Why taking a break actually improves your creativity (BKI 26)

We’ve been focusing on decluttering so that you have more space for your creativity. Today we take it to the ultimate decluttering! How guilt-free breaks support your learning, memorization and artfulness.

Hi, this is Diana. Bright knowledge instants give you one thing you can do today to move your creativity ahead. And today I want to give a quite unusual recommendation. I want to recommend that you take a break and you take a break without guilt. Why is taking a break any good for your creativity? Well, there are four things that I can think of right off the top of my head, and I'm sure you can think of more.

There are great benefits in taking a break. Number one, as my friend Shoshana pointed out, you regain beginner's mind. And this is huge. As creatives, we need to be in touch with beginner's mind all the time, because as Suzuki said, in the mind of the expert, there are few possibilities. In the mind of a beginner, there are many. So when we are in beginner's mind, we are much more creative and we have many more things that we can incorporate into our art.

The second thing that I can think of is that we regain internal motivation. If we're kind of forcing ourselves to practice, we start feeling that we just have all this external pressure to do it. We have this lack of relationship that comes from inside. So when you take a break, you will feel a little spark of that internal motivation calling you again and saying, hey, you know, what about my art form?

You know, what about my writing? What about my painting? What about my gardening? And it may be a tiny, quiet call. Nonetheless, it's internal. And that is a million times more powerful and sustainable than external force. The third thing that I can think of is your memory becomes better when you take a break. Your mind sifts through everything and starts to make patterns that you can recall. In other words, your memory becomes stronger.

And this has been proven in research where people were taking one day off a week from practice versus people who were practicing seven days a week, and the people with the day off were retaining better. The fourth thing, and this builds on that last point, is that when you let go of the conscious mind and you take a break, the subconscious and I believe other dimensions also step in, start helping you, and new solutions start coming up, new possibilities start coming up that are actual things that you can act on once you come back to your creativity.

So this is my recommendation to you today, take a break. And this is the important part, without any guilt. Why no guilt? Because you're actually benefiting your creativity. Let me know how this works for you. Bye.