How to leverage your unconscious mind for creative bursts

Sleep, on-demand creativity, and the unconscious mind

Yesterday I wrote about how we can learn to prime our attention so that we're more likely to recognize patterns and connect the dots as we go through our day-to-day. This is a passive method of inducing insights. But what if I have a pressing problem that I'm struggling with right now, say at work, and I can't wait for some sudden insight to hit me? Well, then, it's time to bring in some active ideation and reflection.

The Idea Quota

I only learned about this exercise yesterday while reading Ideaflow, which inspired this post. It's called "The Idea Quota."

Every morning from now on, you will write down ten ideas. (We'll get to what kind of ideas in a moment.) The quality of these ideas isn't the point. Contrary to what you might believe, you can't judge the merit of an idea while it's still inside your head. Idea validation is as crucial to the creative process as idea generation. But that happens later. For now, our aim is just to freshen up stale thinking.

Performing an Idea Quota is a simple, three-S process: 1. Seed. Select a problem and study it. 2. Sleep. Let the unconscious mind process the problem. 3. Solve. Flood the problem with ideas.

The idea here is that you want to, again, prime your attention filter by consciously seeding your brain with an important problem you're trying to solve. After you've done that, as you unwind for sleep, bring the problem to mind. Maybe pull up a book and do some reading around that problem in a relaxed manner (remember, you're not trying to actively fix the problem yet, you're just seeding your brain with ideas. You're laying out the puzzle pieces.) After that, then it's time to get some solid sleep.

While it may seem wrong to not actively work on a problem, and our instinct is to want to pull an all-nighter, this is a crucial part of coming up with better ideas. While we're sleeping, our brain stays busy. It goes through many different cycles throughout the night, processing your day's experiences more loosely, helping your body recover, and preparing you for tomorrow.

Here's another quote on the importance of sleep from Ideaflow:

Research shows that sleep improves our ability to solve difficult problems during the day. Thus, poor sleep is a double whammy: It doesn't deliver new insights, and it doesn't prepare you to innovate effectively while you're awake. What's more, sleep deprivation "impairs attention and working memory" and "affects other functions, such as long-term memory and decision-making."

After you've had a solid night's rest, it's time to jot down some ideas.

In the shower, while making breakfast, on your morning run—during any lightly distracting physical activity, noodle on the problem in a relaxed manner. Then, before leaving for work, spend a few minutes jotting down possible solutions. Aim for a minimum of ten but count all iterations and variations. If you're coming up with colors for a new logo, for instance, aquamarine and cornflower blue both count.

An important note about generating ideas: Aim for quantity, not quality. Bad ideas are perfectly okay. In fact, you should expect your initial ideas to suck. Embrace it. Julian Shapiro calls this the Creativity faucet.

Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.

Because your pipe only has one faucet, there's no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater.

The Most Important Question

Another spin on this is Josh Waitzkin's method. He uses a journaling routine called the "Most Important Question," which also leverages the power of the unconscious mind. It's similar to the "The Idea Quota" noted earlier, but it can take a bit more time and is meant for heavier thinking.

The idea is that at the end of every work session, you jot down the most important question for solving in that moment/project. What is the one thing that, if solved, would simplify everything moving forward? Jot down the question, stop worrying about it, and continue your day. Once you've had a full night's rest and as soon as you wake up the next day, take 15-20 minutes, grab a journal or your notes app, and reflect on the most important question from the night before. Do this every night and reflect monthly on what you thought was the most important question for each day to spot gaps in your thinking.

Here's Waitzkin in his own words:

"And if we think about taking this and then turning it into a systematic training of the ability to be potent in the creative process, if we're working on a given project and we're reflecting on what's the most important question here, and we're journaling on it, and the brainstorm in the morning, we're doing a lot of things to open the channel systematically between the conscious and the unconscious mind. We're waking up in the morning and beginning our day proactively. But then, if you sit back after, say, a month, and you look back at your, say, three, or four, or five journals, brainstorms, Q & As, on a given subject and you think about, 'Okay, so, at the moment, this is what I thought was most potent, but now I realize this, in fact, would have been most potent. What's the gap?' Deconstruct the gap between your understanding then and your understanding now, and then design your training process around deconstructing that gap and training at what that gap revealed. It's a really powerful way for individuals –to uncover the misperceptions about what was most important. And so you're training yourself, day in and day out, like water, to be an increasingly potent thinker. And this is manifesting scarcity in that we are forcing ourselves – no matter how many resources we have – to think about what is the most important question in what we're working on right now."

With these two methods noted above, you now have a powerful set of tools you can reach for to tackle any problem you come across in life. The keyword here is problem.

As Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn mention in Ideaflow:

Remember, a task is something you know how to do, even if you'd rather not do it. A problem is something you don't even know how to approach. A true problem responds only to new ideas.