As you’re designing your brand, creating content, and improving your marketing strategy, you may find it difficult to tap into your creativity without the help of caffeine. You notice that your most productive work sessions are done after you’ve had your cup(s) of coffee.
Is this connection between creativity and coffee a myth? Is drinking coffee every time you need to get work done a sustainable way to approach your business (and overall lifestyle)?
If you don’t see yourself as an artist, or you’ve noticed you’re more of an analytical or systems-oriented person, then good on you for having that self-awareness. Still, I think at a certain point it’s good to admit that each and every one of us is creative. We all have an innate ability to make something out of nothing and develop outside-of-the-box solutions in a way that’s never been done before.
In this way, you are a pattern interrupter. You’re blazing your own trail. Maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t want to be a trailblazer. Life is so much easier when I get to follow someone else’s instructions.” I can relate to those feelings.
But I want to dispel the idea that creativity is difficult to access daily. Yes, everyone can act creatively without caffeine in their systems. That’s my opinion, at least.
With that said, caffeine has an undeniable effect on the nervous system, which controls our thoughts, movements, and ability to produce work.
The question is: Scientifically, how necessary is caffeine for you to show up as the best business owner you can be? Let’s consider this question from the perspective of scheduling creative work sessions into your business calendar.
What Is Needed For Productive Creative Sessions?
Whether you’re designing an email newsletter or batch-writing social media posts for the week ahead, your behind-the-scenes marketing activities require you to focus on your work without jumping to other distractions.
You need the ability to stick with the original plan, as well as solve problems as they arise. You also benefit from having attention to detail and a vision of the bigger picture, at the same time.
Investing the creative energy it takes to run a business requires a willingness to say “yes” to ideas that pop up in your mind, without overly referencing or relying on others’ work or ideas.
All of these attributes combined describe the ability to focus and solve problems.
How Does Caffeine Help You Focus and Solve Problems?
Scientifically speaking, there’s a lot that goes into the way coffee, black tea, matcha, and other caffeinated beverages affect the human mind. Shall we get a little nerdy? Okay, let’s do it!
Better Health Channel tells us that “caffeine is a stimulant, which means it increases activity in your brain and nervous system. It also increases the circulation of chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline in the body. In small doses, caffeine can make you feel refreshed and focused.”
So does it actually help creativity? There seems to be mixed feedback.
“While the cognitive benefits of caffeine – increased alertness, improved vigilance, enhanced focus, and improved motor performance – are well established […] the stimulant’s effect on creativity is less known,” says a study published by the University of Arkansas.
An article from Inc.com uses coffee as the prime example of a high-caffeine drink:
“Coffee is enormously helpful to the creative process because it suppresses unwanted and unnecessary insights and instead helps you focus on the work at hand. It helps you get down to work, stay on the project, and make day-to-day progress, rather than daydreaming up new things that you might be doing instead.”
As we read about these effects, we have to remember that, just like with anything, each individual reacts a bit differently to caffeine.
What Is Detrimental About Relying on Caffeine?
Relying on caffeine to be productive in your business might be summarized as a placebo effect. In other words, creating the daily habit of drinking coffee before working can create a psychological reliance or superstition that “I can’t accomplish XYZ until I’ve had my coffee.”
Caffeine is known to make your adrenals work overtime. This can lead to a phenomenon known as adrenal fatigue, which can feel like lightheadedness, nervousness, and excessive tiredness even after getting a full night’s sleep.
Caffeine acts as a diuretic, so it depletes the gut of nutrients, electrolytes, and water, which are necessary for proper brain function.
These are good enough reasons to either stop drinking caffeine (if it’s affecting your well-being) or cut back significantly.
How Can You Produce High-Quality Creative Work Without Caffeine?
Believe it or not, you’ve got a lot of power to produce creative work without caffeine. You may have to change the lens through which you see coffee (or other caffeinated products), as well as the way you see your mind.
Here are a few quick perspective shifts:
As a human, you are naturally curious. Whether out loud or quietly, you pose questions, and then you answer them. This sort of problem-solving happens more intuitively than you might realize.
Your brain can only pay attention to so many things at once. By working through any conditions in any random environment, you may be overloading your brain more than you think.
As a society, we’ve been taught to work the same way as “everyone” (i.e. Monday through Friday, from 9 AM – 5 PM). By following this trend, you may be ignoring your body’s natural rhythms. Over time, you’ll find that forcing yourself to push past your natural limitations is unsustainable both personally and professionally.
What Are the Sustainable Ways to Access Your Creative Side?
I’d say you need a combination of focus and mind-wandering – or accessing your imagination. This combination can be reached through:
Mindfulness
Practicing moments of slowness and stillness, even apart from work sessions or moments of problem-solving
Environment
Setting up the right work environment (e.g. sights, sounds, smells, and room temperature)
Boundaries
Creating and reinforcing boundaries around your time and energy (e.g. turn on email away messages, turn off notifications, take breaks using the Pomodoro Method)
Cyclical Living
Maximizing your energy by managing projects and tasks in alignment with your natural cycles (i.e. sleep cycle)
For example, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman promotes fixing your relationship with sleep and cortisol, which occur naturally, but can also be manipulated by:
- Early wakeups (around sunrise)
- Sunlight exposure
- Caffeine in healthy amounts
- Physical activity (particularly intense exercise)
- Early bedtimes
Ultimately, you will find the path that’s most sustainable for you after analyzing your deepest desires or non-negotiables.
Wrap-Up: Is Caffeine Necessary?
Caffeine can definitely have a positive impact on your creativity, but it isn’t absolutely necessary to complete your creative work. As an entrepreneur, it’s up to you to decide which routines you’re going to adopt, in order to creatively build a long-lasting business without burning yourself out.
A great place to start establishing a healthy way of accessing your creativity is collaboration. Working with and talking to like-minded people who fill various gaps in my skill sets has been highly beneficial for me as an entrepreneur. Collaborating with others naturally accelerates your growth – as long as you’re open to learning, of course.
This brings me to a beautiful opportunity I have for you.
My online coaching program, Sustainable Content Marketing (SCM) is a 12-week experience for entrepreneurs who are ready to create a consistent and effective content marketing plan. The investment for SCM is $6,000 (payment plans available). The doors are officially open!
Disclaimer: This blog post is not intended for medical advice, but for educational purposes only.
