For Better Creativity, Spring Clean Your Brain

I would very much appreciate someone stepping into my brain and giving it a thorough scrubbing. Dust out the cobwebs of old thoughts, repair the broken neural pathways, maybe give my self-confidence a nice polish while they’re at it. At the very least, they could hold me upside down and give me a good shake so that all the loose nuts and bolts inside my head might fall out.

When my mind feels cluttered, I find it difficult to be creative. Meditation, yoga, and similar activities are great for this, particularly for maintenance—and would probably be even better if I actually stuck to doing them regularly—but sometimes, it feels helpful to go through a Big Refresh™, or the equivalent of hiring professionals to deep clean your house and discovering that holy crap, that carpet is white??

Since I’m not aware of such a brain-cleaning service existing yet (are you? Please tell me.), I’ve cobbled together, from the recesses of what increasingly feels like the haunted attic of my mind, a few of my personal favorite methods for clearing out, refreshing, and resetting my brain. It’s best to look at this as a grab bag: take what sounds helpful, and leave what doesn’t. I hope that these provide some help if you’re feeling similarly, or at least serve as a jumping-off point for you to create your own Brain Spring Cleaning checklist.

Actually, physically clean your workspace.

Whether it’s your office, your kitchen table, the tiny TV tray in the corner of your studio apartment: clean it up.

For those of us with executive function issues, I know that “just clean it” is a very unhelpful directive. I like to set a timer for ten minutes and clean as much as I can before it goes off. The timer helps the task feel a bit like a game and gives me a clear end point. Half the time, I discover that the thing I’ve been putting off cleaning because it felt too big only takes about two minutes, and then I get to find other things to clean in the remaining eight. Sometimes, I sit down as soon as that alarm goes off, knowing that my house is ten minutes cleaner than it was before. Other times, I do manage to trick myself into cleaning for longer than ten minutes.

Regardless of what works best for you, I can absolutely tell the difference in my ability to focus when I’m in a clean and organized environment.

Exercise in whatever way you can.

I do not like exercise. I am forever angered by the fact that I feel so much better after I do it. But movement is wonderful for clearing the mind, and I often find that taking walks in the middle of the day allows me to create the mental space I might need to break through writing blocks.

Finding an active hobby that I enjoy like rock climbing has made it much easier to head to the gym regularly, but for most of my life, there was no way I could have afforded a hobby that required gear and a gym membership. For a while, I was lucky enough to work in an office building with a free gym, and after about three years there, I finally began to take advantage of it.

In every case where I’ve managed to exercise regularly, building exercise into a habitual part of my daily routine was absolutely key. A common piece of wisdom for forming new habits is “habit stacking”—that is, piggybacking a new habit on top of one that you have already established. For me, that meant automatically heading to the gym as soon as my workday is over. For others, first thing in the morning might work best. What’s important is not so much telling yourself that you will work out at X time each morning, but that you will work out as soon as you wake up and brush your teeth. Experiment until you find what works for you.

Try positive affirmations.

Yes, I, too, have been resistant to them for my entire life. Yes, you will feel ridiculous as you sit there muttering “I can do this” to yourself.

Yes, I am extremely angry that affirmations work.

Even angrier than I am about exercise.

But consider this: for about a year, I have been working with my therapist on EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy. One of the components of EMDR is identifying the negative beliefs about oneself that often develop after a traumatic experience (beliefs such as “I am helpless”) and training the brain to recognize that the trauma is over, in part by training it to reprocess the traumatic memories alongside a positive belief (e.g., “I can protect myself now”). I’ve been fortunate to have had massive amounts of success using EMDR, and as I told my therapist the other week, EMDR is basically positive affirmations + brain science (for the record, she agreed).

For a less intense example, I returned to the climbing gym this week after a month away, and decided I’d try to recite some affirmations to myself before attempting a more difficult bouldering problem. For about ten seconds, I pretended to believe myself when I said “I can do this,” imagined myself reaching the top—and then set a personal best record. After a month away.

I get that these are anecdotes, and anecdotes do not equal evidence, but anecdotes from a serious skeptic who really did not believe this stuff would work has to count for something.

Write something for yourself, and only for yourself.

About a year ago, I was feeling completely stuck in my writing. I’d finished the third full rewrite of a book I’d been working on for years, then trunked it after feeling so bogged down in the details of its convoluted plot that I couldn’t tell up from down. I’d drafted another book that felt like it was between genres, and had no idea how I’d pitch it to agents once I got to that point. I felt, in essence, like writing was quicksand, and that I was rapidly sinking beneath all the pressure I’d been putting on myself to write something good, to get an agent, to get published, to start my career, and on and on.

I wish I could remember what prompted me to do this, but one cold winter’s day, I decided to sit down and write something that would never see the light of day. No pressure to publish, to get feedback, to make it good. It could be the worst piece of writing that ever existed and it wouldn’t matter, because no one would ever see it. So I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. The block I’d been sitting before shattered in front of my eyes.

It is honestly some of the best writing I have ever done, and it would never have existed had I not given myself permission to write badly.

What are your favorite ways to spring clean your brain? Have you ever tried any of the ideas above? What about just taking your brain out and wringing it like a wet rag? Do you think that could work?