Why Your Best Thoughts Happen in the Shower or When Walking

Ever wonder why a good shower relaxes your imagination as well as your body, or why it seems to release a stream of creative thoughts about a problem that may have vexed you?

The answer lies in the fixed amount of attention your brain has to work with at any given moment. This biological limit is the reason why trying to multitask so often degrades performance and leads to mistakes. [1]

When the rational mind focuses on a problem, it eats up a lot of your allotted bandwidth whereas letting the mind wander while you carry out a “mindless” task lets your subconscious thoughts roam beyond the activity at hand.

By mindless I mean a relatively automatic routine such as walking, driving a habitual route, following your exercise workout, hiking in nature or, yes, taking a shower [2]. These are all solitary activities that let us disconnect from the outside world. They can become meditative, relaxing intervals that open us up to new ideas and perspectives.

An additional benefit of the shower is that its white noise blocks outside stimulation. The roar of the water produces a partial sensory deprivation and takes bandwidth that would have been used for other perception and shunts it to the mental space your mind uses to wander. Ideas incubating in the background can now rise to consciousness and lead you past a creative impasse.

Carving out mental space and freeing the mind of deliberate thought is a proven incubator of creative insight. The lack of outside stimulation can lead to the state of “flow,” in which we are deeply if absentmindedly engaged with our inner contemplations.

Two widely agreed features of “shower thoughts” are that they are insights from the subconscious and the result of not thinking deliberately about anything [3]. Sometimes breakthroughs occur in an “aha” moment. Two features of this kind of insight are the need for relative mental quiet and the suddenness with which they arrive when not intentionally thinking about the problem at hand.

Walking is another mindless—or should I say mindful—activity that grounds us in the present moment. Famous walkers attest to walking’s benefits and shed insight on any solitary activity. During her habitual, meandering walks Virginia Woolf honed her ability to portray consciousness and the character of thought. In one of her last novels, The Waves, she refracts six separate consciousnesses into the mind of one character, the biographer named Bernard.

In her biographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf said that her novel To the Lighthouse burst forth while walking, “in a great, apparently involuntary, rush … Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind. What blew the bubbles? … I have no notion” [4].

In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau explained that it is nothing at all like exercise and “absolutely free from all otherworldly engagements.” Nietzsche, too, walked so that he could think. In Twilight of the Idols he wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

Essayist Roger Rosenblatt, in The Boy Detective, explores the flaneur—a stroller who saunters and observes—a walker without purpose. Wandering feet reflect a wandering mind, going wherever the chain of associations takes you. Rosenblatt develops a lovely concept that each of us has two personalities we take on our private walks, one “for the senses, one for the intellect.” The two never meet, yet live connected “parallel lives … and side by side move into infinity.”

Both the shower and walking can be meditative experiences and opportunities for introspection and reflection. But they are also times when great ideas can pop into our heads.?