Four­teen acts or mind­sets that have been shown–using science!–to increase cre­ativ­ity, from a two-article series on scientifically-proven meth­ods to increase your cre­ativ­ity:

  1. Psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tance: Imag­ine your cre­ative task as dis­tant and dis­con­nected from your cur­rent location.
  2. Chrono­log­i­cal dis­tance: Project your­self or the task for­ward in time.
  3. Absur­dist stim­u­la­tion: Read some Kafka: absur­dity is a ‘mean­ing threat’, mak­ing our mind work harder to find mean­ing and enhanc­ing pat­tern recog­ni­tion abilities.
  4. Use highly emo­tional states: Highly-charged emo­tional states increase prob­lem solv­ing and flex­i­ble thinking.
  5. Com­bine oppo­sites: ‘Janu­sian think­ing’ helps inte­gra­tive ideas emerge.
  6. Take resis­tive paths: The path of least resis­tance typ­i­cally leads to ideas lack­ing in cre­ativ­ity (as they’re inher­ently built on exist­ing ideas).
  7. Re-conceptualisation: Re-conceive the prob­lem in dif­fer­ent ways before try­ing to solve it, focus­ing on dis­cov­ery at the problem-formulation stage.
  8. Coun­ter­fac­tual mind­set: Two types of ‘what could have been’ thinking:
    • Sub­trac­tive for ana­lyt­i­cal prob­lems (what could have been removed?).
    • Addi­tive for expan­sive prob­lems (what could have been added?).
  9. Two simul­ta­ne­ous prob­lems: Mul­ti­ple con­cur­rent prob­lems help the recall of pre­vi­ous cre­ative solu­tions that may be related.
  10. Generic verbs: Focus on abstract rather than spe­cific details of the prob­lem (by think­ing of problem-specific verbs in more generic terms).
  11. Syn­onyms and cat­e­gory tax­onomies: Look at the prob­lem cat­e­gory or type and dis­cover hid­den struc­tures (by think­ing of problem-specific details as syn­onyms and cat­e­gory taxonomies).
  12. Engage con­flict: Social con­flicts give us intense moti­vated focus.
  13. Think love not sex: Thoughts of love shift our minds to a long-term view­point while sex­ual thoughts shift them to the imme­di­ate, which is more analytical.
  14. Stop day­dream­ing: Some­what against Csikszentmihalyi’s advice, incu­ba­tion has shows min­i­mal cre­ative improve­ments. How­ever its advan­tage may be in that it helps us for­get pre­vi­ous bad ideas.

Alter­na­tively you could take advice from Grayson Perry:

Being cre­ative is all about being unself-conscious; being pre­pared to make a bit of a fool of myself. In my expe­ri­ence, embar­rass­ment is not fatal. […] I’d like to make a plea for dif­fi­culty over cool. In the end, being dif­fi­cult is the coolest thing you can be.