Ooooooh she’s been doing some reading.
You probably know this about me by now, but I am absolutely obsessed with learning how people tick and what gives us our brilliant ideas. So I did a bit of a deep dive, surprise surprise, because creativity gets packaged like it’s a polished little lightning bolt: you sit down, have a brilliant idea, and then go on with your mysteriously gifted life. It’s very cinematic and not especially accurate… and it sure hasn’t been my experience, and I’m guessing it has not been yours either.
Getting into the science 🧪 I found a handful of studies on creativity, and one of them leaned into incubation, which I’ve felt has been such a staple of my own process for a long time, so I found it very comforting. It found that people did better on certain creative tasks after taking an undemanding break (key word: undemanding) that allowed mind wandering vs. pushing straight through.
IRL, creativity is weirder than that. It’s the brain making odd connections while you are not paying attention. 👈 Did you catch that? That means:
- It’s ideas showing up in the shower after refusing to appear at your desk.
- It’s the irritating fact that your first idea is often your most obvious one.
- It hands you a better idea three hours after you gave up.
- It makes your best idea show up while you’re unloading the dishwasher.
So when you look at some of the research around creativity, a lot of it points to something surprisingly human: good ideas do not always arrive when we are trying our hardest to be impressive. Sometimes they show up when our brain finally has had a second to breathe, wander, rearrange the furniture, and come back with something unexpected.
1. Creative people are often better at sticking with uncertainty
I like this one because it feels more true to lived experience than the usual “creative people think differently” line. Creativity isn’t just tied to generating ideas, but to being willing to stay in the messier stage longer, before rushing to close the loop. I’m allll for some resilient skills.
So this means that us creative folk can tolerate ambiguity, resist the urge to grab the first obvious answer, and hang out in the weird middle a little longer than feels comfortable. And isn’t this such a big part of making art?! Not just having ideas, but letting an idea be unfinished, awkward, unclear, or a little ugly without immediately deciding it’s bad. That is a skill. An irritating one, but a skill.
2. The half-asleep stage seems to be a particularly weird and fruitful place
You know that floaty little moment where you’re not fully asleep, not fully awake, and your thoughts start getting a bit slippery? Welll, as it turns out, when you enter that first light stage at sleep onset (which I just discovered has a name: N1 sleep), it shows better creative performance afterward, including more semantically distant responses.
So basically, your brain may be extra good at making strange, interesting connections right when it’s drifting out of ordinary logic. So if you’ve ever had a bizarrely good idea while half-dozing and then immediately lost it like a tiny fool, that tracks. This is why I keep trying to remember to put a notepad on the nightstand 👀
3. Creativity often comes from connecting things that don’t seem to belong together
A lot of creativity research circles around this same basic idea: original thinking often involves linking concepts that are farther apart. The farther apart two ideas are in conceptual space, the more novel the connection can feel, which makes so much sense when you think about how ideas actually form. It is rarely “I had one perfect thought.” It is more often “something from over here bumped into something from way over there and now I can’t stop thinking about it.” Creativity is basically pattern-making with a flair for unexpected pairings.
4. Habits help, until they don’t
Sure, I love the idea of a routine. I also know that routines can get a little too comfy. I *also-*also know that for some of us, routines aren’t realistic. And I have some good news: Routines can actually be a detriment to creativity because they can interfere with the process by steering us back toward familiar solutions and well-worn pathways.
It doesn’t mean structure is bad. It just means your usual way of doing things is not always going to lead you somewhere new. Sometimes the problem is simply that you are just so efficient at being yourself that your brain needs a gentle nudge sideways to have new ideas.
5. Your brain really does keep working on ideas after you step away
This one just means that all those times you stomped away from a problem were not necessarily wasted. People actually improve more on creative tasks after a break that let their minds wander than after doing a demanding task, resting, or just continuing straight through.
6. Creative breakthroughs feel sudden, but they usually aren’t
Insight has incredible branding... It loves to show up in one dramatic flash and make it seem like the whole thing happened in an instant, BUT insight is actually: the moment a solution enters awareness after slower background processing has already been underway.
So when an idea seems to come out of nowhere, it probably didn’t! Your brain had just been dragging it around in the back room without giving you updates. Which, frankly, feels on brand.
7. The first idea in the room is usually the loudest, not the best
This one makes me feel better every single time I remember it. Research on fixation shows that people often get stuck on familiar examples, early solutions, or the most obvious answer first. Now, that doesn’t mean your first idea is bad. It just means it is often the easiest one for your brain to grab, which is not always the same thing as the most interesting one.
Honestly, I think this is why so many creative sessions feel discouraging in the beginning. We think, “well, that was predictable, so I must not have anything good.” When really, you may have just reached the front porch. You have not even gone inside yet.
8. Your brain gets clingy when a problem feels too close
Apparently one of the rudest things about creativity is that being too close to a problem can make you worse at choosing an original idea. Ready for some more research? Say less. Studies on psychological distance found that greater distance was associated with selecting more original ideas, likely because distance helps people think at a higher, less literal level.
Which explains a lot, actually. Why your own project can feel impossible while someone else’s problem seems weirdly easy. Why advice for a friend comes instantly, but your own brain just sits there blinking. Sometimes the issue is not that you do not have ideas. It is that you are standing too close to them.
Why this matters when you’re making things
The reason I like all of this is because these kinds of science-backed facts on creativity make the process feel less of a “you-problem” when it gets frustrating/weird/blank.
If your ideas come late, sideways, half-formed, or after you’ve already declared the whole day a wash, that does not necessarily mean you are blocked or doing it wrong.
If your first few ideas feel stale, that does not mean you have lost it.
If you need distance, sleep, quiet, repetition, or a break before something clicks, that is not a character flaw.
It is just part of the very unglamorous, very human way creativity often works.
I think we put so much pressure on creativity to look impressive that we forget how odd it actually is. How indirect. How often it asks for patience instead of performance. How often it shows up once we stop trying to wring it out of ourselves like a wet towel.
Not always, of course. It still likes to be difficult 🙄 😆
But at least now we have receipts.
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