Are You Killing Your Creativity?
I hate the idea that some people are ‘creatives’ and others are not. I have no visual art skills to speak of, but I’ve been writing poetry and songs since I was a kid, and I am creative in my approach to therapy. You can express your creativity through your dress sense, your approach to problem-solving or your handwriting. Your creativity might shine through in the way you educate your children, the meals you cook or the holidays you plan. To be human is to be creative.
The Technology Age
As a Gen-Xer, I’ve seen a huge change in technology in my lifetime. I was an avid reader at a really young age, and left to my own devices I wrote poetry and stories, taught myself to play instruments or learned things from books, and had a steady stream of ideas, fantasies, plans and dreams about my life. I loved to build things, design things and draw things. I witnessed the first video games appear when I was in primary school, playing pong on the Atari and text-based prompt adventure games on the Commodore-64. I got my first internet connection at age 19, and my first smartphone at 35.
I don’t have a steady stream of inspiration and ideas anymore. In fact today I woke up at 6am and started writing this article at 11am, and I’m not gonna lie… I filled most of the morning with pure procrastination. I played some Candy Crush, spent an hour video-chatting to a friend, and at least two hours scrolling Facebook and reading or commenting on posts. I only got the idea for this story after I went outside (without my phone) to throw sticks for the dogs.
The Gift of Boredom
Many of my best ideas come when I’m driving long distance. I get inspiration when I’m walking and when I’m in the shower, and I’m willing to bet your experience is similar. The reason for this is that boredom is the perfect breeding ground for creativity. Think about it… your brain’s default state is wandering. The problem with life as we know it now, is that we never have to be bored. Instant entertainment and distraction are available at our fingertips and much of it is specifically designed to keep us coming back. And that lack of boredom could be what’s killing your creativity. Here are the facts.
Fact 1. Boredom is uncomfortable.
Fact 2. Your brain seeks amusement. If it can’t get it externally, it will make its own.
Fact 3: People who are bored tend to be more creative than those who are not.
Fact 4: Social media, electronic games, and even television are very specifically designed to amuse and addict you. Every time you indulge, you rob yourself of a chance to be bored.
Procrastinating and Pondering
As I threw sticks to the dogs this morning (a fairly mindless task), I started to think about how behind I was on my goal to write today. I pondered how I’d been derailed, given I’d met my goals by 8:30am yesterday. Stayed up too late last night again, slept in this morning, had to do the laundry. My mind ran through different situations in my past when I’d been productive and not, through various possible scenarios in the future, and outcomes that were and weren’t in line with my goals. I daydreamed about being a location-free well-paid writer, writing about the kinds of things I was passionate about and travelling here and there. I travelled back through imaginal time gently glancing at various instances of Productive Larissa and Procrastinating Larissa, wondered if other people had this problem, and it was around that point my daydreaming brain pondered ‘Other people probably struggle with this too, I could write something about it,’ and here we are.
Science and Stuff
Boredom doesn’t feel good. In a study done by the University of Virginia, 25% of women and 67% of men, when left alone for 15 minutes, chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than do nothing. Even pain was preferable to boredom for many people! It is unlikely that in your day-to-day life, you ever truly do nothing for 15 minutes.
Your brain seeks amusement, and left to its own devices, will make its own. Professor Peter Enticott of Deakin University’s psychology department asserts that boredom is like any of the body’s motivational systems — it drives you towards action. Its unpleasantness might be likened to hunger or fear, adaptive because it pushes you towards action, engagement with your environment, or mental stimulation.
Boredom leads to improved creativity. Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman conducted a study in 2014 to explore whether boredom improved creativity. In the ‘boredom condition’, one group copied phone numbers from a phone book, and those who reported both boredom and daydreaming moved on to the next phase. Along with a control group who did not do the phonebook task, they undertook a creativity exercise in which they were asked to list as many uses as possible of two polystyrene cups. The boredom group produced about 50% more ideas.
These results have been replicated in similar experiments. In 2019, Guihyun Park and associates had students sort green and red beans into separate piles for half an hour. In a subsequent idea-generation activity, those students produced about 25% more ideas than those in the control condition, and their ideas were also judged to be more unique.
Daydreaming
Mann and Cadman hypothesise that daydreaming is the mediator between boredom and creativity. A recent study by Claire Zedelius and colleagues has expanded on this idea, having participants track the quality of daydreams and creativity over a five-day period. They found that those engaging in personally meaningful daydreaming reported higher creative behaviour and daily inspiration, and fantastical daydreaming (supernatural, funny, or bizarre) was associated with increased creative behaviour and creative writing quality. Planning daydreams were associated with improved creativity on a given day, but being a ‘planner’ was not associated with being more creative overall.
Boosting your own creativity
I drive a lot, and whenever I have a long trip to take, I always make sure I do at least an hour or two without music or audiobooks so I can just let my mind wander. When creative ideas do bubble up, I commit them to memory and write them down when I next stop the car. We all have times and tasks in our day that don’t require a lot of intellectual input, such as driving familiar routes, sitting on buses, washing dishes, or walking the dog. If you can give them a go without your phone or music, you might find your next great idea is there, just waiting for a quiet moment to get your attention.
