Sleep on It

topic

Sleeping on difficult decisions and creative problems is the strategic use of sleep's documented creative integration benefits — with the intentional practice of thoroughly reviewing a problem before sleep and setting the intention to integrate relevant insights during sleep, maintaining a notebook for immediate capture upon waking, and allowing the overnight processing to advance on problems that deliberate daytime effort had not resolved.

Role

Sleeping on it is simultaneously the most universal folk wisdom about creative problem-solving and the most scientifically validated creativity intervention available — with the research support ranging from Ullrich Wagner's demonstration that REM sleep triples the discovery of hidden mathematical rules to Matthew Walker's comprehensive documentation of sleep's role in memory consolidation, associative integration, and creative insight generation. Most people 'sleep on it' accidentally (when they have no more time to work on a problem before sleeping) rather than deliberately (as the specific creative strategy of loading the problem before sleep and mining the post-sleep state for insights) — missing the systematic creative benefit of what they are already doing unintentionally.

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