In other words, shower thinking comes because you’re more likely to “think outside the box” or consider more creative ways. All of these factors — complete relaxation, relaxation of your mind and a little haze — prime you to think creatively, so it’s no surprise that some of us do our best thinking in the shower.
Table of Contents
10 shower thoughts
🌟 Your environment
Consider your surroundings – it’s warm, comfortable and perhaps familiar. It is a relaxing space where you can freely let your mind wander among the scents of your favorite shampoos and soaps.
🌟 Free from confusion
No phone to bother you, no one to interrupt you (usually), and it’s time you can be completely alone with your thoughts. All of these factors will throw a little dopamine around your head, which can jolt the otherwise dormant (and creative) parts of your brain. It’s the perfect place to chill out, sing a few songs and think differently.
🌟 Ride the brain train
There’s more to it than just a pleasant steamy shower and finger trimming, though. When your body relaxes and you fall into a routine or monotonous thought process, your mind follows suit. More specifically, your prefrontal cortex (where your more complex thinking and planning takes place) relaxes when you go into a sort of autopilot. Think of it as the part of your brain that controls when you’re in deep concentration, or the voice in your head that keeps you from throwing a drink in someone’s face (it also controls your social behavior).
When your prefrontal cortex relaxes, the rest of your brain, known as the default network, kicks into gear. It’s a device that lights up or lets your mind wander while you daydream With this engagement, new connections and solutions are illuminated — the kind you’d normally dismiss if you focused too hard. A clean (and clean) head does a body good.
🌟 Sweet places for the mind to wander can help creativity
The trickle-down effect on creativity is the result of mind-wandering, where your thoughts are anywhere but on the task at hand.
Historically, researchers have focused on the negative effects of mind-wandering, which can disrupt performance and is associated with unhappiness.
But nature’s mind wanders matter; Schooler’s research found that people who wandered around with their interests in mind were happier than when they were at work.
“In situations where drifting thoughts might pose challenges, what I refer to as ‘mind-wondering,’ a unique and inquisitive form of daydreaming, can be genuinely beneficial,” Schooler explained.
Its benefits seem relatively extensive. A survey of more than 1,100 respondents reported that their moments of insight came during mind-wandering in the shower (30 percent), in transit (13 percent) or during exercise (11 percent).
There is a “sweet spot” for how engaging the activity is and its effect on creative thinking: too little, and it’s boring; Too much, and it pays little attention to ideas.
A September study found that free-flowing, spontaneous thinking during moderately engaging activities, but not boring ones, boosts creativity.
More than 300 university students were first asked to come up with as many novel uses as possible for simple objects like a brick or a paper clip in 90 seconds. This is known as an alternative use task, which tests creativity.
Students then watch either a boring video of two men hanging out laundry or a more compelling clip of the infamous deli scene from “Harry Met Sally.” These activities give students time to generate ideas and let their minds wander.
When the students were tested again, their mind-wandering led to more creative ideas, but only for students who had seen the moderately engaging daily scene.
An activity like taking a shower or going for a walk (or watching a rom-com video) “takes up some of your attention so they can influence your thinking, but it doesn’t take up all of your creative attention because you don’t. Zachary Irving, assistant professor of philosophy of cognitive science at the University of Virginia and study author, says that ideas are emerging in the background.
🌟 Thoughts about shower music
Randomly listening to your favorite song on the radio is more satisfying than playing it directly from your iPod.
“Resting is akin to rebooting for humans, offering the same solution as the classic ‘Have you tried turning it off and on again?’ in the tech world.”
🌟 Do ghosts give us privacy in the shower? If aliens come to Earth, we must explain why we made so many movies to fight and kill them
🌟 As a child, my parents taught me not to believe what I see on TV. Now, I have to teach them not to believe everything they see on Facebook.
🌟 If you weigh 99 pounds and eat a pound of nachos, are you 1% nachos?
🌟 You are in the shower. The water sounds like a gentle, steady rain, and feels like a Plinko massage. You’ve just started shaking and suddenly, you’re hit with a flash of brightness. Maybe it’s the answer to a nagging problem at work, the location of your lost USB drive, or maybe it’s just a random, unnecessary (yet totally satisfying) insight.
But, by the time you hang up the towel, the idea has already gone down the drain. “All of us experience such thoughts, and they occur in various situations beyond just moments spent in the shower.” Long drives, short walks, even something like pulling weeds, all seem to have the right mix of boredom and busyness to trigger an epiphany. They can also be activities where note-taking is difficult. “Engaging in an activity without a specific goal can remarkably enhance free association, yet the introduction of pen and paper can unexpectedly stifle the creative process.”
There haven’t been many experiments on why we get random insights, but there is a theory in psychology that describes a mental state that seems to encourage this type of thinking. This is called default mode network.
“You become less aware of your environment and more aware of your inner thoughts,” says John Kounios, a psychologist who studies creativity and distraction at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The underlying similarity among these activities lies in their moderate level of physical or mental engagement. They also need to be familiar or comfortable enough to keep you engaged but not bored, and long enough for an uninterrupted flow of thoughts.
Kounios explains that our brains typically catalog things by their context: Windows are part of buildings, and stars belong to the night sky. Ideas will always blend to some degree, but when we focus on a specific task our thinking tends to be linear.
buildings, and they belong to the night sky. Ideas will always blend to some degree, but when we focus on a specific task our thinking tends to be linear.
Consider a pile of bricks in your backyard – a sight you pass daily with little notice, categorizing them as construction material, perhaps for a future pizza oven. Then, one morning in the shower, your thoughts wander to your neighbor’s walnut tree. Those enticing nuts dropping into your yard catch your attention. In a moment of revelation, you realize the bricks could serve as nutcrackers, offering a novel solution to your walnut problem!
As far as eureka moments go, using a brick as a brick cracker is pretty lame, but as an example of how the default mode network frees things in your brain from external associations, it works pretty well. As ideas become unconnected, they are freed to bounce against other ideas they may have never had the chance to encounter, increasing the likelihood of a useful connection.
Instead of a catalog of our collective knowledge, the poop journal has become a repository of inside jokes, gross artifacts, and anecdotes of our day. Random insights aren’t well studied, as Kunios points out, “You can’t just sit someone down and wait for them to come up with a novel idea.” However, there has been much research on eureka moments, or flash epiphanies that solve a specific problem. The most famous is the apocryphal story of how Archimedes discovered that his king’s crown was a fake.
As the story goes, King Hero II gave his goldsmith a gold nugget to make into a crown. However, he suspected that the artisan had taken some of the gold for himself and replaced it with less valuable silver. But, without the crown melting, the king could not be sure that the goldsmith had torn it off. He came to Archimedes with the problem. The famous scientist was stunned, until one day he realized while taking a bath: when he sat in the tub, the water rose with the volume of his body. If the goldsmith were to cut the crown with silver, he would have to add extra silver to make up the weight of the dense gold. So, if the crown was made of silver, Archimedes reasoned that it would displace more water than the same weight of pure gold. They checked, and the goldsmith was found to be an impostor.
17 deep thoughts and drift off to sleep.
- A lock transforms a door into an impassable barrier, rendering it as secure as a solid wall.
- At 30, you’re one month past your birthday.
- When you buy and eat half a chicken, you are secretly sharing a meal with a stranger.
- ‘Coffee flavored water’ doesn’t sound good but it is coffee.
- We were taught as kids not to get into strangers’ cars or meet strangers from the Internet, and now we literally call strangers from the Internet and get in their cars.
- When you drink alcohol, you are only borrowing happiness from tomorrow.
- Your car keys have traveled more than your car
- The objective of golf is to play the least amount of golf.
- Fitbits are just like Tamagotchis, except the silly little creatures you have to save yourself.
- Technically almost every mirror you buy in a store is used.
- Condoms are one of the most environmentally friendly things man has invented. A single person has the capacity to eliminate their carbon emissions over their lifetime.
- Tapes have “A” and “B” sides so it only makes sense to convert to “CDs”.
- If you had $1 for every year of the universe’s existence (about 13.8 billion years), you wouldn’t even make the top 50 on the Forbes list.
- It is the penalty of honesty that makes us lie.
- Most of the sky is actually under your feet.
- Sound travels faster than the speed of sound in a telephone.
- When people think about traveling to the past, they accidentally worry about changing the present, but no one in the present really thinks that they can radically change the future.
see…Santa Hat