometimes third cup of coffee. These days I only have two cups and stop naturally a few hours before I go to bed, but I’ve found it makes no difference to me, even when I cut out caffeine altogether.

Don’t listen to loud music? As I said, putting on good music that was loud enough to hold my attention helped me fall asleep so many times that even now we have music on at night, or else I have an earpiece in. (Podcasts work for this as well – I pick one from hy history list that I remember enjoying, put it on – and drift to sleep.

Don’t watch exciting video before? Doesn’t matter to me, I fell asleep towards the end of several great action movies and had to re-watch the last 20-30 minutes or whatever. I’ve also fallen asleep in the middle of less-action movies, documentaries – my brain seems to treat them just like music, as a way to tune into just one thing.

Exercise? Seems to me that when I do gardening or work on a project or go for a walk to make myself tired – it makes little difference compared to days when I just wash the dishes. And “blue light from screens” has also been debunked by later studies that found no correlation. I don’t know how many times my e-book reader fell on myself or my wife and woke us. We both read socials on our phones before we turn in.

Here’s one that I kind of was aware of but never thought about – processed foods – and now that I think of it, it makes sense. If I eat too many potato or corn chips before bedtime I get slightly fidgety and often it gives me bloating and/or acid – if I eat roast, boiled, or mashed potatoes instead my body’s quite happy with that.

I never really thought about it, but it makes sense. Some of those “E” additives give kids the zoomies and are actually bad for their development. (I can’t remember which ones, but 75% of additives come with some warnings or are banned in many countries,)

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PLEASE DON’T let my experiences influence your own experiments with getting the sleep habits right. What doesn’t work for me may be just the ticket for you, and you might find intrusive music to be distressing where it was a sedative for me.

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The thing is that these things are all interlocking, and every step you make to get them right for you makes the next step easier.

Rulz

Find a way to meditate – not in the classical sense (unless that works for you) but just in that “let me think about that cute kitten video for a bit” way, or with music you can let the drift state overtake you – whatever it takes. Whatever way you find, it’ll most probably also help you get to sleep on nights when you’d otherwise be wide awake and craving sleep. Use the pre-sleep time to Zone if you like,kill two birds with one stone.

Also, I said I could in necessary blank my mind, and it’s apparently not hard for some people but for me the struggle was always real. I’d need either total quite or soft music, and those airline sleep eye-covers. Then I could close my eyes and watch the coloured “stuff” of various shapes slowly fade to black, and when it was a black field, I’d do the mental equivalent of rolling my eyes back and suddenly see “ultra” black.

I had several friends tell me things like “think of a candle alight in front of you and then moving away from you until it’s out of sight” and similar, but these didn’t work for me. However, as difficult as it was for me to get to that ultrablack state, I found that if I did it while tired I’d pass over into sleep in mere minutes.

Do whatever works for you. Search for “sleep hygiene” and “sleep initiation” for yourself – I’ve probably only listed a small subset of sleep initiation techniques and your perfect one my be out there…

Sleep monitors?

I don’t know about alpha and theta waves – I mean, I’ve read about them and so have an idea. But I’ve never had electrodes on and seen them on the screen and been able to think “so THAT’S what delta feels like.” I’ve never seen another person experience the different stages, seen the waveforms, and been able to ask them questions. If I had, odds are I’d be some kind of cognitive neuroscience type person with qualifications.

I’ve had two sleep studies done for apnea but you can also get the whole shebang done with an EEG brainwave monitor. I’d love to do that someday but only for interest.

There’s one more thing – cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that puts your body on alert. That’s not good for sleep or flow states. I had a psychologist friend who claimed that the Internet actually HAS increased stress levels in people, but he indicated that it was a cumulative thing so no – doomscrolling before bed may contribute a tiny bit to insomnia, but daily hearing about grave news that you wouldn’t have necessarily ever known about fifty years before the Internet does have a cumulative effect on stress levels.

Cortisol levels also increase when the amount and quality of sleep decrease, higher cortisol levels make it difficult to get into the flow state, which probably leads to less success with the sleep initiation methods which leads to less and worse sleep which raises cortisol levels…

Capturing BrainWave Ideas

I found a little voice notetaker at the opp shop, kept it in my pocket with me. It was a lucky find, but luckily a modern new voice notetaker is about half the size, twice the sound clarity and costs less than twenty bucks delivered.

I also found one of those “LCD notepads” from the same opp shop, they let you draw / write on them and you get some dark greenish lines that you can erase by pressing a button. I can make a fair go of writing in the dark, so this was perfect for not waking my wife if I had a brainwave at 3AM.

I also have Google Docs on my phone and a voice recorder app but they are fine by day – if I can get to the phone and legitimately use it – and I also keep a paper notepad and some pens and pencils near me.

So there are a few pointers for being more creative, more productive, more rested. I hope some of them are helpful, or put you on the right track. If you’d like to thank me, help me pay the online bills for this by scrolling allll the way down and using one of the links to make a donation. Also please Like and Share this post with your socials.