You’re trying to come up with a creative solution to a problem. You’ve been thinking about it for so long that you feel blocked, frustrated, and tired. Out of habit, you head out to a nearby park to unwind. And sure enough, as you drink in the greenery and birdsong, your thoughts gradually start to flow again.
Countless famous creatives, from William Wordsworth to Nikola Tesla, have said they find inspiration, motivation, and rejuvenation in the natural world. Given the millennia of anecdotal evidence like this, “nature is good for creativity” goes without saying.
But what’s less clear is why. And then there’s the question… is there a “right way” to interact with nature to boost your creative thinking?
Why Does Nature Benefit Creativity?
In recent years, research in the emerging field of environmental neuroscience has shown a positive relationship between time in nature and creative performance. A notable study found that a 4-day hike was linked to a staggering 50% increase in one’s ability to think creatively.
So, what is it about nature that is causing this creative boost?
Boosting Attention Restoration
Attention Restoration Theory (ART) posits that having something other than work to focus on lets the brain recover from cognitively demanding tasks.
In one experiment, people’s performance on a memory test improved by up to 20% when they were invited to take a nature walk, a result that wasn’t seen in a group who took a walk in an urban setting.
Creative thinking requires many high-level functions, such as problem-solving, memory retrieval, and critical thinking. Giving your brain a chance to recuperate means you have more capacity for these demanding processes (a little like recharging your creative batteries).
Nature is ideal for attention restoration as it triggers something known as “soft fascination”. This means that the natural environment attracts your attention in a pleasant, gentle way that doesn’t demand your full or deep focus. Unlike other restful activities like reading or watching TV, enjoying the breeze in a park doesn’t require your attention.
Inducing Mind-Wandering
Creativity researchers have also been looking into whether a natural environment might encourage mind-wandering: the free-flowing state of mind where you flit from one idea to another. This is useful for creativity as it enables you to make fresh connections between pieces of information.
The authors of a meta-analysis of the research into creativity and nature theorize that the gentler demands of spending time in nature might lead us to regularly switch between externally focused soft fascination and internally focused mind-wandering. As they put it: “Attention is first drawn to softly fascinating aspects of the external environment, but where it demands no response, the mind is free to wander for a time and attention may become inwardly focused.”
Positive Impact on Mental Health
While healthy stress (like using creative constraints) can prompt you to think more creatively, unhealthy stress (performance anxiety, interpersonal conflict, etc.) can do the opposite. When you feel stressed, you’re more likely to avoid risks and act out of fear, rather than leaning into the exploratory, bold thinking that’s needed for creativity and innovation.
Many experiments have shown that spending time with nature can lower people’s stress levels. Natural spaces have also been shown to reduce rumination: the tendency to circle through negative thoughts.
This reduction of stress-related background noise leaves you more space, energy, and courage to focus on creative thinking. As cognitive psychologist Ruth Ann Atchley explains: “Nature is a place where our mind can rest, relax, and let down those threat responses. Therefore, we have resources left over—to be creative, to be imaginative, to problem solve…”
Nature for Sparking Inspiration
Nature has been inspiring us for as long as we’ve been creating.
Artists like Claude Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe spent their careers finding new ways to translate the natural world onto canvas. For poets like Emily Dickinson and John Keats, plants and wildlife provided powerful metaphors for exploring themes like love, death, and imagination.
Nature’s influence goes further than artistic pursuits, though. The process of biomimicry has led us to many breakthrough innovations, from burs providing the inspiration for VELCRO to kingfishers enabling the creation of a quieter bullet train.
It’s easy to understand why this happens: the natural world offers us variety and complexity that we just can’t find elsewhere. But it may go even deeper than that.
The theory of biophilia suggests that we’re instinctively drawn to other living things. Additionally, research shows that green spaces encourage a more meditative, open mindset, meaning that we may be primed to take notice and accept inspiration more readily while out in nature.
Even if you’re not inspired directly by something you encounter, nature could still help you uncover creative insights by shifting your perspective. Nature is one of the primary sources of awe, a feeling that can give you a deeper sense of connectedness to the world around you and help you step beyond your own limited worldview.
How to Use Nature to Boost Your Creativity
So, what’s the best way to use nature to boost your creativity?
The simple answer is to get out there. But there are a few factors you can consider for maximizing the potential benefits.
Timing is Key
Based on the theory of Attention Restoration, heading out when you’re feeling depleted can leave you feeling rejuvenated. Cognitive neuroscientist David Strayer believes that a moment in nature is particularly effective if you’ve spent a long time multitasking and focusing on a screen. “If you’ve been using your brain to multitask—as most of us do most of the day—and then you set that aside and go on a walk, without all of the gadgets, you’ve let the prefrontal cortex recover, and that’s when we see these bursts in creativity, problem-solving, and feelings of well-being.”
Research also suggests that exposure to nature is particularly useful during the preparation and incubation phases of creative work. So, if you want to gather inspiration for a creative project or mull over possible directions, it could be a good idea to go outside.
As for how much time you need, a large-scale study into the positive impact of nature found that 120 minutes per week in total (spread out throughout the week) had a significant impact on people’s well-being. Different research suggests that spending as little as 20 minutes 3 times a week in nature could be enough. Of course, that’s not to say that a 4-day hike won’t also deliver some incredible benefits!
The Places to Go
According to the academics who first researched Attention Restoration, a natural environment needs to have certain characteristics to be restorative.
To reap the creative thinking benefits, you need to find a natural environment that:
- You feel motivated to spend time in
- Feels extensive enough that you can get immersed in it
- Feels detached from your daily life
- Provides sufficient gentle interest to trigger “soft fascination”
Additionally, another study found that “the more natural” an environment was perceived, the greater the impact it had on creativity. While it might be related to the immersion factor, it’s still interesting to consider when choosing your next escapade.
With this in mind, you’re likely to get better results from rural settings as they’re more likely to inspire those feelings of scope, detachment, and authentic wildness. But if all that’s available to you are urban natural settings, the good news is that the research suggests that these can still boost creativity to some extent.
You could even go virtual – it’s possible to get some of the benefits of nature even if you can’t get outside at all. Studies have found that people’s cognition and well-being can be improved simply by viewing nature on a screen or working in a room with plants. In the same vein, the concept of biophilic design was founded on the idea that incorporating naturalistic elements into the built environment can have a powerful influence on how we think.
If there’s one takeaway here, it’s that some nature is far better than no nature. Is too much nature a problem? Probably only as far as it will eat into your productive time.
Embrace Nature to Fuel the Creative Brain
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
Albert Einstein
The natural world can do wonders for creativity. It gives you a chance to restore your focus, mull over ideas, destress, and find inspiration.
While there are ways you can maximize the positive effects nature has on your creativity, the most important thing is to incorporate it when, where, and however you can. Head out to the park on your lunchbreak, plan a hike, put some nature on your screensaver, and get yourself a desk plant.
Every exposure to nature, however small, can benefit your creativity.
