Curing the Brain Block: How to Be More Creative

Google has a 20% rule. Employees are told to spend a fifth of their work hours on personal projects, the stuff that has nothing to do with their assigned job. Before you polish your resume and apply, it's worth asking what Google is actually betting on. The company thinks personal growth makes people better at their jobs. That sounds backwards. How can goofing off produce more work? A logical reading says it can't. The creative reading says something different: a brain that only grinds eventually goes dull.

There's research behind the idea. Psychologists at San Francisco State University found that employees who picked up creative hobbies were more likely to carry those talents back into their jobs, and they handled stress with less difficulty. Pile up enough of these studies and a pattern shows: brains want periodic breaks, and during those breaks a lot of useful things happen.

Anyone who works with computers knows you're supposed to shut the machine down every so often. Keep it running without pause and it clogs its own memory and slows down. The brain behaves in roughly the same way. Give it downtime and attention climbs, output improves, and some evidence suggests even moral judgment gets sharper. Naps help. Walks help. So do vacations. And, as the Google experiment keeps demonstrating, chasing a bit of personal growth through creative work keeps the mind keen.

Downtime is strange, though, because the brain never actually powers off. Using EEG and fMRI, researchers have watched synaptic connections, the links that carry signals from one neuron to the next, fire more freely when a person is resting. Areas that stay quiet while you concentrate suddenly light up once you stop trying. Daydreaming is one example. When the mind wanders, it slips into what's called the default mode network, and in that state it chews on material tied to your own growth. You sort out your to-do list without meaning to. You find a cleaner way to tackle something. You rerun an old mistake and finally pull a lesson out of it.

Scientists have identified four other resting-state networks besides the default mode one: vision, memory and attention, movement, and hearing. Consider which activities lean on which. Maybe you dance. Maybe yoga is your thing, or painting, or standing in front of art and just looking. Perhaps you play an instrument, or you lie on your back in the grass next to a toddler, listening to birds and watching clouds drift. None of that requires calling yourself an artist. Imagination is enough, and the brain hands it over almost without being asked.

Creativity asks for very little. Treat it as a process rather than a talent. When you hit a problem you can't solve, what do you do? You turn it over. You obsess a little. Analyzing, combining, shaping a new answer: those are all creative acts. The deeply intuitive person and the strictly practical one both do it, because creativity is where feeling and reasoning meet. Hours spent painting a mural of your hometown count. So does a five-minute coffee break where your mind drifts. Both are the same machinery at work.

Studies point to conditions that tend to loosen the flow: boredom, a bit of disorder around you, walking, tiredness, low light, a drink, and daydreaming yourself somewhere far from where you sit. There's also a thread connecting creative output to mild symptoms of conditions like bipolar disorder, ADHD, and schizophrenia. So does any of this mean you should wander a dim room looking for a cocktail because your desk is a mess and you're bored? Not quite. But those situations loosen the grip, and loosening the grip opens unstructured time where growth can happen.

Step one toward more creativity is noticing how much of your ordinary day already qualifies. Once you've spotted those moments, pay attention to what they're for. You can aim creative thinking at helping other people, say, working out how to provide for someone sleeping rough in your neighborhood. You can point it at a marriage, a tense coworker relationship, a neighbor you keep misreading. And you can keep it for yourself, for insight and the slow work of figuring out who you are. If you feel stuck, or doubt you have any of this in you, the fix is small: stare out a window, watch the clouds, let the ideas start moving.

A few questions to sit with. Which parts of your life are running dry and could use a jolt of inspiration? What are you already good at? How much time are you really willing to protect for doing nothing in particular? And which triggers actually work for you, boredom, a walk, a change of room?

Melissa Lavery, M.S.

References: Bayer, R. (2004), Creativity Enhances Our Lives. Burns, W. (2014, August 13), Science Continues To Show Us How To Be More Creative, Forbes. Jabr, F. (2013, October 15), Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime, Scientific American. Morris, C., Our Greatest Untapped Resource. Turner, P., The Amazing Benefits of Creative Time.