Study reveals that creative folks relish downtime

According to research from the University of Arizona, creative people are more likely to spend their downtime during the day pursuing their intellectual interests. A creative person is more likely to use downtime effectively by letting one idea flow to another, according to the study, which was written up in the Creativity Research Journal.

Researchers discovered that study participants who were more creative experienced less boredom when they were left alone in a room. Additionally, during the COVID-19 epidemic, a period of exceptionally long amounts of free leisure, creative people were less bored and more preoccupied with their thoughts.

“I am particularly interested in creativity because we wanted to know what’s going on in the mind of creative individuals, especially in situations where nothing constrains their thoughts,” said lead study author Quentin Raffaeli, a graduate student in the UArizona Department of Psychology.

In psychology and neuroscience, most studies on human thoughts either prompt participants to think in a certain way or ask them to report on thoughts they experienced, but less is known about how thoughts naturally arise and unfold over time in unprompted contexts, said Jessica Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and senior author of the paper.

“In today’s busy and digitally connected society, time to be alone with one’s thoughts without distraction may be becoming a rare commodity,” she added.

The study was split in half by the researchers. In the initial study, participants were required to spend 10 minutes alone in a room without access to any electronic devices, per the researchers’ instructions. The participants were invited to speak their views out loud in the present tense without any specific prompt. Next, a transcription and analysis were done on the audio files from 81 individuals.

In the first trial, it was discovered that when left alone and without electronic distractions like a cell phone or the internet, creative persons were more focused on their thoughts.

“Creative people rated themselves as being less bored, even over those 10 minutes. They also spoke more words overall, which indicated that their thoughts were more likely to move freely,” Andrews-Hanna said.

The COVID-19 pandemic, during which many people spent more time alone with their thoughts, provided a significantly larger time frame for the study’s extension, which the researchers used to supplement their initial findings.