10 minutes a day that will boost your creativity

Since Sigmund Freud developed his theories on the unconscious, much has been written about the psychological processes that operate in the back room of our mind and that, without our noticing, 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 he has proposed the idea that 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 in order to benefit from this source of creativity? For it, Hardy proposes dedicating 10 minutes a day to contacting the hidden processes of our brain. It is not an activity that has to do with esotericism, although when talking about ways to influence with the invisible part of the human mind sometimes forces us to refer to mysterious aspects of ourselves themselves. Actually, the idea of ​​this psychologist is based on a very specific routine whose effectiveness can be scientifically tested.

Start the day with a blank canvas

The idea on which the strategy of Benjamin P. Hardy is actually very straightforward. This psychologist assumes that most mental processes occur unconsciously. And it does not refer only to those that have to do with the regulation of mood, making quick movements in the face of possible dangers or the maintenance of our vital signs, all of which depend on evolutionarily ancient structures of our nervous system, such as the brain stem.

No, it refers to all those tasks that do not require much concentration: move along the route that leads to our workplace, make the necessary movements to pronounce a word 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 performing repetitive and automatic tasks can serve and act efficiently, without wasting time on seemingly 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 “reboot the system”, gain control of those decisions that the unconscious tends to make and reconsider routine thought schemes.

10 minutes a day to break schemes

To seize the power of the ability to choose from many more options than are available to us given in a normal situation, what we should do, according to Hardy, is take advantage of the power of rest: when we sleep, our mind is isolated from the environmental stimuli it is used to receiving and it can reorganize ideas in new and innovative ways, “oxygenating” our habitual ways of thinking.

Which are the steps to follow?

First of all, just before going to sleep, we spend a few minutes thinking about the problems (daily or not) that we would like to solve, and then we write down these issues on a piece of paper. In this way, these will be the ideas that we will have in our heads just before sleeping 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 reactivate. 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 occurs to us on the subject, 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 issues with a clean mind after having allowed our unconscious side to reformulate our thought schemes.

Fields 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, we put a piece of paper and a pen by the bed and maintain good sleep hygiene, Hardy's ideas can transform the way we build our reality. And we don't even have to concentrate to find solutions by combining strange ideas: our unconscious mind does it for us.