Tag: creativity

Some of my artistic/creative sleep coaching clients report that they wake in the middle of the night with ideas that they simply must get up and process.

Their sleep is never the same that night.

When this happens too frequently, they develop a diagnosable sleep disorder.  Usually a form of insomnia.

I haven’t ever heard a sleep physician address it in a training video or in a research article.  If one of my readers knows about a piece, I would love to read it.  This is a different problem from someone who stays awake creating and gets too little sleep because of it.  It also isn’t the same as someone who wakes early to take advantage of the peace and quiet in their home to write or create in some other way.

This is fracturing the sleep cycle in the middle of a REM sleep stage.

We know what is lost when you break up REM sleep.  The valuable dream sleep that would continue to fuel emotional processing is damaged.  The physical relaxation from the “paralysis” of REM sleep is lost too, contributing to chronic muscle and fascial tension.

An artist that gets up in the middle of the night, worried that if they didn’t act on the ideas that came to them in the night, could wake feeling physically worse and irritable.  This isn’t conducive to great art, or to a great life.

So…what can creative people do when they wake with an idea?

• Scribble it down and let it go.  The creative brain is always working.  Those wonderful ideas will float back from your scribble.  You do not have to flesh it out at 3 am.
• Learn better methods of getting back to sleep.  Being able to detach from your thoughts, all thoughts, and go to sleep is a skill.   Just like painting or writing.  A skill.  One you can develop.
• Make time during the day for creativity, and be efficient about it.  If you haven’t done so, your mind will be more likely to use your REM sleep stage to burst forth.  It will cost you in ways that erode your health and your pleasure in both creating and sleeping.  If you don’t know how to efficiently bring forth your creativity in daylight, then build this skill.  Scheduling creativity sounds like the antithesis of what it means to be an artist.  It is the opposite.  All great artists developed strategies to produce and work well.  You can too.