This is Why You’re the Most Creative at Night

Everyone knows that we can be the most creative when we’re out of our element and experiencing something new. People often travel in order to rejuvenate their creative juice and some people go as far as forcing themselves to do something uncomfortable each day. It’s hard to argue that our brain works in mysterious ways. With billions of neurons firing every minute and quadrillions of dendrites constantly interweaving one another to decipher complex algorithmic patterns our consciousness acknowledge as thoughts, our brain can process remarkable amount of information during it’s waking hours. Yet there are still reports of people who perform better during the late night hours, when the brain is suppose to be sleeping. Why is that?

 

Understanding how our brain works

To better understand why we’re more creative at night, we must first understand how our brain works. The vast majority of decisions are made by your frontal cortex, a region located at the front of your head just above your orbital sockets. The frontal cortex is a remarkable centralize processing machine responsible for executive functions such as planning, making decisions, attention, and inhibition. All sensory information we received from external stimuli are processed and interpreted by our frontal cortex when it’s active. Without your frontal cortex, information wouldn’t be filtered correctly and things wouldn’t make sense to you. In a way, it acts as both a translator and a filter. And it determines what the other parts of your brain receive.

A more simplified way of understanding of the frontal cortex is…think of it like the teacher of the class. Now imagine that teacher going into the hallway for 5 minutes…you know what I’m talking about. The students go wild. The same is true for our imagination.

 

Circadian rhythm

Before we dive into how the creative process is released, we must talk about the mysterious circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is our body’s endogenous method of keeping track of time. Your frontal cortex picks up external stimuli and clues from your normal routine and uses it as a baseline to determine what time of day it is. And it’s these clues that often triggers your brain to turn off and you suddenly feel tired. Understanding the circadian rhythm is important in learning how to unlock our creativity at night. Knowing what your brain picks up in order to identify “sleep time” is important and you can use that information to get yourself into a sleepy state, even when you’re not (more on this later).

 

Dopamine’s role in creativity

Your frontal cortex  produces a chemical known as dopamine and it’s commonly referred to as the “Reward” neurotransmitter by psychologists. Dopamine makes you essentially feel good for doing things. Without dopamine, you’d feel lethargic, unmotivated, and lazy. Dopamine gives you the fuel to go through your day and feel accomplished. Towards the end of your day, the production of dopamine slows down. Your brain begins producing other chemicals that blocks dopamine receptors in the frontal cortex.

Once blocked, your brain no longer feels rewarded for its actions, and therefore it decides now is the time to go to sleep. And the way your brain knows when it’s time to release these dopamine-blocking chemicals is through your circadian rhythm. There are things in your environment and routine that triggers your brain. It’s saying that it’s time for bed and time to relieve your frontal cortex from its duty. And that’s when the fun begins.

 

How you enter the creative process

While you’re awake, your frontal cortex filters anything it doesn’t understand out. That prevents it from making it to your consciousness. When your frontal cortex is turned off (or when you’re feeling sleepy and tired), it no longer has the ability to filter information. Anything goes. Information that wouldn’t have made it to your consciousness now surfaces, and ideas you’ve never even thought of flashes before you.

You are most creative at night largely because you lose your inhibition and your ability to filter out things that don’t normally make sense to you. To put it simply, you’re more creative at night because you stopped caring what makes sense and what doesn’t.

 

How to take advantage of this

If you ever need to solve a complicated problem or work through something challenging, wait until the moment you’re too tired to continue. And then push yourself to stay awake. You’ll be rewarded with unfiltered thoughts, ideas, innovation, and the answers you’ve been looking for.