“Just want to clear my head and drive the sleep!
Want to smile without looking like a creep!
This may not make me a king in any way!
But a hot water shower will surely make my day!”
The common point between Agatha Christie and Stephen King!
Then you have the recent Pulitzer prize winners; Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jennifer Egan!
Now the easy answer is that they are all great writers!
In fact the list is much longer because of one trait or habit which they all share!
They used to get the best ideas when they are in the shower!
There is a name for this! The bathroom brainwave!
In the popular book the 5am club, Robin Sharma has stated how getting up at 5 am is the most coveted secret of highly successful people! Adding to that routine is the early morning shower!
When you shower, you apparently get amazing ideas!
A Nat Geo article explains that rather than constantly grinding away at a problem or desperately seeking a flash of inspiration, research from the last 15 years suggests that people may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs or epiphanies when they’re doing a habitual task that doesn’t require much thought—an activity in which you’re basically on autopilot!
This lets your mind wander or engage in spontaneous cognition or “stream of consciousness” thinking, which experts believe helps retrieve unusual memories and generate new ideas!
Researchers have shown that the default mode network (DMN)—which connects more than a dozen regions of the brain—becomes more active during mind-wandering or passive tasks than when you’re doing something that demands focus. Simply put, the DMN is “the state the brain returns to when you’re not actively engaged,” explains Roger Beaty, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University. By contrast, when you’re mired in a demanding task, the brain’s executive control systems keep your thinking focused, analytical, and logical.
So one of the routine mechanical and automatic task in most people is taking the shower or using the restroom! The brain here is not having any distractions and is now free to release its creative juices! This may also be the reason why like in the movie Psycho, people are more sensitive or vulnerable while taking a shower!
Amid the mist and suds, a good shower can relax not only your body but also your mind, unleashing streams of consciousness, clarity and creativity.
Research shows that what is known as the “shower effect” also can occur outside the shower, and many of our best thoughts don’t happen at work or school — but occur while going about our days with ideas incubating in the background!
Typical triggers for events, that make us feel great and relaxed and therefore give us an increased dopamine flow are taking a warm shower, exercising, driving home, etc. The chances of having great ideas then are a lot higher!
Still, that’s not all there is to it. Dopamine release is an essential component but Dopamine alone, which gets triggered in hundreds of events, where we aren’t very creative, can’t be the only reason. Another crucial factor is a distraction which may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution!
Basically a calm and relaxed mind and a clean body gets your creative juices flowing! Time for a shower then??!! Of course if you want to be successful and famous like birthday celebrity Gautam Shantilal Adani then you have to get out and work more!
Though a warm bath before sleep may give you good sleep!
Shubh Ratri…
ramadocblog 