Ever wondered why you get your best ideas in the shower?

It’s not just your imagination! You might actually be more creative at the gym than you are at your desk.

In my case I know I get my best ideas when I am walking my dogs on the beach you can see out of the window in my Tea Break Coach videos!

When you know what is going on in your brain when you shower, walk by the sea or work-out, as opposed to what is going on in your brain when you are in front of your emails, you can use it to plan to be effective. To get more done in less time. To work smarter not harder. And it can cost nothing.

In my Tea Break Coach video last week [insert link] I’d just been reading the best places to work studies which I do every year. It’s a great source of good ideas to steal and share about how to create engagement and what is trending in workplaces that I’m not lucky enough know personally.  

One trend was for a ‘work from wherever you like’ week – a chance for colleagues not just to work from home, but to perhaps combine work with a beautiful location or a visit overseas to be with family who you only see in the evenings.

Knowing that your brain works differently dependent on its environment becomes a game-changer if you have the opportunity to choose where you work.

If you need to get lots of things off your ‘to-do’ list, then a quiet room with a Pomodoro timer and no distractions is probably the way to go. However, if you want to think about your strategic plan, have a complex problem to solve or need to innovate, then that is not likely to work at all.

You are much more likely to think ‘outside the box’, if you are outside and certainly not in your box room.

It is all to do with the fact that what is stimulating our senses – our view and what we can hear, changes which networks our brains use for thinking and processing information.

When our brains are slightly occupied, but we are required to be doing something which requires too much conscious thought, our brains use their DMN – Default Mode Network. Being in the shower is a great case in point. You are shampooing your hair – something you have done a million times. So, you don’t need to give it much thought – other than to pay mild attention to squeezing a bottle or washing out the soap. This means at the same time your brain can meander a little. Ditto running on your treadmill or whenever else it is that you have noticed new ideas just seem to spring into your mind.

For me and clients who have visited me for coaching or to plan some training at my place by the sea, the wall-to-wall sea views are compelling. Rather than focus on a flipchart in a hotel room with no windows, we find ourselves stopping to look and take in the distance to the horizon, the expanse of beach and rocks and the rhythm of the waves or the swoop of a seagull.

If we don’t know this science, these pauses to gaze out of the window can make us feel like we are not ‘working hard’. But when you know that something as simple as a room with a view leads the brain to be in a more reflective and creative state, where neuroscientists tell us the DMN is more active, our attitude to working on creative things in a beautiful place changes from a naughty treat that we have to sneak past the finance team, into a commercial no brainer.    

The DMN mode gives us greater capacity and bandwidth to reframe challenges, explore what is possible, and re-evaluate unhelpful patterns which might thwart our ambitions. It is in this DMN state that we often make greater intuitive and more creative leaps with complex issues and problems. We make less judgemental observations and more lateral connections as the brain falls into a slow-wave pattern of functioning called ‘Theta’

If we don’t find a way to create these pauses, our brain can spend too much time in a mode of focus that’s aimed at simply getting tasks done known as the Task Positive Network (TPN). Great for getting your ‘to-do’ list ticked off. Not at all great for thinking differently or seeing the bigger picture.

Natural places give us the cognitive space to think more holistically — otherwise, in our busy lives where we are constantly switched on, we stay in TPN mode and focus more on the task at hand.

The 52 Project, that myself and Dr Iain Price, a neuroscientist led in the Covid 19 lockdowns led to writing our book DOSE. This also has some other angles to add in when considering the Best Place to Work to get the best results.

Natural light matters for both modes of thinking. Our bodies set our daily ‘circadian’ rhythm through the power of light on our suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), sometimes called the brain’s clock. Time spent outside or by a window increases the amount of natural light that we receive which helps balance these rhythms and helps us sleep well and stay focused when we need to.

Time in nature or even looking at it from a window floods our brain with natural colours which has been shown to affect our emotional state, even reducing stress and anxiety and our perception of pain. Whereas staying indoors with artificial light stresses our brain and makes our world feel smaller – again not ideal if you want to think big!

Maybe part of the problem is our definition of ‘work’. The truth is the environments that best create our DMN state often don’t feel like work!

But knowing this science means the commercial value of an away day out of the office is easier to jusify. We can recognise that encouraging employees to use a gym at lunchtime or do yoga in a meeting room is not at all ‘pink and fluffy’ but likely to lead to business improvements.

Knowing why and how to create policies or workspaces so your employees can think better in bigger and more complex jobs is a game-changer.

When you know what your brain needs to be physically able to step back and think about what will come tomorrow (not just plough through the to-do list of today) – you can think differently about what you do to get things done.

Dulcie Swanston is the owner of Top Right Thinking Ltd and Dr Iain Price is founding director of Think it Out Ltd.