Frustration does not refresh stale routines

If you wake up everyday and find your mind traversing the same paths repeatedly, and you play the same chords on the piano repeatedly, and you write the same scenes repeatedly, you probably should stop.

It's time to break that routine.

This link gives some good suggestion for steps you can take to start anew. Among them:

- Journaling: you need to record ideas and get them out of your head – make room for new ideas
- Puzzles: problem solving, you can train yourself to be better
- Creativity Exercises: you need a purpose to be creative
- Purposeful Exploration: find creative inspiration in traditional media – take a purposeful look at these things – pay attention while watching tv, reading newspaper and find ways that others have expressed their creativity. Often we use these mediums to escape but we should look at them in a different way.
- Human Interaction: we are communal creatures – creativity is born from experience including other peoples. All people solve problems – surround yourself with people different from you. We need new perspectives.

Of all the suggestions listed, it's the last one I find most interesting.

Thanks to the RMIT library, I've had a lot of fun reading books that detail experiments on human interactions. These experiments attempt to figure out what brings individuals to react in certain ways through a variety of means: variation of stimuli, subconcious suggestions, and sometime just plain exposure. They try to be as rigorous as conditions allow them to be, after which the data is collected and analysed to come up with explanations for behaviours and actions.

If you're not already alarmed by the thought of manipulation, let me just say these findings trickle down to the world of advertising, management, and marketing. It is in these fields, that these theories gain their practical forms.

Of course, we've veered off-topic slightly there, but there are thoughts there useful for breaking routines.


Change one thing, unleash a new wave of creativity

In trying to understand human behaviour, the researchers changed every possible variable to see how their subjects responded.

In trying to break away from a routine, we could do the same to see what unlocks the door to a new way of thinking. Start with the small things, it's always the details that matter. Have tea instead of coffee. Black instead of with sugar. Sleep on your back instead of on your side.
Work your way up if it doesn't work: take a different route to work, try a new way of talking to people, pick up a new sport.

Something must eventually work. It might already be working, only that you don't realise it. Not all change drops on you like a ton of bricks. Some simmer from the sides, gradually changing the nature of your thoughts.

Through patience, old routines are broken.