A 50-Minute Morning Routine to Boost Your Creativity

Regain your creative connection.

How the Routine Found Me — Shattered

I hung up the phone. Hands trembling and vision gone sideways, I stumbled back onto my bed. The saltiness of tears stung my eyes, but before letting them fall, I quickly wrote an email to HR that would end up costing me a dream job and my connection to my creative source.

At the beginning of the pandemic, back when the memes were still funny and Tiger King was trending, I was scrambling for a high-paying writing job to make up for the loss in freelance clients that the pandemic brought for me. What I wanted and dreamed of was an office job as a content writer and editor for an organization. A job that allowed me to work from home while still paying me over $40,000.

That was the dream. And I achieved it almost immediately. I was hired as the communications and grants officer of a local nonprofit that helped domestic and sexual abuse victims. I wrote stories that helped change lives. My creativity was being challenged while I made a difference. This was the first time that I could say that.

But for the three months that I worked for that nonprofit, my emotions and creativity were torn down. I was the only dark-skinned person of color on the 70+ staff and often felt out of place and was subject to racist jokes by my supervisor. It all came to a head one afternoon. After repeated attempts to contact my supervisor for an overdue project that had been waiting on his input for over a week, I sent one final email explaining where we were at in the project and how important his input was to moving to the next stage. That email sparked him to make an unrecorded call to my personal cell phone.

During the call that left me shaken to the core, he used racist language to insult my ability to communicate, write, and work while making veiled threats about my job. The whole time, I kept asking for HR and telling him that what he was saying was making me uncomfortable. He refused and only ended the call when he was done. Weeks later I was fired for job incompetency and insubordination. When I asked HR and the Director of the nonprofit if the real reason was that I had raised concerns about a superior officer being racist, they both answered yes.

As a queer Black woman, racism and discrimination are nothing new to me. What was new was the close tie to my craft. They had attacked my ability to do what I know I do well. They attacked my ability to communicate through words, linking it to my race and a traumatic work event. At this point, my core was shattered.

I lost my connection to what made me, me. I lost my spark of creativity. This spiral led to a lot of doomscrolling, anxiety buying, and other unhealthy habits. It took me several months to find my way back to a healthy relationship with my craft and creativity. But that journey led me to wonder and wondering led me to reading.

In my months of reading and researching into our connection with creativity and its benefits for not just artists but people in general, I learned some things about what aids in creativity. This brought me to come up with the Jumpstart Creativity Morning Routine. I didn’t want to just focus on the benefits of creativity but the benefits to everyday life through creativity. So, these steps all connect you with the present, with your body, and with the world around you.

Our Creative Connection and How to Get it Back

Being creative allows us to make new neural pathways and cognitive developments at a faster rate while boosting our mood and lowering our stress levels. This is because expression is a big part of what makes us humans.

We can write an opera or play showing the ache in our hearts at a great loss. Splashing colors on a blank canvas to us is more than just randomness. There’s meaning there. Meaning that helps us grow and connects us to the wider experience of being human and individuals in the world.

More often than not, especially in today's creator society, the world of the innovator, creativity is reserved for those who are making a living at it. But this is doing a greater harm to our community than anything.

Creativity shouldn’t be reserved for the likes of me *the artist*. Stay at home guardians need creativity to help keep up with the constant demands of childhood development. Mechanics need creativity to problem solve issues within a troublesome car or to do custom jobs that test their abilities and skills.

Creativity is a human right. We all need to exercise our creative muscles and think about the world as an artist. If we don’t, we’ll bring on our demise quicker than the dinosaurs.

Anthropologist Augustín Fuentes author of the book The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional sees art as something that has been with us since the beginning. Picture this, half a million years ago, our ancestors were designing beautiful tools that served both an aesthetic function and a purpose.

Creativity and innovation, for us humans, goes hand-in-hand.

When we get down to it, creativity is what has helped us advance and come up with new tools, inventions, and ways of life to elevate ourselves as a species. It is also what has given us the beauty of hair ballads and hip hop. Creativity elevates our society and our souls.

Without it, we run the risk of perishing and falling into the dark void of stagnation.

Luckily there’s a way to avoid that. Scientists are steady at work coming up with ways to boost creativity and keep us connected to what makes us, us. After researching the different methods and findings of various studies and reports, I’ve found what is proven to be the best morning routine for fostering creativity that will bring more gratitude and wellness into your life.

Jumpstart Creativity Morning Routine

Get 8 hours of sleep

The brain does a lot of work while we are sleeping. Psychologist Deirdre Barrett, author of The Committee of Sleep says, “In the sleep state, the brain thinks much more visually and intuitively. Dreams are just thinking in a different biochemical state.”

A 2004 study from the University of Lübeck in Germany gave subjects math problems that relied on algorithms to complete. Except they were tricksy. Hidden inside the formulas was an intricate shortcut. On the first go-around, 25% found the shortcut. After 8 hours of sleep, that percentage skyrocketed from 25% to 59%.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after a good’s night rest and a dream of a monster built from the dead.

During REM sleep, our fight-or-flight hormone cortisol spikes. This up in hormones allows for our brain to begin creating imaginative connections between the things in our lives and our internal selves. Dopamine plays as a reward for fostering creativity in both our sleeping and waking lives.

An alternative to getting a full 8 hours of sleep is to aim for the Tesla or Leonardo method. Leonardo, Niccola Tesla, and Thomas Edison took several brief naps throughout their days. This allowed them to stay always close to their REM cycles and constantly at a state of peak creativity and performance.

Drink a 16oz glass of water as soon as you wake up

Drinking water has not only hot trendy benefits, but it is also a necessary thing in our day to day lives. Something that as we distance ourselves from the present, from reality, we often forget to do. That’s why there are so many apps and water bottles and devices to help people remember to do something that should be as natural as breathing.

When it comes to this routine, the benefits are helping your body wake up, kicking starting your metabolism and energizing you, hydrating your brain, and flushing your body of toxins.

These all help to get your brain, mood, and body in the right condition to start the morning on a creative and good start. Shake away yesterday’s issues and focus on breathing in and swallowing the water.

Drinking water also helps our thermoregulation, our control of body temperature. This is great for the next step which is going to call for you to get a bit wet and a bit cold.

Take a cold shower

Cold showers are known for boosting mood, immunity, lowering stress levels, and helping ease body soreness.

The added bump in mood opens up the morning to greater possibilities. People who have done cold showers on a regular basis have noted that it helps relieve morning grogginess, stiffness from sleep, and headaches.

By lowering stress levels a cold shower offers a fresh start to each day.

Timing varies, but the minimum is 30 seconds while longer times go up to 5 minutes or more.

For people with underlying heart conditions, avoid taking a cold shower and instead replace this with a step outside.

Drink a cup of green tea

I’m a bit bias. Tea is my go-to caffeinated drink. I made the full switch about six years ago. Haven’t looked back since. But I choose tea over coffee because tea is actually better for you than coffee.

A cup of hot green tea after your cold shower is going to replenish all that warmth you lost and ease you into a relaxed yet focused state. The calming effects of green tea are because it contains L-theanine. This amino acid helps ease anxiety and stress.

Green tea has been used for hundreds of years in various cultures both eastern and western to aid in concentration, bodily functions, and more.

The next step in this creative morning routine is to get your body moving. Working out with green tea in your system is shown to increase fat burn and drinking any remaining tea after your workout or movement will help aid in recovery and lessening the chance of soreness.

Because of green tea’s acidity people who experience stomach pains from drinking the beverage should pair it with milk and honey or drink a decaf cold version. Decaffeinated green tea still retains over 90% of its benefits.

Exercise for 15 mins

There is no perfect time to work out. It’s all about what time is best for you, but for this morning creativity routine, aim for a morning workout to help your focus, better concentration, and get your endorphins flowing.

You can do some time on the bike, jumping roping, stretches, pilates, and really anything. The main point is to move your body so that you can bring yourself into your body. This will help keep you in the present and thinking about the world around you. There are exercises geared specifically toward energy-boosting if you’re aiming to up your energy throughout the day.

Wendy Suzuki, neuroscientist and author of Healthy Brain, Happy Life, found that exercise has creative benefits for the brain. Suzuki sees a link between exercises benefits on memory linking to more improved imagination. This theory is based on the BDNF or Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor that feeds new brain cell growth in the hippocampus. This is often associated with aerobic exercises like running, rowing, or the link.

A study between the connection of walking and creativity showed that a majority of participants (60%) were able to boost their creative output after a walk.

The reason why exercise is meant to boost creativity comes down to the cognitive benefits of the hormones released during working out. These hormones aid in convergent and divergent thinking. That type of thinking is responsible for our creative problem solving and the ability to come up with original ideas.

Open a window

This step is less about the benefits of opening a window than it is about the benefits of listening to the world around you. You are not alone. You are a part of a community you can and cannot see. By opening your window, you’re consciously letting the world in. Visualize the window that you’re opening as a window inside of yourself. Let the fresh air come into you and blow away any remaining negativity. Focus on the rise of the sun. The sound of the birds. Focus on the now.

There is a link between air quality and cognition. A study by the University of Tulsa showed that participants tested better with fresh air present than with stuffy air.

We’ve been in quarantine for a year now which means for many of us, we’ve stayed indoors for the better part of a year. This type of lifestyle has led to rises in depression, lower cognitive levels due to being stuck in stuffy indoor settings, and heightened stress levels.

Opening a window is also going to play a part in the final step in this routine that is going to challenge your creative abilities and bring you more into the present moment while bridging the gap between your imaginative space and the real world. This will lead to a more creative approach and outlook on your day.

Write a Sestina Poem About What You Hear

As many people know, reading poetry is beneficial to expression and making connections between unrelated things. Poetry can make the heart wilt and the soul sing. It is a celestial art form for both writer and reader. There be magic in the form.

But did you know there are actually neurological benefits of poetry? In a 2013 study of poetry’s effect on the brain, British scientists discovered that we respond to poetry as a state of rest. This makes absolute sense given the fact that our brains love patterns. And that is what good poetry is. It works a pattern either on the page, in our imagination, in the ear, or on the tongue.

Poetry and all its patterns and high weirdness keep our brains constantly working and searching for deeper meanings and patterns. This spike in function while in a restful state opens our brains and selves up to reaching further connections and making links between things we wouldn’t normally.

Expression and contemplation are at the heart of self-care and psychotherapy. Writing poetry allows us to do both while forcing our creative juices into overdrive. So much so that there is a whole organization based around the benefits of poetry therapy.

A sestina poem is a structured poem style that consists of 39 lines with a complex repetition of end-words broken into six stanzas and an envoi or tornada which is meant to be a dedication to a particular person or audience that the poem is speaking to.

The sestina poem pattern:

ABCDEF
FAEBDC
CFDABE
ECBFAD
DEACFB
BDFECA
(envoi) ECA or ACE

Where each letter represents the end-word in the stanza marked by the number. So, if your end words happen to be barbie(A), hot sauce(B), lawnmower(C), air conditioning(D), alarm clocks(E), and engines(F), those are the words that will repeat throughout the poem at different endpoints throughout each stanza.

Stanza 2 of that poem would have lines with the end words in order being engines(F), barbie(A), alarm clocks(E), hot sauce(B), air conditioning(D), and lawnmower(C). Following the above pattern of the sestina what will happen is you’ll begin making new connections and metaphors based on the words.

This poetry form is extremely challenging even to skilled writers and should be tackled here less like a work assignment and more like a creative exercise meant to connect you with your surroundings and uplift your creative thinking.

There are no good or bad poems here. No need to worry about someone reading what you wrote. Feel free to even burn, erase, or delete your poem after you wrote it. The real benefits aren’t on the page but inside of you.

For examples of sestina poems to help facilitate this part of the step, the poetry foundation has 20 poems from poets of different time periods and disciplines all using the form. Reading these different sestina’s can show you the wide range of the form.

See the Beauty in the Everyday

The thing to remember about this routine that ties it all together is to not do this for longer than 90-minutes. Keeping it within that timeframe allows it to become more of a morning routine and less of an intrusion into your life. Move through these steps seamlessly and without stopping to respond to emails or the like. Focus on the present moment and what you are doing.

Allow the creative spark that is within you, me, and us all to flame bright. And don’t think that this routine is best reserved for one person. Try this out with the family and partners so that you can approach the day as a whole unit in a creative and open state, ready to interact with the world.

The main thing that I want to convey with this method is that you don’t need to be an artist or a “creative” to be creative. It is already inside of you waiting to be fed. This routine will feed that creativity well and prime you for your day. Approaching your day with renewed creativity will allow you to connect with the world and be more appreciative of the world around you.

You might have also noticed that many of these steps except for the last one and a little bit of the first one are all about taking care of your body and bringing you into the present. That’s because if we are to be our creative selves we must let the world in, know ourselves, and connect with the world around us.

Jumpstart Creativity Morning Routine Review

Step One: Get 8 hours of sleep
Step Two: Drink a 16oz glass of water as soon as you wake up
Step Three: Take a cold shower
Step Four: Drink a cup of green tea
Step Five: Exercise for 15 mins
Step Six: Open a window
Step Seven: Write a Sestina Poem About the Moment

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer of America, Horror Writer of America, and Codex writer. Her work has appeared in Tordotcom, Fiyah, Vice, and more. She strives to help writers reach their publishing goals and attain their dreams. Subscribe for access to masterclass courses in writing, editing, and making a living as a writer.