Psychologists have written a great deal about how to be more creative. Some of the work suggests that it is best to take a break from the problem, sleep on it, or have a shower. I have always found that good ideas come to me after I have worked on a problem and then started working on something else. However, the ‘working on the problem’ bit does require real work. My favourite thing is to walk along this earthwork and talk about the issue….
The walking takes a minimum of an hour, and has been known to go on for three hours. Just walking around and looking at the issue from as many different perspectives as possible.
When do you have your good ideas and what do you find encourages your creative juices?
I only seem to have good ideas or spot solutions when I’m nowhere near a means of writing them down – bath, dancefloor, field with 12 dogs, driving onthe motorway. iPhone is a great help!
When i think about a problems for long say 2 to 3 hours, then take a break. after that when i go to shower on that day or next day i come up with the solution or the idea of that particular problem.
Late at night
usually after something mind altering has been either smoked or swallowed
in the bathroom with a pencil
How do you smoke something with a pencil?
If it comes to that, how do you swallow something with a pencil?
That doesn’t count. Getting wasted enough to think you have a good idea is not the same as having a good idea.
Now I know how things get written on bath room walls…….lol….
I have always found not trying to force ideas, that by allowing myself to get distracted for short time periods really helps as you figure things out, when you are not ‘trying’ to.
please do not laugh at me … i often get my best ideas on the toilet seat … maybe coz it is the ultimate cleansing process for the body and eases the mind like nothing else.
yes i do spend a lot of time sitting idle on the ‘pot seat’ LOL
For me it’s nearly always an early morning thing; walking with my dog pondering Nature or simply sitting and thinking about other things; an internal conversation . . . I think that finding a path through other issues often helps me to find the way through the one I’m stuck on . . .
During or just after a shower is the most fertile time for me. The next-most-fertile is in the time right before I fall to sleep, which means that I end up gettng up and having to write everything about the idea down so I don’t forget it, and then that leads to an explosion of more ideas around it and then I end up not going to bed for another 4 hours and it won’t be a restful sleep because my mind will still be churning away on the idea.
Walking around with a writer friend, hashing out plot points.
In the shower.
In the middle of the night.
In the shower in the middle of the night.
When I was still living in California, My sister and I swore by Disneyland as a problem-solving tool. We came up with SO MANY solutions to things whilst queued up for rides and walking around.
Usually I’m working on a problem with a couple of people. When we’re stuck or just whenever I need to, I go to the bathroom. Just taking a pee seems to refresh my brain and new ideas keep on popping up
I’ve also trained myself to write down ideas as soon as they pop up, because that just seems to happen in the weirdest places and the weirdest moments. Usually when I’m nowhere near the problem that the idea is related to: in the pub, at dinner, when putting my daughter to bed, etc.
As a musician my ideas often come when I am very busy. I find the best way to stimulate ideas when they are sparse is to inspire my artistic side with a different media,say an art gallery or a play or a novel or even a science documentary.
Using my inner ear is far more productive than hands on a piano. I sing thematic material into my iPad sometimes. When I was young I wrote an entire string quartet in my head working as a saturday trolley boy at Tescos. I replayed and replayed it through until I had fixed a memory of it and then wrote it down.
I find most of my ideas and creativity comes in the early hours of the morning when I’m dosing up on caffeine! I also find as soon as I wake up I will have an idea…it’s when I am almost half asleep so I will forget the ideas sometimes if I don’t become more conscious. The shower is also a place I like to think and after a hard day at work I can access my day in a hot bath. These are all times when it’s innapropriate to be thinking as I should be sleeping or I am unable to write the idea down or I am gonna have trouble remembering it!
I find my best ideas come when I say things out loud…if I’ve been reading something, or pondering on a point, I often find verbalising it brings a whole flurry of new ideas. This is particularly true if someone will listen to my ramblings and help me reflect on them!
I always do my best thinking in the bath or steam room.
I’m usually in for an hour and a half and there’s a ‘sweet spot’ in the second half hour where everything becomes clear and falls into place.
Anywhere else, I’m too easily distracted.
I do have to admit that when I had just one dog I used to do a lot of thinking then. Now that I’ve got two then no chance. Too busy trying to srop them getting into mischief.
This explains why exams are an extremely limited form of assessment. They cannot assess creativity, just recall. Earlier this year I bombed on a question for one of my MBA exams. two days later, wide awake at 5am and the whole answer was mapped out perfectly in my head. I proved to myself I’m not stupid: However I’m not sure my course tutor would agree!
When my mind wanders either from boredom concerning the present task, or during a time of leisure.
If I’ve got a problem I’ve been working on, the solution often magically appears just as I’m falling asleep.
I find engaging in some physical but mindless activity helps me focus on developing ideas. Long walks or bike rides, my job, etc. Anything that I can do without actually thinking about it. Also, non-lyrical music helps. If it has lyrics I end up singing along, but I have several electronica, jazz and classical albums I’ll listen to when I’m either studying or working on ideas. I find it helps to focus my creativity when I distract other parts of my brain.
Meditation always inspires me with visions and my reasoning becomes intuitive reasonong as opposed to rational reasoning!
Take a moments silence, set your intention and enter into a beautiful scenery in your mind (Mountain lakes or Sea and beach). Watch what appears in your visions!
What did the vision represent to you? Work it out!
Bring your best self to light! Lindy
Wow, tough question. Just thinking about it makes me think I’ve never had any good ideas in my life! Maybe the answer’s ‘when I’m talking things over with friends’.
While having a shower!
Definately while being allowed to “just talk”. My sound board used to be my ex-husband and I swear I had some of my best ideas then. My current husband tends to try to problem-solve any negatives that I find which pins me down too much.
Also, while “fiddling”. Be that sewing or making jewelry or whatever. My brain needs to be alert but there has to be space. I tried playing Kingdoms of Camelot on Facebook to achieve this but I go into a kind of torpor doing that, which has the opposite effect. X
Oh, and I cannot be creative with anything other than meal-planning around my three children. They simply occupy too much of my brain capacity ~ but I think that’s a bio/chemical thing. For many of those whose best thinking happens at night; I wonder if you have children too?
I also find it unhelpful to have my own paintings hung in a space in which I am trying to get creative. I find it a total block; as if I am somehow ONLY the sum of my previous work.
Don’t know if that is helpful or not *worries*
When I’m dozing off in bed just before I fall asleep.
Also, after solving a sudoku or drawing maps of medieval cities in my notebook.
Most reliably when brushing my teeth after having worked on a problem. Sometimes when I’m about to fall asleep.
It depends what you have to be creative ON.
If you’re writing a novel, your creativity is going to require a different result than if you’re trying to develop software or wondering how best to repair a broken item.
In all cases though, anything that allows me a fresh view at the problem is helpful. In my personal experience I find it works best to be looking at or working on something completely unrelated to the problem I’ve trying to solve, because somehow I subconsciously still make a link to the problem I’ve been working on all this time anyway (if there is a link).
Being a very visual person, I also find it helps me to draw things down, and then even an accidental squiggle in the line or a drawing mistake can spark something.
I find that talking to someone about it usually get me going. But it’s actually when I listen to myself that I find new way to think about something.
Provided I’m trying to write a serious paper, or really, a serious anything, I’ll go off on a tangent, saying the craziest things imaginable. Then, I delete the crazy and go back and finish the paper. It often ends writer’s block for me on serious things.
Here’s an example of what might happen.
The problem of capital punishment is in the fact that it may indeed harm innocent people in the most irreversible way possible. This leads to tragic effects, such as crying babies. It really hurts their feelings. THINK OF THE BABIES. And the mongooses. Mongooses have feelings too, you know. And while we’re on it, you know, instead of punishing people by killing them, why not make them change dirty diapers? I mean, that’s like a punishment worse than death.
Sleep is crucial. And letting your mind wander appropriately. I really like to work on a problem until I get really frustrated, then either go to sleep or take a walk or talk to my wife. I find that reading and writing or working on other things, while probably good for overall creativity, are too involving to let my mind work out a specific problem, so sleep and exercise are best. Also, poop. Sometimes when a problem is really frustrating me I go poop and when I get back the problem seems easier.
Usually when running or cycling, when (of course) I can’t write them down. Recently got a digital voice recorder for this reason; however upon listening back I can usually only hear a lot of panting and gasping
Love all these different answers! For me best ideas…come on nights I have worked on my business creatively and then lay down in bed – I find myself getting up multiple times to write them down!
In my journal!
I also know that when I am taking good care of myself and step away from work to do something fun…I come back refreshed and loaded with new ideas!
Whenever i have a really big (technical) Problem to solve, then i ask a colleauge. And then, when i spell out my question loud (!), in the same time i find the solution. So often this was happened, and my colleauge ask me why im calling him when i am knowing the answer already…
Sometime i cant relax or go to sleep, until ive solved at least a part of the problem.
drawing, You will always see me with a pencil in my hand
Recently I woke up from deep sleep with a cryptic crossword solution. So sleep works for me (so long as I don’t think too much before Iget off to sleep)
Always when I’m dropping off to sleep, especialy with riddles. It seems my mind spots more patterns or is more capeable of thinking outside the box then
“When do you have your good ideas and what do you find encourages your creative juices? ”
Inspiration strikes no matter when I might be thinking. Whether I’m in my study or dozing off in bed or out taking a walk it really makes no difference. Without question the best time to be creative is whenever I’m not frustrated about being creative. If a lack of creativity in the study is frustrating me and I decide I must take a walk because that’s how ideas have come to me in the past, then I haven’t really left my study. More often than not all that walk will yield is uninspired thinking and even more frustration. If instead I had picked up a novel and let it draw me into its world for awhile the frustration is soon forgotten. When I’m ready to go back to work the wall of tension will be gone and I can access my creativity. In a nutshell – creative people need distractions.
What encourages my creativity? The seed of a great idea that I know has the potential to inspire, amuse, enlighten, entertertain or groom any sane person who doesn’t care a whit about cultivating my self-esteem.
That and the thought of world domination.
My process is very alike Richard’s one. My best ideas come from walking, usually around a park near my house. My (rarely used) blog for instance, is called, roughly translating it, “scopes and walks”.
I talk to myself…..in a dank and dark cell…with my laptop….and my birds and rabbit….sometimes it is the only way to have an intelligent conversation. I also keep a small handheld digital recorder to record my thoughts and ideas…. and I am way behind too…lol….until I can refocus…..
I love cold country to walk around. Will stay here forever.
If I am working on a project, such as writing a paper or solving a problem: I think about, and research, the topic intensely for a while, writing out options, firstly as a list. I don’t know why a “list” at first – maybe getting it all down left-brain style?
After I am fatigued from thinking about it, I let it go. Ideas pop up here and there, which I note down. At this point the “list” doesn’t work any longer: a diagram seems to work best. This takes a while, as if a fermentation is going on. If I talk about the project with friends, they usually suggest completely different ideas than I had. All of this gets stirred into the soup! Eventually, usually when the due date is lurking: if I have allowed enough time for the “fermentation”, the paper or solution flows out.
If I am working on a painting, the process is similar, but more intense: there is no list or research – just the canvas, the paint, the subject to be interpreted, and me. I find it at first such a struggle, as if being teased, but then, especially if under a time pressure, the paint flows easily onto the canvas.
[...] also evidence to suggest that by stepping away from creative challenges your subconscious may come up with new ideas or a [...]
I am a research psychologist and am interested in the “incubation effect” i.e., the benefits of switching away from an unsolved problem and doing something else before returning to the original problem. The basic effect has proved quite difficult to establish in controlled lab type settings although most people report incubation experiences in everyday life.
I think the effect is now accepted as established experimentally by a number of published lab studies and has been dignified by a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin (the major review journal in psychology) in 2009. Question now is, how does it work?
Dutch psychology group led by Ap Djiksterhuis have extended incubation idea to “immediate incubation” i.e., skip the conscious work stage and as soon as the problem arises, set it aside…thhey have found benefits from this immediate incubation method in decision and creative thinking tasks (well, thinking of unusual uses for a brick anyway.)
The benefits of immediate incubation (if replicated enough to become an established “fact”) imply unconscious work rather than simply forgetting or weakening of misleading representations of the problem.
Next question…what is involved in unconscious work? is it just like conscious work, but unconscious, or is it more uncontrolled, free ranging, spreading activation, associative activity?
We are exploring whether doing something v different to the original problem benefits incubation (immediate and delayed) as compared to doing something similar….results so far suggest doing something different is more helpful, but effects a bit weak..and , yes, more research is needed…watch my blog for breaking news on this, probably around easter 2011 when current studies completed.
reading comics books, watching comics or science fiction movies on tv; one time sleepwalker at night, nobody understood what said calmed to me and they made me return to sleep but the morning following I remembered what I tried to say and was the correct solution; talking to friends of another subject, reading a book of other subject, seeing landscape, watching news on TV, playing with my daughter when she was a child, caressing a pet
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