As we know, walking helps our creative juices flow. What is also becoming clearer is that how we walk is important too. As Dr Barbara Handel, neuroscientist from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg reveals, “It is not the exercise itself that helps us think more flexibly.” It’s moving with the freedom to go in any direction that’s most helpful.

Creativity can appear mysterious. It's impossible to force ourselves to be creative and have ah-ha! moments because so much of what the brain does behind the scenes doesn't involve our direct attention or control. But, what if something as simple as briefly drifting into sleep could help?

What are the next two letters in this series - O, T, T, F, F…..? Sleep pioneer, William C. Dement, set this challenge to 500 students, with an instruction to think about the problem for 15 minutes before going to sleep and to write down any dreams they remembered as they awoke.

Do you struggle to get out of bed in the morning? If so, it could be your advantage. Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Jung-Beeman suggests that when we’re stuck on a difficult problem, one of the best things we can do is set our alarm clock to go off a few minutes early.

When the stakes are so high, sitting back to relax is the last thing you’d expect to be helpful when trying to make such important improvements. However, it turns out that sitting back may be a necessary part of the process.

If we asked 100 people, how many do you think mull things over or sleep on things as part of how they routinely work? What’s your best guess?

How are you feeling? It turns out that your mood could be the difference between solving a problem, or not.

One evening, single parent Jerry Swartz simply wanted to occupy and entertain his three children so he brought home a laser pointer to show them. He started by shining the light onto different objects in the house and eventually started to shine the pointer onto moving objects to keep them engaged. They were simply relaxed, happy and everyone was in a good mood. Then he recounts that unexpectedly, “I knew I had it.”

It’s well known that being exposed to lots of noise is harmful – it raises blood pressure, increases stress levels and hampers performance. However, in contrast, the benefits of silence for our brains are more recently being established.

How often do your thoughts become clearer once given a bit of time to settle? Or an idea emerges from what originally seemed like a confusing mess of information? If we understood what occurs in our minds, perhaps we wouldn’t be so surprised when this happens.

Do you ever feel frustrated when you doze off when you don’t want to? But, what if dozing in and out of sleep was actually a helpful state to be in? What if we gave into it a bit more often (as long as we’re in a safe space and not operating machinery!).

At the onset of sleep there’s a state we enter called ‘hypnagogia’, which we experience as being half-asleep, half-awake. Charles Dickens talked of this as a time that enables the mind to “ramble at its pleasure.”

Not all ingenious ideas come about in a flash.

Not everyone experiences Eureka moments such as those made famous by Archimedes the Greek mathematician and scientist who worked out that the way to tell if the king’s crown was made of pure gold or of cheaper metal was by the amount of water it displaced. His Eureka moment is said to have come about whilst stepping into his bath and realising that the amount of water displaced was proportional to the weight of the object immersed in it.

At a time when many are in lock down, with the usual routines gone and people left trying to work out new ways of spending their time, what if we used this time to tackle problems differently too?

Studies show that incubating ideas substantially increases our likelihood of solving a problem. Interestingly, this is most likely with longer incubation periods and when not cognitively overloaded with tasks*. So if you find yourself facing longer periods of time indoors and with less routine or demanding work to occupy your mind, you may be able to make particular use of this habit to incubate ideas.

What's your typical doodle? Flowers? Houses? Stars? Faces? These are amongst the most common. Or are you someone who finds themselves scribbling the same abstract or geometric shapes over and over in different ways? Whatever your preference, you’re not alone in your doodles.

While scribbling in the margins, shading in the shapes and creating random patterns doesn’t sound particularly productive, there may actually be cognitive benefits of doodling.

In February 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev had a dream. It turned out to be quite an important dream which delivered an important outcome – the periodic table. Mendeleev had been working tirelessly to solve an incredibly complex problem: how to logically organise all the known elements in the universe. He had created a set of cards of all the elements that he would regularly shuffle and deal, with the hope that he find the rules that would explain how they all fitted together. He did this repeatedly and failed to crack the code. However, it was his dreaming brain that eventually solved what his awake brain could not.

When was the last time you were bored; when those little moments and tiny cracks in the day were left unfilled – while waiting for the lift, queuing for a sandwich or arriving early for a meeting?  Do you allow boredom to creep in, or are spaces quickly filled with snippets of news, a quick text or a catch up post?  

We crave stimulus and it’s only when we can’t find it externally that our minds tend to create it internally; sparking innovative ideas and solutions.

It may sound cliché to talk about getting your best ideas in the shower, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest it’s a great habit for your mind. Did you know that 72% of people get their best ideas in the shower*.

Stepping away from a difficult problem and creating space for solitude distracts the brain just enough to give it a chance to stop thinking deliberately about your challenge and daydream a little.

New ideas can come at any time - the week or weekend, day or night, at work or at leisure. Our brains do not make a clear work-life balance distinction in the same way as we might.

Be prepared for helpful ideas to happen at any time. Get into the habit of writing down your ideas in the moment and capture them before they slip away!

Aristotle, Einstein and Salvador Dali all made use of the 'micro-nap'; the tiniest of moments between being awake and asleep.

Dali would sit in his armchair with a key in his hand hovering above a plate and doze off. The idea was that just before falling into deep sleep, the key would fall and loudly land on the plate and he would wake with a sudden jolt of inspiration*.

People who take naps are twice as likely to solve complex problems than non-nappers*!

10 to 20 minutes is the perfect amount of time to nap to measurably boost your energy and alertness. NASA found that pilots who napped for 26 minutes improved their task performance by 34% and alertness by 54%, compared to pilots who didn't nap**.

When tackling complex problems or chunky pieces of work – don’t binge it in one go. This means avoiding the temptation to procrastinate and then work like crazy to hit a deadline. Equally it means not getting something done and dusted early in one go. Instead, plan your work differently. Start early and then deliberately build in time part way through where you step away. Then come back for a second bite.

It can often feel like we’re chasing the clock, constantly rushing to meet never ending deadlines. However, it can be incredibly helpful to not just momentarily step away and come back to a challenge, but to go away and actually 'sleep on it'.

Our brains really do "keep working" unconsciously, even when we've stopped.

It's why ‘ah-ha!’ moments – those times when ideas suddenly click together when we least expect them to – are much more likely to come about when your mind is relaxed and free from tasks. We call this Click Thinking. It happens when we stop focussing directly on the tasks in hand.

Take more walks. Leave all distractions behind. Don’t think about anything in particular, but once you’re back, consider what ideas crossed your mind.

It can be really helpful to mull ideas over to help prime for 'ah-ha' moments. 

Neuroscientists have linked alpha brain waves (the slow, electrical activity in the brain) to an increase in Click Thinking moments – that 'ah-ha!' when ideas suddenly come together in a ‘click’.

While we can’t make these happen on demand, we can help ourselves by finding enough time when our minds can wander and we are truly task-free.