Creativity and Physiology

By Jonathan Halls

Your physiological condition can also affect your creative potential. Unfortunately, modern life actually works against many people having the optimum physiological condition for creativity.


Diet and exercise

The skills of imagination and critique come from the brain which is an organic structure. It needs to be properly fed and therefore needs to be fed healthy food.  Feed your brain with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Avoid processed foods that lack the nutrients of fresh vegetables. Also avoid heavy foods that take a lot of effort for the body to digest.

Such foods re-direct your body’s energy from the head to stomach as it processes and digests your food, which is why you often feel tired after lunch.

While the research seems to constantly shift between different opinions, there is wide consensus that some foods will actually stimulate your brain function better than others. These include oily fishes such as sardines and salmon and nuts.

Sleep or fatigue

Fatigue makes it hard to think and saps our motivation.

It’s important to get the 7 or 8 hours of sleep doctors recommend to make sure our minds are alert and able to call on our imagination when we want.

This is increasingly difficult in today’s 24-hour society. However, the importance of sleep is not just because we need energy to be creative.

During our sleeping time our minds sift through the experiences of our day and unconsciously tries to solve them. You may have found yourself waking up in the middle of the night with an idea.  This is precisely the time you need pen and paper to catch it.
 

Stress

It may come as no surprise that stress can lower your level of concentration and inhibit your imagination, and your ability to critique ideas and plan their implementation.

Some people find that stress actually gives them motivation especially in the circumstance of deadlines. Working in broadcasting, I know a lot of people who actually thrive on stress.

However, while the stress of a deadline may get the adrenalin surging through our system to heighten our powers of awareness and sometimes clarity, it also causes muscle tremors.

These in turn lower memory capacity which is tied up with cognitive information processing in our brains.

The lesson? Avoid stress.

Alcohol

We’ve all heard stories about alcohol fuelling the creative juices of authors and artists. However, scientific research actually debunks this theory which is probably more of an urban myth than anything else.

Alcohol does not spur on imaginative powers, nor does it enable the brain to clearly critique an idea. Alcohol is a depressant which slows your body’s cognitive and motor functions while at the same time blocking inhibition.

Some people think alcohol’s ability to block inhibition is ideal for allowing our skills of imagination for many of the reasons we have already discussed.

But the fact is, it slows motor and cognitive function and actually counteracts any benefits of freeing one from one’s inhibitions. Research has also shown that alcohol inhibits the cognitive processes of abstracting, conceptual formation, learning and memory retention.