Written by Danielle Raine, Holistic Creativity Coach
Danielle Raine is a holistic creativity expert and mindset coach for creatives and entrepreneurs. She has been studying the creative process since an epiphany at Art School in 1993 that revealed how to access the flow state.
We spend a third of our lives asleep. Imagine how your life might change if you learned how to use those slumbering hours to your advantage.
The desire for more sleep and the need to get more done in a day are pretty universal. Yet, for many, these two goals appear to be at odds with each other.
For many of us, the ideal 8-hours-a-night can seem impossible in the face of never-ending To-Do lists or commitments to others. After all, how can we get more done if we take more time out of our busy schedule to enjoy a few more hours of precious sleep?
But what if there were ways to combine improved sleep with increased productivity? The answer lies in getting creative.
Getting creative with downtime
It’s easy to assume that our sleeping hours are unproductive downtime, periods when nothing can be achieved, progressed or created. Yet, science is increasingly showing us that the hours of slumber are periods when many of our physical and mental processes are most active.
So, our sleep time can actually be both restorative and productive, helping us to achieve the goals and aims of our waking hours. This can be a valuable incentive for prioritising better quality sleep and plenty of it - which will yield a cascade of beneficial side effects.
With a little proactive planning and creativity, we can learn how to get even more benefits from our night-time hours. Here are just three of the ways we can make sleep more productive with practices that support our goals and increase daytime efficiency.
3 creative ways to make sleep hours productive
Lucid dreaming & problem-solving
Perhaps the most effective way to use your sleeping hours to advance your waking goals is to master the art of Lucid Dreaming. The practice of intentional dreaming is nothing new, it’s been a feature of numerous ancient civilisations, including Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism.
How can Lucid Dreaming help you be more productive? One of the most productive benefits of this practice is its potential to assist with problem-solving. When we learn how to ‘wake up’ in our dreams, we can direct them and act in ways that aren’t possible in our waking realities. Always wanted to fly? You can in your dreams! Have a Big Vision of success? You can shape your dreams to experience it. But beyond the fun aspects of Lucid Dreaming, you can access problem-solving insights that remain elusive during the day.
By mastering Lucid Dreaming, you can start to get solutions to the problems that affect your productivity. Delays at work, family challenges, health issues, the potential solutions to these, and many more problems can be discovered during Lucid Dreams. You could even find the answer to enjoying more sleep and more productivity.
“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” - Virginia Woolf
Brain training while you sleep
It’s no secret that our subconscious minds are powerful drivers of our habits and behaviours. Recent decades have seen an explosion of techniques for retraining our minds to support the visions we have for our lives. These include hypnosis programmes, meditation apps, visualisation audios etc.
Some of these tools are specifically designed to work while we’re asleep, because that’s when they’re most effective. There are some fantastic 8-hour sleep tracks available online that are carefully designed to install powerful mindset upgrades, all while we sleep comfortably in our beds. There are even pillows with built-in headphones to make sleep-time brain training even more comfortable.
If you want to customise this practice for your personal goals and intentions, one advanced technique is to design and record your own creative affirmations audios. This way, you can install the precise beliefs you require to get your work done easily and well. Experts claim that sleep audios in your own voice are particularly powerful in reshaping your psyche.
Combining the right audios with a regular practice of Sleeptime Brain Training can help to achieve a range of waking goals, including being more productive. It’s also possible to hone the kind of mindset that makes you naturally more effective and efficient during the day. And if you choose to train your sleeping mind to believe that your days always run smoothly and you always get everything done, you’ll soon see more of that reality playing out for you.
“Your life follows the grooves that you yourself have created in the brain.” - Paramahansa Yogananda
Hypnopompic inspiration
You know those drowsy moments when you shift from sleeping to waking? This is the realm of hypnopompia, a term based on the Greek words for ‘sending away sleep’. And this woozy,
waking feeling that we all experience as we emerge from sleep is a uniquely valuable time - one that holds the potential for rich creativity and significant life improvements
During this transitional phase, the boundaries between our conscious mind and our subconscious mind are more fluid than they are during our waking state. It’s the time when we may catch fleeting memories of our dreams, which can yield valuable insights about our lives and challenges.
It’s also the period renowned for increased inspiration and creative ideas. Have you ever heard someone say that they work up one morning with the sudden idea to try something new? This is the zone of genius insights and breakthrough clarity - and it’s available to us all, every morning.
If you’d like to enjoy more productive progress and efficiency during your days, you can start by setting an intention before sleep that you will wake up with new ideas that will support your goals. If you also hone the practice of lingering in the hypnopompic state, you’ll access more conscious awareness of the messages and revelations from your subconscious mind.
And if you’re a fan of the snooze button, you might like to know that those minutes between alarms can become a potent portal to your genius mind. This is one way that staying cosy and going back to sleep can be a highly productive practice!
The benefits of productive sleep
Exploring the ideas above are ways to get started in turning those seemingly unproductive hours into problem-solving sessions, brain-training boosters, or access to your genius mind. While these practices hold the potential to create positive shifts in your waking life, my intention in sharing these is to help you see your sleep-time in a new light.
The resounding message from the wellness industry in recent years is the importance of getting enough sleep. When we’re convinced of the benefits of spending more time asleep, it’s much easier to prioritise it, even when life gets busy. And when we understand the value of sleep, and give it the position on our To Do list that it deserves, we get to enjoy more of the natural benefits of sleep.
Even without the practices above, ensuring we’re well-rested brings so many benefits to our bodies and minds that we are naturally more creative, productive, and effective - not to mention healthier and happier. It’s a recipe for a holistic approach to success and achievement, that ripples out across all aspects of your life.
While these practices can take your sleep-time productivity to the next level, if all they do is inspire you to get enough sleep, you’re likely to see shifts in your innate creativity and problem-solving skills. After all, those genius ideas and inspired solutions come from within you - and quality sleep is one way to bring them to the surface, where you can use them to improve your life.
Beyond creative sleep practices, the simple intention to prioritise your sleep may be the ultimate productivity tip.
So, if you’d like to become more effective, enlightened and inspired - all from the comfort of your bed - I hope you’ll give some thought to these ideas and how you can hone your bedtime hours for productivity, happiness and success.
Enjoy your productive sleeping!
For more wellness-based strategies for boosting productivity and success, help yourself to the collection of Free Samples from my Holistic Creativity Courses.
Danielle Raine, Holistic Creativity Coach
Danielle Raine is a holistic creativity expert and mindset coach for creatives and entrepreneurs.
She has been studying the creative process since an epiphany at Art School in 1993 that revealed how to access the flow state.
For three decades, she's been working and experimenting in the creative fields of design, blogging, publishing, marketing, tech, and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on the nature of inspiration and flow productivity.
Her speciality is a wellness-based, feel-good approach to creative fulfilment and success, along with an enduring theme of enjoying the journey as much as possible.
Through her coaching, courses, books, and blogs, her mission is to share the simple, practical tools that create rapid shifts and inspiring results, so that her clients, students, and readers can do more of the work they love to do, and bring their most exciting creative visions to life.
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