This is why you must sleep over your problems.

Is problem solving and creativity an in-born asset?

We often have this urge to be creative in our field. Maybe you want to be unique in presenting your ideas to your boss. Perhaps you want to cook delectable dishes. Many of you got into painting, writing, meditating, baking in the past twelve to fourteen months. As you got into the habit, you would push yourself to be more creative in the field each day. But are you really operating at peak creativity? Furthermore, how do you operate in times of stress or when your world seems to be falling apart due to some unpleasant event?

Do you ooze out mind-boggling ideas to take your passion to new heights? Some even give up being anywhere near to creativity or putting forth ideas. People often succumb to the monotonous routine in their lives and are miles away from thinking differently. At times you are overwhelmed with an issue that needs a solution to be resolved. You just seem to be stuck in thinking differently. Why does this happen?

People assume creativity or problem-solving is an inborn virtue. I beg to differ with this line of thinking. There are multiple aspects to innovation, and in my view, one can be creative in their area of work by sticking to some principles. This also requires an understanding of how creativity works. Highly creative people intentionally or unintentionally follow routines that set them apart. This includes musicians, writers, dancers, scientists, athletes, painters, all alike. The output, style, area of work might differ upon their orientation. But that is not what I intend to write about here.

My hacks below are to create a solid foundation towards being creative. These are hacks that have helped me in my thinking and writing process that eventually help my output.

Managing with stress – be the average person.

Often the issues that come along blocks our mind with stress. When your mind is enveloped with pressure or trauma, it clouds your thinking and judgment. Decisions you would make under no stress and in the blink of an eye will vastly differ in stressful times. You need not find ways to avoid stress. That is an unavoidable part of daily life. Your attempt to avoid tension compounds it, as you constantly think about it. You need to avoid making immediate decisions under pressure—the art to pause between stimuli and your reaction.

Take a quick break. Divert your attention onto something else for few minutes or even seconds. Call up someone you like speaking with, go for a walk, or maybe get yourself a coffee. This break helps to release the tension created in the mind as you attempt to break the loop. You are replacing the stressful thread of thoughts with some tranquil. It is equivalent to switching from a gripping, intense thriller scene to a comedy or romantic flick. Notice how your thoughts alter when these images are played on screen. It is no different when it’s played on your mind. While facing a writer’s block, I shut down everything and get on with doing something else.

You might wonder I started speaking about boosting creativity. Why am I writing on decision-making during stress? The reason is thinking sanely as the average mind during trauma or anxiety is as good as it can get. People wrongly believe they have to do something drastically different. Some take extreme measures in trying to be flamboyant in stressful times and fall flat on their face. Napolean Bonaparte once defined a military genius as, “The man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.” This wisdom is true in most walks of life. 

While investing, success is when your money is safeguarded during a market crash or recession. In the ongoing pandemic, success is when you bounce back to your health vitals soon if you get infected. Your first goal should always be to do what the average person does comfortably. You can train yourself to be sane on such occasions by reading long-term trends of an impact than focusing on the current situation. Time, after all, is the best healer, and you need to constantly keep repeating this phrase in your head. Acknowledge there will be stress created with some random event. Decide how do you want to act in such a situation. It won’t solve all your problems, but will surely reduce its impact.

Detox with sleep.

Sleep is a highly effective tool in dealing with stress or in boosting creativity. I had written an article on the benefits of sleep based on the best-selling book – ‘Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Mother nature has this ingenious engineering built-in us through sleep. Every minute in the eight hours of our sleep plays a vital role. One such function is boosting creativity and decluttering the tension of varied issues lingering in our minds. When we sleep, we go through REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and NREM (Non Rapid Eye Movement) cycles. In the four stages of NREM sleep, the body repairs and regrows tissues, builds muscles and strengthens the immune system. 

During the REM stages, you experience dreams as your brain activity increases to a more wakeful state. Scientists prove that dreams help you to flush out emotions lingering in your mind. This detox recharges and resets your brain to the natural state of being cheerful and active. The attributes that form the bedrock of creativity. Sleep and dream researcher Rosalind Cartwright says, “It’s almost like having an internal therapist, because you associate (through dreams) to previous similar feelings, and you work through the emotion related to it so that it is reduced by morning.” According to the National Sleep Foundation, humans spend more than two hours dreaming each night with proper sleep, and the most vivid part of the dream occurs in the REM stage. 

The mining of emotions during these stages of sleep epitomizes the importance of a healthy state of mind. It acts as an effective eraser to wipe out the traffic of thoughts that obstruct creativity. When you wake up from a dream the next time, be rest assured you have effectively flushed out the residual emotions out of your brain. It’s a known secret that some highly creative artists keep a notebook and pen by their bedside to write down the thoughts after they wake up. 

The legend Paul McCartney came up with the tune to one of his biggest hits, “Yesterday,” in his sleep. “I woke up with a lovely tune in head,” the musician mentioned in the 1998 biography – Many Years from Now. “I thought, ‘that’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it,” he added.

French philosopher Michel Foucault once said, “every act of imagination points implicitly to the dream, the dream is the first condition of its possibility.” Depiction of dreams into artistic forms was common during the Renaissance.

Russian chemist and inventor Dmitri Mendeleev had a spiteful tryst in formulating the ‘Periodic Law.’ He didn’t sleep for three nights in a row and tore his head into it with no solution in sight. Finally, he hit the sack and miraculously cracked the code for the periodic tables in his dreams! He used the Periodic Law to correct the properties of some known elements, like the atomic weight of Uranium, and to predict the properties of eight elements that were unknown to mankind. Quite a heady stuff! 

This is what he quipped on the discovery, “I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.” It is no secret now what aids creativity. The quality time you spend in your research fueled with a good sleep schedule will see you bouncing off creative ideas like a pro.

Scheduling tasks – fixing the jigsaw.

Managing stress through sound emotional intelligence and having a good sleep habit helps creativity. But you also need to schedule the creative tasks during the right time slots to yield the best returns. I typically do my writing at the start of the day. I then get into my day drafting plans around my work. These could be sops, policy documents, monthly goals, and so on, which require me to think clearly. I then look into my pending tasks, which might have spilled over, and ensure these are completed without further delays or, at best, deal with the bottlenecks holding them up.

Around noon, I sit to clear emails and get into calls that require me to be a listener or explain the ideas I have drafted earlier. Since these are prepared with a clear mind, it’s merely a ritual of explaining it to others. Towards the end of the day, I ensure my emails are cleared and all pending tasks are dealt with. Then I go for a run listening to an audiobook or a thirty-minute workout at home to have an endorphin release. I then watch some television to unwind and slip into the bed reading a book or some interesting article I have stumbled upon.

This is how my typical day looks like unless some random event disrupts it. The scheduling is done to engineer maximum efficiency and effectiveness of my brain. Complex thinking is done early in the day, the routine work during noon and evening, and the learning aspect during the night when I only have to absorb. The brain is highly creative the time you wake up, as explained earlier. Some highly creative people ensure that they waste none of it as they avoid inconsequential decision-making early in the day. 

Therefore, you would see these folks deciding on what clothes and shoes to wear not in the morning but on the previous night. At best, some folks keep a standard dress code to avoid wasting time on the confusion around it. Those who can afford, also prefer not to use smartphones and laptops and hire people to manage them. Not carrying a smartphone today is the new rich!

What I have shared above is a template to give you an idea of how you can regulate stress and use your creativity effectively for your own good. When you create a pattern for yourself and repeat it over time, problem-solving and thinking-out-of-the-box mindset manifests on its own. Sticking to the routine, persistence, and sleeping well is the key. The practice goes a long way to tune these aspects and convert them into life hacks you can always use. Your intent towards this change is critical too. As they say, “it’s all in the mind!”