Welcome to Career Advise, the newsletter providing career advice, how-tos, and life musings through an optimistic and intriguing lens.

Each week, you will receive two newsletters written by the Oppstartr Team. Mondays — Our career-focused newsletter. Fridays — Out of Office where we discuss life and other thought-provoking ideas.

Happy Friday to you all, and welcome to Out of Office, the weekend edition of Career Advise.

You’re standing in the shower and the following happens:

“Whoa that’s an interesting thought… I’ll definitely remember that.”

“Wait what was it again?”

“Shoot, I did it again. Do they make dry-erase boards for the shower?”

If I had a dollar for every time the above scenario happened to me while I was in the shower, I would be sitting pretty. It’s a fairly common experience for enough people and myself that I thought I should cover this interesting phenomenon. That is, why do deep and interesting thoughts come to us in the shower?

Forced Stop

Think of another activity in which you are awake, in a fixed spot, and not really doing anything mentally taxing. I’ll wait. I cannot think of anything else. In our busy, rushed lives, unfortunately, it’s the one time of the day we are forced to stop. As modern people we are so accustomed to constantly rushing and needing to be “productive”, and it is taxing for our brains. Perhaps we should learn from this time of day and stop or at least slow down at certain moments.

Relaxing Environment

I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t enjoy a warm shower. I know there are the die-hard cold shower people, but I think if pressed on the issue, they would agree a warm shower is more relaxing. Studies have shown that warm water can lower blood pressure, and in turn, make you feel relaxed. Uncontrolled stress is not conducive to creative thoughts and connections. You simply will focus on the stressors, because it is viewed as a threat. When threats loom over us, we aren’t capable of creative thinking.

No Distractions

You are not taking literature (besides the text on the bottles if you're the person who finds yourself reading that), your laptop, or iPhone into the shower – most likely. Waterproof cases exist for smartphones, but if you cannot help but scroll through social media in the shower, you need to take a long hard look at yourself. With no distractions, you are by yourself with only your mind. It’s a time of the day in which you are forced to be without distractions. When your mind doesn’t have constant stimuli it can do what it does best: think.

You’re On Autopilot

When we do simple passive tasks, this allows our brains to go into what is called the Default Mode Network (DMN). The National Geographic article, which I highly recommend reading, goes into what this “mode” is and why it happens when we are engaged in unfocused activities. The DMN is what our minds switch back to whenever we are not engaged in a focused task, and this allows for multiple areas of the brain to network with each other, and from these complex connections, we can get truly unique and novel ideas. When we let go of active thinking, our brains are free to wander. So daydreaming is not as bad as we have been led to believe if we want to have creative ideas.

So it seems these shower thoughts are pretty unique. So, do they make a shower dry-erase board? A quick look over at Amazon, and the answer is yes (of course).

I may need to make a small investment.

Thoughts

• Is this the only time in which you have these creative thoughts? If so, how could you cultivate time or find relaxing activities to allow for them?

Thank you for reading Career Advise. Be sure to read our upcoming issue on Monday where we focus on our third pillar: Tend the Orchard.

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