You’ve probably been there. A blank document, a deadline, and a brain that offers you the same three tired ideas it offered last month. Then, two days later, a good idea turns up while you’re rinsing a mug. Annoying? Very. But it’s also a clue.
Creativity isn’t a personality type that some people got at birth and the rest of us missed. Researchers have spent decades measuring it, training it and trying to break it, and the picture that comes out is surprisingly practical. Your ideas respond to how you move, how you rest, who you talk to, what tools you use and how long you stick with a problem before you give up.
Below are 18 ways to get more and better ideas out of your head. Each one comes with the evidence behind it, including the limits of that evidence, and a small thing you can do this week. Some will suit you more than others. That’s fine. Pick two and start there.
1. Stop calling yourself “not a creative person”
That label does more damage than you’d think. If you believe creativity belongs to artists and designers, you won’t bother practising it, and the belief quietly proves itself.
The best large-scale evidence against the label comes from the OECD. In June 2024 it published PISA 2022 Results (Volume III): Creative Minds, Creative Schools, the first time PISA tested creative thinking. Fifteen-year-olds in 64 countries and economies were asked to produce original ideas for tasks like writing a story or planning a school awareness campaign. About 78% reached the baseline level of proficiency. More telling, the OECD found that students can do very well in creative thinking without doing very well in maths, reading or science. In other words, being “not academic” and being “not creative” are two different things. This is still the latest edition of that assessment, and it covers teenagers, not adults, so treat it as a signal rather than a verdict about you.
If the “real creatives” in your office make you feel like a fraud, the pattern may be familiar from imposter syndrome, and the fix starts the same way: question the story you tell about yourself.
Your move: for one week, swap “I’m not creative” for “I haven’t practised this yet.” Say it out loud once, then do item 2.
2. Go for a walk when you need ideas
This is the cheapest tool on the list, and the evidence for it is unusually strong.
A team led by Alex Thabane at McMaster University pooled 23 studies with 1,036 participants in a May 2026 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE on walking and creative thinking. Walking had a large effect on divergent thinking, the ability to come up with many original ideas (Cohen’s d = 0.93). When they kept only randomised trials, the effect stayed large (d = 0.82). The authors put it in plain terms: after a walk, the average person is likely to out-generate more than 80% of people who didn’t walk. Walking did nothing measurable for convergent thinking, the part where you pick the best answer.
Two honest caveats. Most participants were university students, and many of the positive randomised trials came from a single researcher, which the authors themselves flag. Outdoor walks looked slightly better than indoor ones, but the difference wasn’t statistically significant. A corridor works.
Test it this week: next time you’re stuck, take a 10-minute walk with the problem in mind and a notes app open. No podcast. Write down every idea, even the silly ones.
3. Push past your first batch of ideas
Early ideas arrive fast. That speed fools you.
Brian Lucas (now at Cornell) and Loran Nordgren (Kellogg School of Management) called this the “creative cliff illusion” in a 2020 paper in PNAS. In one study, 165 people predicted, minute by minute, how creative they’d be during a five-minute brainstorm about raising charity donations. They expected to fade. Independent raters found the opposite: their ideas got more creative as the session went on. In a contest with students and alumni of The Second City comedy training programme, people who believed their best ideas come first quit sooner, submitted fewer captions and had fewer rated as highly creative.
Why does it happen? Later ideas take more effort, and we mistake effort for a sign of quality dropping. The obvious ideas live near the surface. The interesting ones need digging. People who did creative work regularly were less fooled, which tells you the illusion can be unlearned. The study is from 2020, so it’s older than I’d like, but it’s the original finding on this effect and I didn’t find a newer replication that overturns it.
If this sounds like the point where you’d normally drift off to check email, it’s also where deep work begins; our guide on how to enter the flow state covers how to stay with a task once it gets hard. When you hit the moment you feel “done”, set a timer for five more minutes and keep going.
4. Brainstorm questions instead of answers
Sometimes you’re stuck because the question is wrong, not because you lack ideas.
Hal Gregersen, a senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT Sloan and a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, has built a method around this called the “question burst.” You describe your challenge briefly, then spend a few minutes generating nothing but questions about it. No answers allowed. The goal is to find a question that makes you a little uncomfortable, because that’s usually the one poking at a hidden assumption.
In March 2026, MIT Sloan described how Gregersen adapted this for AI with a tool called Question Burst Catalyst. The design choice that matters: the human generates questions first, before the AI adds any. Gregersen’s concern is that teams who hand this job to a chatbot lose the skill, and he notes that “LLMs typically give an average, meme-type response.” This is an expert’s method and a tool description, not a controlled trial, so judge it by whether it helps you.
Asking good questions is a social skill too, and the same habits that make you good at conversation make a question burst work.
Give it a go: set a four-minute timer, write your problem at the top of a page and list at least 15 questions under it. Circle the one that bothers you most. Work on that one.
5. Use the edge of sleep
Thomas Edison reportedly napped holding something that would drop and wake him as he dozed off. Turns out the trick has data behind it.
In December 2021, Célia Lacaux, Delphine Oudiette and colleagues at the Paris Brain Institute published a study in Science Advances with 103 participants. People tried maths problems that hid a shortcut rule, then took a short rest while their brain activity was recorded. Those who drifted into the very first stage of sleep (called N1) for as little as 15 seconds, without going deeper, were far more likely to find the hidden rule afterwards: 83% of them did, compared with 30% of those who stayed awake. People who fell into deeper sleep lost the advantage.
A 2023 follow-up in Scientific Reports by Adam Haar Horowitz, Robert Stickgold and colleagues at MIT went further. Playing audio cues at sleep onset to steer dream content toward a theme boosted performance on creative tasks about that theme compared with staying awake. Both studies are small and lab-based, and both are older than two years. I kept them because they’re the main experiments on this specific state, and the only newer work I found was an unpublished 2025 conference poster.
None of this is a reason to cut back on sleep. If afternoons leave you foggy rather than dreamy, our tips on how to fight sleepiness at work may help more than any nap trick.
A quick experiment: before a short rest, read your problem once. Lie down with a notebook nearby, and when you surface from that half-asleep haze, write down whatever’s in your head before you check your phone.
6. Take breaks that keep your hands busy and your mind loose
You know the “shower thought.” There’s a reason it happens in the shower and not while you’re filling in a tax form.
Zachary Irving (University of Virginia), Caitlin Mills and colleagues tested this in a paper in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, published online in September 2022 and in print in December 2024. Students at the University of New Hampshire generated alternate uses for everyday objects, then watched either a boring or a moderately engaging three-minute video before trying again. During the engaging video, more mind wandering went with more creative ideas. During the boring one, it didn’t. The authors’ explanation is that mildly engaging activities give your thoughts a loose leash: enough freedom to roam, enough structure to stay useful.
The sample was small and made up of students, and the effect is a correlation within each condition. Still, it fits everyday experience. Washing up, gardening, a familiar route on a bike. Mind wandering only helps when it wanders somewhere new, though. If yours keeps circling the same worry, that’s a different problem, and our piece on how to stop ruminating thoughts is a better place to start.
Start small: pick one dull-but-not-mindless chore each day and do it without audio. Keep a pen nearby.
7. Split idea time from judging time
Generating ideas and choosing between them use different mental gears. Mixing them in the same session tends to jam both.
The reason is fairly mechanical. Divergent thinking relies on loose, wide-ranging association: you need to pull in distant memories and weird connections. Convergent thinking, the evaluating part, leans on focused attention and working memory. Thabane’s 2026 walking review (item 2) found exactly this split: walking boosted idea generation strongly but did nothing for convergent thinking, which the authors link to its heavier reliance on working memory. Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levav found a similar split in their 2022 Nature study of video calls (more in item 16): screens hurt idea generation but not idea selection.
So the causal chain is fairly clear. Judging an idea switches on the narrow, critical mode. Once that mode is running, the loose search that produces unusual ideas gets cut short. The evidence for the split is solid. The claim that mixing them always hurts is my inference from it, not something those studies tested directly.
Picture this: you’re planning a product launch, and every time someone suggests an idea, someone else says “we tried that.” Forty minutes later you have four ideas and a headache. Next time, do this: give the first 15 minutes to generating only, with a rule that nobody evaluates anything. Take a break. Then judge.
8. Think before you prompt
AI tools are good at producing ideas. The catch is that they tend to produce the same ideas for everyone.
Alwin de Rooij (Tilburg University) and Michael Mose Biskjaer (Aarhus University) pooled 19 studies with 61 effect sizes in a 2026 meta-analysis showing that generative AI makes creative output more homogeneous, presented at the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics in September 2026. Using AI was linked to a small but reliable homogenisation effect (d = 0.334), robust to sensitivity checks and not explained by publication bias. Their framing is careful: each user may look more creative, but across many users, ideas drift toward the same middle.
A January 2025 preprint by Emily Wenger (Duke) and Yoed Kenett (Technion) suggests switching tools won’t save you. When they compared many different language models on standard creativity tests, the models’ answers were far more similar to each other than human answers were. That paper hadn’t been peer-reviewed when I checked, so weigh it accordingly.
This doesn’t mean you should ban AI. It means order matters. If your phone and laptop already decide a lot of your attention, the ideas in digital minimalism apply here too: use the tool on your terms.
Here’s a simple way in: write your own list of 10 ideas first. Only then ask the AI for more, and ask it specifically for ideas that don’t overlap with yours.
9. Borrow expertise you don’t have
A lot of innovation is just someone from department A seeing department B’s problem with fresh eyes.
Procter & Gamble ran a pre-registered field experiment on this with 776 of its professionals, led by Fabrizio Dell’Acqua, Ethan Mollick, Karim Lakhani and colleagues (NBER working paper, March 2025; published in Organization Science online in June 2026). People worked on real product innovation challenges, either alone or in two-person cross-functional teams, with or without AI. Without AI, R&D staff mostly proposed technical solutions and commercial staff mostly proposed commercial ones. Teams that mixed the two produced more balanced ideas. Individuals given AI matched the performance of human teams without AI and also produced balanced solutions, whatever their background. Teams with AI were the most likely to produce top-tier ideas.
The case shows two routes to the same goal: pair with someone outside your field, or use AI deliberately to ask “how would marketing see this?” The second route is useful. The first, based on the top-tier result, still has an edge. It’s one company and one-day workshops, so longer projects may play out differently.
If teamwork across functions usually feels clumsy, our guide on how to collaborate more effectively covers the basics. This week, take one problem to a colleague in a completely different role and ask how they’d approach it.
10. Practise open-awareness mindfulness
Mindfulness has a reputation for calm. Its effect on creativity is less talked about, and more modest, but real.
Zoe Hughes, Linden Ball and colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire published a meta-analysis in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in July 2023. Across studies with control groups, mindfulness interventions improved creative performance with a small-to-moderate effect (d = 0.42). Longer interventions mattered, and the gains were bigger for convergent tasks, like finding the link between three words, than for open-ended idea generation.
The type of practice may matter too. An older experiment by Lorenza Colzato and colleagues at Leiden University (2012) compared two styles. Open-monitoring meditation, where you notice whatever arises without holding on to it, improved divergent thinking. Focused-attention meditation, where you fix on one object, did not. That’s a single small study and over a decade old, so treat it as a lead, not a rule. The meta-analysis is the firmer ground. The older Stoic tradition gets at a similar skill of watching your thoughts without being dragged around by them; if that appeals, see our Stoic exercises.
Do this once a day for a week: sit for 10 minutes, and rather than focusing on your breath, simply label what shows up (“thought,” “sound,” “itch”) and let it pass.
11. Learn the “why” behind another culture’s habits
Travel is nice. What seems to change your thinking is something more specific.
William Maddux (INSEAD) and Adam Galinsky (then at Northwestern) reported across five studies in 2009, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that time spent living abroad was linked to higher creativity, while time spent merely travelling was not. The link ran through adaptation: people who had actually adjusted to another culture showed the benefit. A 2010 follow-up by Maddux, Hajo Adam and Galinsky in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin narrowed it further. Recalling a moment of learning why people in another culture behave as they do boosted creativity, but only among people who had lived abroad.
The mechanism makes sense step by step. You meet a behaviour that seems odd. You learn the reason behind it. Now you hold two valid ways of doing the same thing, and your brain learns that the “obvious” way is just one option. That habit transfers to other problems. Most of this work is correlational, with short priming experiments on top, so it doesn’t prove that moving abroad makes you creative. A more recent meta-analysis by Jennifer Haase, Paul Hanel and Norbert Gronau (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, print issue August 2025) found cultural exposure among the most effective ways to enhance creativity, with an effect around g = 0.66. These studies are old, but they remain the core research on this question.
You don’t need a passport. When you notice yourself running the same week on repeat, our piece on how to stop living on autopilot has more ideas. For now, find one custom from a culture you know little about and dig until you can explain why it exists.
12. Train creativity like a skill, and expect slow gains
Can you actually get better at being creative? Yes. Just not as dramatically as course brochures suggest.
Two big meta-analyses help here. They agree on the direction and differ on the size.
| Meta-analysis | What it covered | Average effect |
|---|---|---|
| Haase, Hanel & Gronau (print Aug 2025) | 332 effect sizes, adults | g = 0.53 |
| Sio & Lortie-Forgues (May 2024), unadjusted | 169 studies, 844 effect sizes, five decades | 0.53 SD |
| Sio & Lortie-Forgues, adjusted for publication bias | same data | 0.29 to 0.32 SD |
Ut Na Sio (University of Sheffield) and Hugues Lortie-Forgues, writing in Psychological Bulletin, found strong signs of publication bias: studies with disappointing results seem to go unpublished. Once they corrected for it, the average benefit of creativity training dropped to roughly a third of a standard deviation. They also found many weak study designs. Haase and colleagues, using a different set of studies, estimated that about 70% of people in creativity-boosting conditions outperformed the average person in control groups.
So training works, modestly. That’s honest and still useful, because small gains compound if you keep practising. The Sio paper is slightly older than two years; I kept it because it’s the largest and most rigorous review of training to date.
Set it up like this: choose one exercise (alternate uses for an object, a question burst, 10 ideas a day) and do it for 10 minutes, three times a week, for two months. Keep the lists. Compare week one with week eight.
13. Give yourself a constraint
Think about cooking from a nearly empty fridge. You’d never have put those four ingredients together by choice, yet sometimes that’s the best meal of the week. The limits force you off your usual recipes.
The analogy holds up, within limits. Oguz Acar, Murat Tarakci and Daan van Knippenberg reviewed research on constraints across management, entrepreneurship, marketing and organisational behaviour in the Journal of Management (2019). Their starting point was that findings on constraints like deadlines, rules and tight budgets were fragmented and contradictory. Their conclusion was that constraints don’t automatically kill creativity; whether they help depends on the type of constraint (on inputs, on the process or on the output) and on how it affects people’s motivation and thinking. It’s a 2019 review, the most complete synthesis I found, so newer studies may refine it.
Where the fridge analogy breaks: a chef with an empty fridge isn’t usually afraid of being fired for a bad omelette. Constraints that arrive with fear or crushing time pressure are more likely to narrow your thinking than sharpen it. A constraint you pick yourself is a game. One forced on you under threat is just stress.
Small businesses live with constraints every day, which is partly why some of them out-think bigger rivals; we cover that in how to deal with competition as a small business. Your move: add one rule to your next project. Half the budget, no text, three colours only, a 100-word limit. See what the rule forces you to invent.
14. Put more nature in front of your eyes
Green spaces have a reputation as idea factories. The evidence is more modest than the reputation, but it’s there.
Mika Koivisto of the University of Turku, with Simone Grassini and colleagues, ran an online experiment with 297 people, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2025. Watching nature videos, compared with urban videos, improved the creativity and originality of verbal ideas and the creativity of visual ones. The twist: the benefit was biggest for people who found the nature footage genuinely fascinating. Feeling relaxed or happy didn’t explain the effect.
That last part matters. Nature probably isn’t a magic switch. It seems to work when it actually holds your attention in a soft, effortless way. Those were short videos watched online, so real woods may do more, or less.
Test it this week: before a creative task, spend five minutes looking at something natural that interests you. A tree outside, a park bench, even a good nature clip. Then start.
15. Make it safe to say half-baked ideas
Every creative person has unfinished ideas. Whether they share them depends a lot on what happens when they do.
Silvia Castro, Florian Englmaier and Maria Guadalupe studied this inside a global healthcare company (CEPR Discussion Paper, 2025). Using data from more than 500 teams and over 4,300 employees, they found that teams where people felt safe voicing ideas were associated with more innovation, better performance and more stable membership. Then they ran a randomised trial. Managers were encouraged to hold regular one-to-ones, and the content of those meetings was varied. Conversations focused on employees’ psychological needs raised psychological safety; task-focused ones helped only where safety was already moderate. The interventions also improved how innovative teams were perceived to be.
This is a discussion paper, not yet peer-reviewed, and it measures perceived innovativeness rather than patents or products. Even so, it’s one of the few studies that tests a fix rather than just a correlation. If you manage people, our guide on how to be a good boss goes deeper on the everyday behaviours that build trust.
If you lead a team: in your next one-to-one, spend the first 10 minutes on how the person is doing and what’s getting in their way, not on task status. And when someone shares a rough idea, ask a question about it before you critique it.
16. Brainstorm in the same room, or switch the camera off
Video calls are great for many things. Wild ideas aren’t one of them.
Melanie Brucks (Columbia Business School) and Jonathan Levav (Stanford) published a study in Nature in April 2022. In a lab experiment with 602 participants and a field experiment with 1,490 engineers at a telecoms company across five countries, pairs who met in person generated more ideas, and more creative ones, than pairs on video. When it came to picking the best idea, video pairs did just as well. Eye-tracking showed why: on video, people stared at their partner’s face much more, and that narrower visual focus seems to narrow thinking. In-person pairs looked around the room, and objects in the room sparked associations.
The effect is real but not huge; one outside researcher, Jay Olson at McGill, described it as roughly one or two ideas’ difference. Brucks herself has suggested turning cameras off during idea generation so people can look around, while noting she hadn’t tested that. It’s a 2022 paper, and I couldn’t find a newer trial that overturns it.
Meetings are where most group brainstorming dies, so it’s worth getting the format right; see our guide on how to conduct effective meetings in the workplace. For remote teams, run the idea-generation part with cameras off and let people move around. Turn cameras back on for choosing.
17. Treat creativity as part of your job, not a hobby you do after work
If you think creativity is a “nice extra,” your employer probably doesn’t.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, published on 7 January 2025, surveyed more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 55 economies. Creative thinking ranked fourth among the core skills employers say their workers need today, behind analytical thinking, resilience and leadership. It also sits among the skills expected to grow in importance by 2030, and the report names slower economic growth and trade restrictions as forces making creative thinking more valuable, because companies need new ways to compete under pressure. This is the latest edition of the report, which comes out every two years.
Surveys of employer expectations aren’t proof of anything about your own career. They do tell you something useful: creative work belongs on your calendar and in your performance review. Your spare time can have the leftovers.
Over the next month: block one 45-minute slot each week labelled “thinking” in your calendar and protect it like a meeting. At the end of the month, write down one creative contribution you made at work, so you can point to it later.
18. Make something with your hands, just for you
Knitting, pottery, fixing up an old chair. Crafts get recommended for creativity all the time, and the newer data supports making them a habit, with a twist about what it actually measures.
Helen Keyes and colleagues at Anglia Ruskin University analysed survey responses from 7,182 adults in England, published in Frontiers in Public Health in August 2024. The data came from the UK government’s Taking Part survey for 2019 to 2020. About 37% had done at least one arts or craft activity, like painting, pottery, knitting or woodwork, in the previous year. Those people reported higher life satisfaction, more happiness and a stronger sense that life was worthwhile, even after accounting for age, health, employment and deprivation. The boost to feeling that life is worthwhile was comparable to the boost from having a job. Crafting wasn’t linked to lower anxiety or loneliness, and the authors stress that the data is correlational.
So why is this on a creativity list? Because making things regularly, at low stakes, is practice. Nobody’s grading your wonky bowl. And as item 3 showed, people who do creative work often are less fooled by the belief that their ideas run out. A craft also builds the steady routine that the good habits worth keeping are made of.
Start small: pick one hands-on activity you haven’t tried since school and give it 20 minutes this weekend. The point is to make something, not something good.
What to do when you slip
You’ll have weeks where none of this happens. You’ll skip the walks, ask the AI first and spend your “thinking” slot answering emails. That’s normal, and it doesn’t reset you to zero.
A systematic review by Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia, published in Healthcare in December 2024, looked at 20 studies with more than 2,600 adults trying to build health habits. Where studies measured it, habits took a median of about 59 to 66 days to form, with huge individual variation, from 4 days to 335. The review also notes that missing a single opportunity didn’t meaningfully change how the habit developed over time. Singh’s practical advice was to aim for consistency rather than perfection and to pick the habit back up the next day. These studies were about health behaviours, not creativity, so the numbers are a rough guide, not a deadline.
There’s a creative version of the slip too: the moment you feel your ideas drying up and stop. Lucas and Nordgren found that simply telling people about the creative cliff illusion helped reduce it. You now know. When it feels like you’re out of ideas, that’s the feeling the research says to distrust.
If you’ve stalled for a while, don’t try to restart everything. Pick the single easiest item from this list and do it tomorrow. If avoidance has become the real problem, our strategies to beat procrastination can help you get moving again.
Conclusion
Being more creative and innovative is less about waiting for inspiration and more about setting up conditions where ideas can show up. Move. Rest at the edge of sleep. Keep going after the easy ideas run out. Think before you prompt. Mix with people who see the world differently, and make it safe for them to speak.
None of these will turn you into a different person overnight. The training evidence says gains are real but modest, and that’s fine. Choose two ideas from this list, try them for a month, and keep the notes so you can see what changed.
Want more practical, research-backed ways to grow? Explore our self-improvement articles and pick your next small experiment.
