What happens when we stop pushing and give our minds room to wander
I’m very good at filling empty space. I excel at it! But I’m learning that creativity needs space, too.
When I’m out walking or gardening, I’m usually listening to a podcast or audiobook, or chatting with a friend. When I’m waiting, I’ll knit, check my phone, update emails or message someone. Even sitting in the garden can become an opportunity to read a few pages of a book or make a list. I love a list!
I’ve often talked about how good I am at ‘making the most of my time’ rather than doing nothing. I can still hear my mum saying something about it being better to do something than waste time.
I’ve noticed something similar in my creative work. When I’m struggling with a piece of writing, my instinct is to push harder. I stay at my laptop or notebook, trying to sort out the problem. Surely, if I concentrate hard enough, I’ll find the answer?
Except creativity doesn’t always work that way.
Sometimes the answer comes when I’m walking, gardening, driving or doing something that has very little to do with the problem I’ve been trying to solve. I hear other writers and creatives say the same thing.
How creativity needs space to let the mind wander
There’s a reason ideas can arrive when we’re not actively trying to find them. Our minds can continue making connections when our attention has moved elsewhere.
Psychologists call this ‘mind wandering’. It happens when our thoughts move away from the task immediately in front of us, allowing us to drift between memories, ideas and associations.
A 2025 study published in Scientific Reports explored the relationship between mind wandering and creative writing. Researchers found that participants who reported more mind wandering during a break from a writing task tended to show greater improvement in their creative performance when they returned to the task. The findings don’t mean that taking a break will automatically improve our writing, but they offer an interesting insight into what might happen when we give a creative problem some breathing space.
Earlier research by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman also explored the relationship between boredom and creativity, finding that some boring activities could help people perform better on subsequent creative tasks.
Neither study suggests that we need to sit around doing nothing in the hope that a brilliant idea will arrive. But both raise an interesting question: what might happen if we stopped trying to fill every quiet moment?
Do we need to stop filling every moment?
Our phones make it remarkably easy to fill the smallest gaps in our days.
Waiting for the kettle? Check the phone.
Waiting for an appointment? Check the phone.
Going for a walk? Put on a podcast.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. I enjoy plenty of them myself. But when do we leave ourselves any unfilled space?
As writers, we need to make connections. We might remember something that happened years ago and realise it belongs in the story we’re writing. We might find an image, a phrase or a possibility that wasn’t there when we were staring at the screen trying to force it out.
This kind of thinking can’t always be summoned on command. Sometimes we need to step away from the work and let our minds wander.
And there’s a difference between deliberately trying to be bored and becoming a little more comfortable with having nothing in particular to do. As I explore in this month’s Mindset Insight, the point isn’t to manufacture boredom or turn walking, gardening or resting into another productivity strategy. It’s to give ourselves permission to leave some space unfilled.
You don’t have to earn space for creativity
Many of us have learned to think of time as either productive or unproductive. Writing is productive. Editing is productive. Research is productive. Even reading a book can feel productive if we’re doing it for our work.
But creative work needs more than output. It needs attention, curiosity, memory, observation and connection. Some of that comes from sitting down and doing the work. Some of it comes from stepping away.
Perhaps we could start small. Take a walk without listening to anything. Sit in the garden without picking up a book. Let yourself wait for the kettle without reaching for your phone.
You might not have a brilliant idea. That’s fine. The point is to give yourself a little room to think, notice and simply be.
In this month’s Mindset Insight, I explore the research into mind wandering and boredom, my own tendency to fill every gap, and how we can make space for creative thinking without turning it into another task on our to-do list.