When I do work and I get stuck I leave my desk and wander down the hallway. I meander and look out the window as I think lightly about the problem. I weave through the complications crowding my thoughts until I’ve sorted them out. Then I return to my desk and refocus on the screen.

Focus narrows the mind. It zooms you into the fine details and blurs everything else out. But sometimes you need to relax your attention and widen your view to notice the missing piece, or the jagged edge that would snag your approach. You need to loosen up and make space to have new thoughts and interact with them.

Focus guzzles energy like an SUV. But accessing your energy reserves isn’t as easy as pressing the gas pedal. Hour by hour your energy levels rise and fall. If you tune into your body it tells you how much energy is available.

For long I’ve known my energy dips after I eat but still I’d push myself to be productive. Now I embrace it as a natural part of my day and let myself relax for a few minutes. I lay on the couch and play chess on my phone and soon I feel fresh and ready to resume work. Taking those 15 minutes to repose lifts my mood. Listening and adapting to my internal state makes work pleasant and less draining. It makes it sustainable.

Sometimes you need more than a few minutes. Energy levels can dip for days. This could mean you need to rest or do something to replenish your energy. Rest isn’t the only activity that reenergizes.

When you lose steam you can spend time absorbing instead of producing. Moments of low energy are a chance to listen and think passively. When you relax, your creativity stirs and feeds on what your senses are gathering. When you can’t be diligent, be curious. Let yourself follow a thread and soon you’ll be moving.

Watch movies, go for walks, listen to music, spend time in the sun, talk with friends, flip through photos, clean the house. Open yourself and allow thoughts to trickle in and out. Replenish the energy and ideas you’ll use to produce next chance you get. You can delay rest, but you can’t skip it. Dues you don’t pay today you pay twice tomorrow.

The shower is so fertile a place for contemplation and creative thinking for so many of us that we have the name shower thoughts for the novel ideas that we produce while we’re there. It’s one of the most ordinary of activities, but it is exceptional as an “ecology of attention.” Like many other routine activities, it occupies you for a small window of time every day. But, unlike other routine tasks like driving, it frees you from having to respond to external information. Unlike household tasks, it renders you in uncontested privacy. All these things are also true for baths, but do they provoke thoughts in the same way? Showers, unlike baths, do not allow you to stay idle nor do they let you entertain yourself with a book or a TV show.

I suspect this last bit is crucial. Keeping your mind busy on a menial task seems to have extraordinary powers for unlocking a certain kind of thinking. There is a reason for the psychoanalytical practice of hypnosis, represented in pop culture in the form of a dangling pocket watch. There is a reason, similarly, for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. It’s not magic. There are mysterious ways of programming our attention and psychological capacities through interactions with our external environment.

From where I am sitting on my balcony I can see the TV out of the corner of my eye and it’s very difficult to ignore it. I keep turning my head away to think of what to write next, but then when I turn back to resume typing on my computer, the flashes of color and light from the TV make it very difficult for me to focus. I just went inside and turned it off, but still my mind keeps diverting attention to the now black rectangle in my peripheral vision. Let me draw the curtains.

Sometimes when I want to be alone I come out and sit here. It’s a lovely little space detached from the living room. However, if Z is sitting at her desk on the other side of the glass where I can see her and if my need to be alone in that moment is particularly potent, I draw the curtains. Her presence remains exactly as it was and I remain aware of it, but it doesn’t intrude on my attention in the same way.

In his book

, Matthew B. Crawford points out that this involuntary aspect of attention makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint. New information demands attendance. Is it a predator? Prey? Or just a gust of wind? Regardless we must pay attention to it so we can make sense of it and integrate it into our mental model of the current environment.

Crawford appropriates the term ecology – the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings – to describe this fundamental relationship between our attention, our life, and our environment. He describes, for example, the “ecology of attention” in airport lounges where the news stream endlessly on TVs oriented in various directions. Even if the talking heads are muted, the infinite sideways scroll of symbols at the bottom of the screen will hijack the attention of travelers who would rather rest idly.

(Crawford astutely points out that the advertisements shown on these TVs exist to continue the transfer of wealth from these common travelers to the ones in the VIP lounges, who rest comfortably without having their attention exploited by their surroundings without their consent. I find these socioeconomic analyses of technology much more relevant and important than the technophobic ones. The same goes for Artificial Intelligence. I don’t worry that AI will take over the world, I worry that those who already rule the world will use AI to accelerate and automate processes of wealth extraction.)

I think the evolutionary perspective can also help explain why time in nature feels so right. This is the primordial ecology of our attention, the environment in which our brains adapted for us to live and thrive. And yet I don’t think we need to draw purist or atavistic conclusions against technology from this observation. Feelings of connection and coherence arise in us not only from time in nature, but also from time using artificial tools and inhabiting constructed environments.

The humble coffee shop for example is a place where many of us go to read, write, think, converse, and do other things that require our focus. The intricate weave of activity and mixture of sounds create a conducive ambience for our attention. How is it that such a busy, public space is so popular for quiet, private activity? This is only counterintuitive if we think distraction is the only unneutral effect our environment has on our ability to focus. From experience we know that it can be easier to focus in spite of extraneous sensory information rather than in absence of it. Perhaps because our cognitive capacities evolved in settings where total absence of sensory input was rare, our minds focus more easily against a backdrop of mundane information. Certain kinds of technologies are essential here and even computer screens are welcome, but not TVs because they would be too disruptive. A good ecology of attention not only prevents distractions, but encourages focus.

I’ve moved into my apartment now, into the warmth. Out in the balcony my fingers were getting too cold. Above my head the clock ticks and farther away traffic brushes by in irregular strokes. The faint wail of an ambulance emerges suddenly and then fades quickly. Occasionally in the hallway outside our apartment a door opens and then shuts a moment later. Our little dog scurries about the living room looking for amusement. My wife Z works intently at her desk a few feet away in silence apart from intermittent bursts of typing and muted clicks of her mouse. Attention to my writing flows easily despite all these things, except when my gaze drifts over to what is happening on her computer screen. So I adjust my sitting position to make it vanish.

Karl Pilkington sounds foolish, but he’s onto something. He tells an anecdote about a time when he finished his grocery list and moved on only to be interrupted by a thought that entered his mind suddenly: Apple.

The thought of apple just appeared and Karl doesn’t know how. It fell like a raindrop into his mind. This happens to us all the time, but we don’t notice it because we expect it. We think What’s his name again? and then something inside us slips an answer into our grasp: Mark. It’s like shaking a tree until fruit falls out. We don’t give the tree much credit. But Karl was leaving the orchard when the apple came rolling after him.

We talk about the subconscious as a mysterious engine that runs the dreams we soon forget after we wake up. But it’s also there in the day. It hums along softly in the background, chiming in helpfully when we need to remember someone’s name or what produce to buy.

But it’s more than our assistant. It’s our advisor, our consigliere. It’s the source of our gut feelings. Great ideas come from interaction with this humble inner partner, this invisible thinker.

Despite being teased by his buddies for his story about the apple, Karl echoed something the French polymath Poincaré wrote in his essay, Mathematical Creation:

Like Karl, Poincaré tells stories of answers coming to him when he was no longer considering the question. And he welcomes it. He recognizes his subconscious mind as a vital actor in his work, a shrewd associate that finds a fresh lead while he rests.

Poincaré then concludes something that Karl would’ve been mocked for saying: resting is productive. Not because it reenergizes you for more work, but because it is work. Rest releases the invisible thinker to explore and find what you haven’t noticed yet. You can feel this happening in the shower when novel ideas surface in your mind without prompt. And though we can’t steer our “ambient thought”, we can tell it what to think about. As Don Draper of Mad Men tells his protégé:

Our train of thought springs into existence already in motion and it speeds between ideas connected by tracks in our mind. Though we cannot access the underlying web of knowledge directly, we experience the result of its traversal. And by training and ruminating on new ideas we integrate them into the network. This is why jazz musicians can fling out new melodies every night. A chord change played by the backing band illuminates melodic pathways carved into the musician’s mind during training. At the gig they just get behind their instrument and go for a ride.

We tap into these networks not only for spontaneous improvisation but also for careful design. We draw from a well of memories and impressions, questions and conclusions, recreating and appropriating them for new purposes. A musician composes from real feelings, from their desires and their fears. A fiction writer sketches a character from the outlines of real people, from the beauties they’ve admired and faults they’ve despised.

This personal reservoir is where filmmaker David Lynch fishes for the strange and abstract ideas that appear in his work. In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, Lynch describes his process more as catching ideas than creating them. He receives ideas from something inside himself, and consults this inner source to develop and implement them.

Lynch isn’t the only prolific artist with a mysterious inner partner. Novelist Cormac McCarthy is well aware of his own collaborator. He said:

Like Poincaré and Pilkington, McCarthy has talked about the mysterious experience of receiving answers from the ether:

McCarthy often talks about the Night Shift, the period when we sleep and the invisible thinker takes over. Pilkington agrees – from his book The Moaning of Life:

The invisible thinker rules this hidden world where our creativity lives. It collaborates with us to devise and improvise, and it even thinks for itself. When relieved from its duty as our advisor, it roams freely, eager to satisfy its own curiosity. We heighten our creative potential when we deepen understanding with our internal agent. Especially if we don’t just ask but also listen.