Do I have to meditate to be more creative?
No. What helps is the open kind of attention, where you let whatever comes, come. The narrow, controlled kind does not do the same job. And if formal practice does not suit you, find your own way in, because the state is the point, not the method.
Tuning-in is how you increase the capacity itself.
Everything up to here has been about using the creativity you have. This is the first behaviour that grows it, and it is the one that has to be daily.
What it looks like when it’s missing
A day with no gap in it anywhere.
Not a busy day. A day with no seam. Meetings touching meetings, and every gap between them filled with a phone, because a gap now feels like waste rather than like room.
The person living that day is not short of time. They are short of unfilled attention, which is the only place their own thoughts can turn up. And they will tell you they are not very creative any more, and they will be describing their calendar rather than themselves.
Ten days of silence. I lasted five.
Years ago I went on a ten day Vipassana retreat with my friend Kate. I had been reading about meditation and its curative powers, and this sounded like the real thing. Ten days in the country.
Quiet turned out to mean silent. Twenty four hours a day, ten days, no talking and no eye contact. We were to imagine we were each alone in a cave. Up at half four to meditate before breakfast, and on through until eight at night.
I lasted about five days.
I went. Head in the blanket, shoulders going. Then I could hear other people going. Then the whole room was going, and the giggles turned into proper laughter, a collective release from unrelenting effort.
And that was the end of me and that particular school of meditation.
What I did not notice for years
I went to that retreat to learn to tune in, and I spent five days failing at it.
The moment I actually got there was flat on my back on the grass, helpless, in the sun. It had been so long since I had laughed like that. I wrote at the time that it felt like remembering some deep need to let go.
I was not being undisciplined. I was in the wrong practice for what I needed.
What the science says.
The type of practice decides what you get.
Colzato, Ozturk and Hommel (Frontiers in Psychology, 2012) compared two kinds of meditation. Open monitoring, where you let whatever arises arise and simply notice it. And focused attention, where you concentrate on one thing and keep bringing yourself back to it.
And the laughing was not a failure of the practice.
It was closer to the practice. Isen, Daubman and Nowicki (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987) induced positive affect in people by showing them a five minute comedy reel, then set them Duncker’s candle problem. Seventy five per cent of the comedy group solved it, against twenty per cent of the group who watched a neutral film. On a separate word association task the positive affect group scored 5.00 against 3.04.
What to do on Monday.
Fifteen minutes a day with no input. No phone, no podcast, no radio. That is the whole practice and it is harder than it sounds.
And here is the only test that matters. Not whether you did it right, not whether your mind wandered, because wandering is the mechanism rather than the fault. Just this: over a fortnight, are new thoughts turning up?
Colzato, L. S., Ozturk, A., & Hommel, B. (2012). Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 116. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116
Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nowicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1122-1131. Candle task: 75 per cent solved after the comedy reel against 20 per cent after the neutral film. Remote Associates: 5.00 against 3.04. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.52.6.1122
BIF source: the Vipassana passage in Tension of Opposites (TOO_WattPad_AUG2025). Creative styles and anchors from BIF People Behaviours 1. Curiosity.
The full evidence for Tuning-in, with the room it came from and the citations with DOIs.