Perhaps your New Year’s resolution is learning to paint, write poetry, or play the trombone. Perhaps it’s nailing the client brief you’ve been working on since November, or finding a creative way to convince your boss it’s for the benefit of the company that you move to the desk with the biggest window. Forget taking in a sunset or doing a Downward-Facing Dog: the easiest way to stimulate your creative brain is taking a nice, long shower. Or a two-minute one, if you’re unfortunate enough to live in California.
In the new book Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman and HuffPost Senior Writer Carolyn Gregoire explain why some of your most memorable eureka moments can happen before you’ve even had a cup of coffee. Kaufman, in collaboration with the world’s largest showerhead supplier, Hansgrohe, found that 72 percent of people worldwide get their best ideas in the shower. He puts this down to freeing your mind from critical thought and allowing it to roam free through a lush forest of new perspectives and necessary distractions.
And while taking a stroll IRL can provide a similar effect, there’s something about showers specifically that make them perfect for opening the mind up to new ideas.
“A shower is also, quite literally, a place of incubation—a change of scenery from the rest of our everyday lives that’s relatively free of stimulation and distractions,” they authors add. “Showering insulates us from the external world so that we can focus all of our attention on our inner desires, daydreams, and memories—thereby increasing the likelihood that our mind will come up with creative connections.”
Previous research has shown that beer is also a good way to get creative juices flowing. Feel free to combine this information in any way you see fit.
