Napping can actually boost creativity — here’s why

Turns out a few Z’s can boost your creativity.

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests there’s a link between naps and a creative mind — but timing is key.

Researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School found that the mind is “particularly fertile” during sleep onset — the earliest stage of slumber where a person drifts between being asleep and awake.

“We found a strong effect of ‘sleep onset’ on creativity,” study author and MIT student Kathleen Esfahany said. “When you are prompted to dream about a topic during sleep onset, you can have dream experiences that you can later use for these creative tasks.”

The scientists wanted to test if napping really does boost creativity and if nap-induced creativity can be refined by suggestions.

The team used hand-worn device they developed called the “Dormio,” a glove that measures skin-based electrical activity to asses three indicators of sleep onset: muscle tone shifts, heart rate and arousal status. The Dormio then sends the data to an application in real time.

Researchers had 49 adults with an average age of 27 wear the Dormio and separated them into four different test groups: a sleep group with audio guidance, a sleep group without guidance, a nonsleep group with audio guidance and a nonsleep group without guidance.

The first group — sleep with guidance — were allowed to nap one to five minutes after entering sleep onset, which took about seven minutes to occur, before being woken up. They were asked to recall any dreams they might’ve had before going back to sleep and being told to “remember to think about a tree” — a process that was repeated for 45 minutes.

The second group repeated the same process as the first, but without the guidance.

The non-sleep group with audio guidance never went to sleep and was instead instructed to “mind-wander” for just over seven minutes before recalling memories. They were then given the same instruction to think about a tree.

After the 45 minute test process, the participants were instructed to write a story using the word “tree.”

They found that both napping groups, with and without guidance, had more creativity immediately following the exercise, but “creativity was the highest in the group where participants napped while incubating dreams of trees,” Esfahany said.

Those in the sleep with audio guidance group were found to have stories 43% more creative than those who napped without guidance and 78% more creative than those who stayed awake with no guidance.

Sleepers with instruction also had the best results for “divergent thinking” as they were able to come up with multiple ideas for the tree and had higher creativity levels on a word pairing test. This group also were better at thinking outside of the box when it came to verbal and conceptual reasoning tests.

Esfahany believes that guided napping, known as “targeted dream incubation,” can boost creativity due to many factors, including being in a semilucid state that allows one to still be aware of outside stimuli, making it “an ideal stage for dreams to be guided and captured, and with them, potential creative insights.”

“It seems that just a few minutes is indeed enough for this effect to be observed. In fact, we do not expect that a longer nap would necessarily be better,” she said.

Researchers noted that a Dormio isn’t necessary to make this process of creativity work — all you need is something that can track sleep and play audio.