10 Minutes A Day That Will Enhance Your Creativity
Since Sigmund Freud developed his theories about the unconscious, much has been written about the psychological processes that operate in the back room of our mind and that, without us realizing it, influence our way of thinking and feeling.
But although the father of psychoanalysis believed that the function of the unconscious is to protect us from ideas that can destroy us if they are not well managed, recently the psychologist Benjamin P. Hardy has proposed the idea that By paying attention to that hidden part of our mind we can make the most of our creative potential
And how could we adequately “communicate” with our unconscious to benefit from that source of creativity? For it, Hardy proposes dedicating 10 minutes a day to contacting the hidden processes of our brain This is not an activity that has to do with esotericism, although talking about ways to influence the invisible part of the human mind sometimes forces us to refer to mysterious aspects of ourselves. In reality, this psychologist’s idea is based on a very specific routine whose effectiveness can be tested scientifically.
The idea behind Benjamin P. Hardy’s strategy is actually very simple. This psychologist assumes that most mental processes occur unconsciously. And it does not refer only to those that have to do with regulating mood, making rapid movements in the face of possible danger or maintaining our vital signs, all of which depend on evolutionarily ancient structures of our nervous system, such as For example, the brainstem.
No, it refers to all those tasks that do not require too much concentration: advance along the route that takes us to our workplace, make the necessary movements to pronounce a word that we know well, make a simple decision whose consequences are unimportant… Our consciousness only materializes in those processes that really require our interest , concentration or improvisation. For everything else, the brain structures in charge of carrying out repetitive and automatic tasks can serve and act efficiently, without wasting time on apparently useless reflections.
Our conscious mind is, according to this idea, the top of a pyramid of decisions that unconscious processes have already made for us… the idea is to “reset the system”, take control of those decisions that the unconscious usually makes and rethink schemes. routine thinking.
10 minutes a day to break the mold
To gain the power of the ability to choose between many more options than we are given in a normal situation, what we must do, according to Hardy, is take advantage of the power of rest: When we sleep, our mind is isolated from the environmental stimuli that it usually receives. and can reorganize ideas in new and innovative ways, “oxygenating” our habitual thinking pathways.
Which are the steps to follow?
First of all, Just before going to sleep, we spend a few minutes thinking about the problems (everyday or not) that we would like to solve, and then we write down these topics on a sheet of paper. In this way, these will be the ideas that we will have in our heads just before going to sleep and that will be worked on automatically while we sleep. If we enter the dream stage having reflected on a series of ideas, these neural connections will be fresh at the time we sleep, and they will tend to be activated again. This will make it more likely that they will be modified while our consciousness stops acting.
The next day, right after waking up, the first thing we will do is pick up the sheet on which we had written down the problems and write there everything that comes to mind about the topic, without stopping to think about whether it is appropriate or not. In those first 10 minutes of the day we will be at the peak of our creative potential and we will be able to approach these topics with a clean mind after having let our unconscious side reformulate our thought patterns.
Areas of application
This strategy, which is powerfully reminiscent of the routine that Dalí followed to find the ideas with which to create his paintings, It can be very interesting for all those people whose work has an obvious connection with creativity: writers, designers, advertising creatives, etc. But it can also be useful for all those people who simply want to make their mentality more open and prone to change.
If we make this routine a constant habit, place a pen and paper next to the bed, and maintain good sleep hygiene, Hardy’s ideas can transform the way we construct our reality. And we don’t even have to concentrate to look for solutions by combining strange ideas: our unconscious mind does it for us.
