Relax, Breathe… Create.

October 13, 2009

It seems when I least expect it, my best ideas appear. Can you relate? Often while on a walk, taking a shower or relaxing in some way… bang! A great idea seems to magically appear. On the flip side, when I’m really stressed out and in need of a breakthrough solution, rarely does anything truly creative surface. If you’re like me, that’s when you return to the old idea well and crank up a predictable solution. It might be an interesting solution, but rarely original. It’s typically a modification of one of those good ideas that “worked” once (or twice…) before.

According to Nuno Sousa at the University of Minho in Portugal, there’s a good reason for why this happens. Sousa found when lab rats are stressed out; their responses to familiar routines become very repetitive. For example, rather than trying new maze paths that lead to food, chronically stressed rats repeatedly ran down the same dead-end paths. Read more