Why Our Best Ideas Come to Us in the Shower

One of the most important ways of taking care of your body is to have a good bath. A shower a day – at least – makes you clean. But as a plus, it creates the perfect conditions for a creative flash, luring out your inner genius. 

Research shows you’re more likely to have a creative epiphany when you’re doing something monotonous, like fishing, exercising, or showering. Since these routines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopilot. This frees up your unconscious to work on something else. Your mind goes wandering, leaving your brain to quietly play a no-holds-barred game of free association. 

Strange as it sounds, your brain is not most active when you’re focused on a task. Rather, research shows it’s more active when you let go of the leash and allow it to wander. Shelley Carson at Harvard found that highly creative people share one amazing trait—they’re easily distracted. And that’s the beauty of a warm shower. It distracts you. It makes you defocus. It lets your brain roam. It activates your default mode network and encourages wacky ideas to bounce around. So when the lather rinses off, your light bulb switches on.  

But one may ask what makes the shower different from a boring board meeting? Doesn’t your mind wander there, too?

As Mental Floss notes, yeah it does. But a shower is relaxing. It’s a small, safe, enclosed space. You feel comfortable there; comfortable enough to be in the buff. On top of that, you’re probably alone. It may be the only alone time you get all day. It’s your chance to get away from any stresses outside.

And there’s more! The time you shower also plays into the equation. Most of us wash up either in the morning or at night—when we’re most tired. According to the journal Thinking and Reasoning, that’s our creative peak; the time of the day when we are least alert. The morning fog weakens your brain’s censors, keeping you from blocking the irrelevant, distracting thoughts that make great ideas possible.