Your Brain Needs a Break, Not a Brainstorm

The Key to Creativity: Stop Trying.

The secret to being more creative is, paradoxically, to stop trying.

We often treat creativity like a manufacturing process—as if we can assemble a breakthrough idea the way a factory line assembles a toaster. But an idea is not a widget; it is a seed. Your mind is not a factory; it is a garden.

Our job as creatives is not to force ideas to sprout, but to control the environments in which growth happens. In a garden, nothing is "made" in the mechanical sense. You don’t command a seed to germinate. You don’t assemble a flower piece by piece. Instead, you provide the right environment, and then—crucially—you wait.

How often has a great idea come to you when you least expect it? In the shower, on a walk, or standing in line at the grocery store? We’ve all experienced the sudden "Aha!" moment when we aren't looking for it.There is a neurological reason for this. Creativity often emerges from the right hemisphere of the brain, which is closely tied to subconscious processing. In The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist challenges the oversimplified idea that the left brain is “logical” and the right brain is “artistic.” A more accurate metaphor, he suggests, is that the left hemisphere looks at a map, while the right looks out the window. The left fragments and categorizes, turning the world into systems to be controlled. The right perceives relationships, context, and the whole scene as it unfolds. Creativity thrives here because, at its core, it is about connection—bringing together things that do not obviously belong and allowing something new to emerge between them.

The problem is that we are taught to live in the Analytical Mind. We try to "engineer" creativity. But you cannot engineer a revelation. As McGilchrist points out, true creativity requires what the poet John Keats called "Negative Capability"—the ability to sit in uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without "irritably reaching after fact and reason."

The Analytical Mind hates uncertainty; it wants to close the loop immediately. But creativity requires the opposite: it requires a pause.

Feed the Soil, Then Step Away

So, what does this mean for your creative practice? It means recognizing that you cannot harvest a crop the same day you plant it. You need to respect the phase of Incubation. For a seed to grow it needs two things: nutrients and patience.

1. Provide the Nutrients To grow a seed, you need rich soil. Creativity is fundamentally about connection—seeing the likeness in things that are different. To make those connections, your mind needs a vast library of experiences to pull from. Go to museums. Read books outside your field. Scroll through the McMaster-Carr catalog. Go down YouTube rabbit holes. Walk through nature. You are building the hidden reservoir that your mind will draw from later.

2. Stop Digging Up the Seeds This is the hardest part: You must stop "trying." If you constantly dig up a seed to see if it’s growing, you will kill it. Similarly, if you apply your critical, analytical focus to a new idea too early, you will stifle it. You cannot force the "Aha!" moment. You can only invite it.

You need to give your mind "background processing" time. This means recognizing that "doing nothing" is actually doing something vital—it is clearing the space for the Receptive Mind to speak.

The Power of the "Do Nothing Day"

To reclaim your creativity, you must actively schedule time to put the Analytical Mind to sleep. Go on walks without headphones. Take long showers. Meditate.

For me, this practice has culminated in what my wife and I call a “Do Nothing Day.” By “nothing,” I mean nothing productive. No checking emails, no "working on that side project," no optimizing my to-do list.

At first, this was excruciating. I am a full-time student with two jobs; time is at a premium, and my brain screamed that I was wasting it. But I found something surprising. Taking time to do nothing didn't just make me more relaxed—it made me sharper. The ideas started flowing once I stopped chasing them.

The seeds grew.

Some ideas take days; others take years. It is not up to me when they sprout. It is only up to me to ensure the garden is ready when they do.