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Take Breaks & Buy a Tomato Timer! Want to Be Creative in Writing or Anything? Then Taking Breaks Is Vital
Powering through writing an article, a novel, or a story may seem like a good idea, but we’re learning that that is self-defeating.
Leonardo da Vinci was probably one of the most creative geniuses globally, and one of his favorite things to do was take 15-minute microsleep naps throughout the day and night. Well known now to sleep researchers, it appears to provide individuals with the sleep they require, but it is not recommended for all.
Both da Vinci and Nikola Tesla used relaxation, to say nothing of continuing creativity. And Thomas Edison took naps throughout the day and had cots in all his labs, and he had 1,093 patents.
Polyphasic sleep is the practice of distributing multiple short sleep episodes across the 24-hour day rather than having one major and possibly a minor (“nap”) sleep episode each day.
This sleep schedule has also more recently been referred to as the Uberman Sleep Schedule. The schedule reveals that rest, either in the form of a nap or a brief period away from our task, can be restorative and infuse our creativity “muscles” with purpose once again. In other words, our brains benefit and may be craving this release from a task.
These breaks are beneficial for writers and surgeons, computer programmers, or anyone who is seated bent on completing a task. The belief that remaining locked into a task for hours on end is the only way to be creative appears to run counter to research. Do not emulate Zuckerberg’s all-night coding stints.
Why Microbreaks?
Our brains may seem to be computers of a sort, but they aren’t because we are flesh-and-blood creatures, not a series of microchips and connections. Computers and much in science have taken the brain as a model for creating and researching networks.
But there are limits to our attention span, which, in turn, affects our ability to remain creative. Computers overhead, we run down on attention, and our creativity suffers. Perhaps that’s where writer’s block comes from; the failure to take breaks to refresh our…
