Boredom is your way to innovation ... 4 entertaining ways to bring back the creativity into you

Zahraa Magdy

We live in a similar period of days. We work from home, we do not go to gyms, and we cannot roam the streets and between parks as we used to do, and even meeting relatives and friends has become lacking for many, for fear of catching the emerging coronavirus infection (Covid-19).

All of this may weaken our ability to produce, so how do we produce and innovate in the midst of anxiety while we work while lying in bed, and in the middle of boredom staying at home? Especially because creativity implies a desire to break existing patterns and look at things differently?

1- Practice "hyperlinked thinking" as a game. Hyperlinking
can be defined as the process of generating ideas, that is, the first stages of creativity that usually come from meditating around us. Hyperlinking follows the process of central thinking, means settling on a specific idea, and we begin to evaluate it alone.

Hyperlinking can be trained to generate ideas in three steps:

1- Set the timer for three minutes.

2- Look around and find the closest thing to you.

3- Start the timer, and write as many uses as possible for this thing.

Now, read what you have written, and evaluate your thoughts based on three aspects: the number of ideas that you came up with, the degree of your suffering in order to reach those uses, and the variety or similarities of the uses with each other or with the usual use of something.

Do this training, and try to get faster each time to the most innovative and non-recurring uses of something in your room. Then start applying to your work, by generating many ideas without judging your mind, then assessing the appropriateness of those ideas through central thinking.

2- Leave your phone and
face boredom. Have you thought about why walking is our best way to face stress and straying of our mind? The reason is boredom. Walking is two repetitive movements, which do not require us to focus on their performance, in order to devote our awareness to thinking about the basic problems and reconsidering things.

Charles Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, when he sat on a sofa in a garden in 1951, took out a piece of paper out of his pocket, and took it in a chore, which led him to think about the possibility of laser invention, was one of the most popular of boredom as a way to stimulate the mind. Prevalent in our time.

This prompted a change of the traditional view of boredom from bad condition to a drive to creativity. Cognitive psychologist Jonathan Smallwood found that feeling bored produces a wandering mind, and the more the mind wandered into a vacuum, the more likely it was that it would come to new ideas. That is, when your mind is freed from constant attention to the immediate visualizations that it is ready at the present time - such as notifications that never stop appearing on your phone screen - you will feel bored, when your mind begins to knock on new doors.

So you have to rethink how you use your phone, reduce the time you spend on it, disable games that steal your time, put it in your pocket or bag while performing walking exercises, reduce the time you spend on social networking sites, and disable chat applications throughout your business hours, so your phone may have helped you Avoid being bored for years, but it prevents you from thinking about your realistic goals.

3- Walking in your room
was the late Apple founder Steve Jobs holding his meetings on foot, as we saw Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg do the same. Walking among the parks may remain our first solution to a state of work distress and an inability to solve our problems, but he is not alone.

A group of researchers at Stanford University conducted a study of the energy and creativity stimulated by walking in nature in the park compared to walking on devices in the home. And it has been proven that walking in a small room with its boring details every day, back and forth, improves your ability to think creatively by 60%, more than you can while sitting.

Walking - not the environment - was our catalyst without knowing, and whether you are wandering in the room or on the treadmill in the office or living room, try not to respond to your desire to sit before 20 minutes have passed.

4- Mandala coloring,
author Ron Friedman explains that our exhausting brains are less able to filter and extract information, as is the case every day. When you are tired and less focused, it is suggested that you stop working and immediately start the process of creative brainstorming, by coloring.

Adult coloring books have become more popular in libraries, after clinical psychologists have found that coloring is a treatment for a weary mind and tired soul. Coloring gives adults an opportunity to express themselves in a way that is not available during working hours, which is a daily routine of life, and it also enhances your mental and psychological health.

Coloring also provides an opportunity for the mind to invent new ideas. Colors stimulate different areas of the brain. Studies have also demonstrated that green and red - in particular - have powerful impacts on promoting and stimulating creative thinking.

And if you are afraid to try drawing for lack of confidence in yourself, you can buy coloring books or search for "mandala drawings for coloring" and print them in black and white, and fill the parts gradually, with colors of your choice to discover your artistic sense, and then you can keep the coloring book next to you in the office, to take a break whenever I felt exhausted.