Prime Your Brain

By Meredith Keeney

Have you ever wished that you could come up with more creative ideas? Well you can, you just need to know how to prime the creative portions of your brain and then once they are revved up and creating great ideas, how to maintain that level of production.
The method for this is simple as long as you remember that your brain isn’t a big computer. You can’t just punch in something and have it spit the answer back out. Like all organic things, you have to nurture it for a bit before you see a result, and then maintain it, or won’t thrive. But the good news is that as once you know the three step process for priming your creativity and the maintenance technique, you can keep the process going with very little effort on your part. Just try it, it’s easy.

1. Figure out what kind of idea you are trying to come up with and think really hard about it. Rack your brain for the idea, but don’t be discouraged if you come up with absolutely nothing good. You are really only planting the seeds right now.
2. Let it rest and turn your attention to something else. Your subconscious will continue to work on the problem while you go about your business. In fact if you keep obsessing about the matter, you will prevent the creative connections from being made. You must chill out and have absolute faith that something will come to you.

3. Periodically (once a day at least) mull the problem over, but don’t get yourself all worked up and don’t obsess. Just check in and see if you can think of something. What this last step does is to remind your subconscious of what it’s supposed to be working on.
In using this technique, you will find that you start coming up with all kinds of interesting ideas at odd times. You will likely come up with great ideas for all the different areas in your life. When each of these come to you, immediately write them down before you lose them (it pays to keep a pen and paper on you at all times, including next to the bed at night), then when you have recorded your brainstorm, spend a few seconds thinking about the original problem again to redirect your brain back on track.

At some point the answer to the original problem will crystallize for you, but don’t let the process stop there. You can keep the level of idea production up (and ramp it up even higher), if you always take care to record each idea as it comes to you and mentally ask yourself for more. It’s all about supply and demand. If you ever stop recording your ideas, or try to just remember it and intend to write it down later, you will shut down the creative process quickly. It’s as if your brain spends so much energy trying to retain it’s previous ideas that it has none left to create new. You must get the old ones out of the way if you want new ones to occur.
So that’s it in a nutshell. Prime your brain and get it working at a high output, and then keep it producing at that level by clearing out the old stuff to make way for the new. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it works.