Sage Bray Varon

This week, I have a few more things to help you spark your creativity and keep your imagination going strong when you’re struggling to get into a creative mode. These suggestions largely have to do with switching your mindset.

Here’s a trick for increasing your creative capacity that is also extremely helpful for this time a year when we are surrounded by far too many delicious goodies — get aerobic! Going for a brisk walk, a bike ride, jumping rope, even wrestling with the dog, gets the blood pumping to the brain as well as getting you away from day-to-day chores, worries, and other non-creative work.

The key to exercise, though, is that it seems to change both the structure of the brain and how it operates, increasing alertness, focus, and cognitive skills. These support the problem-solving aspect of creative work. It also helps with learning (particularly in children), cognitive tasks, and even staving off cognitive decline. These direct benefits can last up to two hours after your exercise session is over. That’s more than enough time to get into a creative flow state.

A fairly recent find additionally seems to indicate that exercise heightens our ability to perceive things visually, enabling us to pick out details and perceive visual input more precisely. This is great news for visual artists or those whose work requires visual observation. This is not to say that exercise is going to give you 20/20 vision if you don’t already have it, but it could help you better discern what your eyes are able to see.

If you’re going to use exercise to switch into a more creative mode, I suggest that you exercise with little or no entertaining distractions (so no TV, audiobooks, or podcasts — music as background seems to be okay.) This will let your mind wander off into a creatively supportive alpha state, which gives you direct access to your imagination and puts your mind squarely in an idea generating mode.

Exercise not only tunes up the brain and get you ready for your creative session but it also makes you physically feel better, which can help with long sessions of writing, painting, sculpting, crocheting, or any repetitive or sedentary creative activity. If spending an hour exercising just isn’t very enticing, even with all these advantages, try to do 5-10 minutes of exercise every hour as a break from your work. That way you get a bit of a brain tuneup while getting those muscles and joints moving, warmed, and stretched.

If you’re not up for exercising but you need to kick your brain out of the present mindset into something more creative, you can do the opposite of exercise — sleep. Just a 20-minute nap can completely reset your brain. Coming out of sleep moves you through a theta brainwave state (where we are in light sleep, meditation and dreaming) and into the alpha brainwave state, which supports daydreaming and creativity. You’ll want to go directly from your nap to your creative work to stay in that creative mindset.

This is also why you often hear that it’s best to do creative work when you first wake up in the morning. Now, I know some of us aren’t very lucid first thing in the morning or have too much to do first thing, but if you wander off and do relatively mindless things like packing lunches and paying bills, you will shift your brain into beta or gamma brain waves which deal with information processing and stress. These are harder to shift out of, as I’m sure you’ve experienced. So, use naps if you can’t carve out time first thing in the morning.

It’s not a bad idea to schedule time to get your mindset shifted right before your creative time or as part of your scheduled creative sessions. Decide if you want to take a walk, a nap, or even meditate (meditation does the same thing as a nap but can do so in a more condensed timeframe) to start your creative sessions and see if it doesn’t put you in the perfect mindset for truly productive and enjoyable creative work.

I do hope you find these ideas helpful. You might not have time to implement them now with the heart of the holiday season upon us, but come back to this post when things settle down. I too will be busy with holiday activities these coming weeks, so I am going to wait until the second weekend of January to get back to posts here. I do hope you enjoy the holidays. Here’s a distant but heartfelt toast to a creative, productive, and fulfilling new year!