Reclaiming Your Creativity: Top 5 Ways to Stop a Brain-Freeze

You’re sitting in front of the computer. You’re ready to work, to bang out those ideas and start putting them down into understandable, relatable bits for your job. And then — nothing.

At some point during the course of your constantly awake days, you’re going to plummet into the depths of zero creativity. Not a good stage to find yourself in if you’re in the business of producing ideas or tasked with generating clever solutions. Add the pressure of deadlines to this situation, and you’re looking at even more brain-freezing moments.

As a professional, you might manage to meet your tasks, but your output might not match previously inspired works. So you need to get proactive. You need to get the neural network snapping and your mental workspace going. Here are five ideas:

1. Tune out.

Noisy office? Crowded café? Constant distractions at home? Put on your noise-cancelling headphones and download a movie, album, or single on iTunes. Watch and listen. Pay attention to only what is before you and in your ear.

Don’t think about the project or the deadline for an hour or so. When you break off from what you need to do and simply enjoy a moment when you need not do anything, that’s when you allow the creative process to come back.

2. Do the most mundane thing.

As an alternative to tuning out, you can get up from your desk and do the most ordinary thing. Many creative people, from author Henry Miller to music producer Brian Eno, believe that the “magic” happens away from the task at hand. When you’re shaving, taking a walk, riding the train, or taking a shower, that’s when the ideas start to hit you.

3. Improve your mood.

Your brain isn’t going to churn out great ideas if it’s stressed out — in a bad way. So what you need is to shift your mood. Watch a video of a laughing baby; according to a study published in Psychology Science, that’s one of the images that can boost creativity.

4. Surround yourself with the color blue.

Color can impact emotions. But it can also spark ideas. In a study published in Science, participants who faced a blue screen did better at creative tasks while those who faced a red screen did better at detail-oriented tasks. Blue suggests tranquility and peace while red means danger. And so when you feel relaxed, you liberate creativity; when you feel anxious, you tend to focus.

5. Sweat it out.

Another thing you can do to restore creativity is to get physical. Sweat, it seems, is like WD-40 for your brain. It has evidently worked on many brilliant minds. Legend has it that Albert Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity while riding a bike; Joyce Carol Oates envisioned her writing by running, and adds that she rarely “invented at the typewriter.”

So when you suffer from that dreaded blankness, tune out; try a mundane activity; perk up; look at a blue screen, and exercise.