Hey, Katie, do you think I'm creative?
Oh?
Of course you are.
I don't see too many other people coming up with everything flavored pretzels, do you.
No, I don't.
I'm curious, though, Adam, have you ever thought about how a good night's sleep impacts your creative choices as an actor and a pretzel maker?
Well, ever since I became an actor and a pretzel maker, I haven't really gotten that much sleep.
But I should check that out. Yes, I'm Adam Shapiro.
And I'm Katie Lowe's.
This is Chasing Sleep, a production of Ruby Studios from iHeartMedia in partnership with Mattress Firm. In this episode, we
explore the relationship between sleep and creativity. I always think that creativity is so linked with sleep for me, Like, at night, I'll read my lines for the next day and think a lot about the character and where they come from and what their parents were like and things like that, and I'll go to sleep, and really I feel like it's just sort of subconscious being digested in process somewhere in my dreams, and when I wake up, not only are my lines better put in my head for memorization.
But I feel like my creativity has been sparked. Do you ever have that?
Oh?
Yeah, I mean absolutely.
If I get a good night's sleep before I show up on set, I'm a monster. And then also the other thing is like, you know, when I know that I'm improving a lot, if it's a comedy or I'm playing a character and a drama, that's got to improvise a lot, I have to be sharp exactly.
Our guests are both creative people too. Doctor Sarah C. Mednick is the author of the Power of the Downstate. She's done extensive research on the link between quality sleep and our ability to be creative.
Welcome Sarah, thanks for having us. We also have respective composer Andrew M. Edwards joining us. You may not know him by name, but you've probably heard his musical scores in films and TV. He often gets the call when a show needs creative music that helps build.
Some mystery and suspense. True.
Welcome, Thank you.
This is so exciting.
I mean, as two creatives as Adam and I are, that we are actors, and I guess what you would call creative people.
Although everyone's a creative person, right.
I like to think so, yeah, I think that it doesn't even matter what line of work you happen to be in or what your day to day is. I feel like giving your brain creative space to exist in is helpful for.
Everyone in any way.
Sarah, this seems like a silly question, but we got to start with the basics. Okay, So when you research the relationship between sleep and creativity, like, what are we talking about? How do you even define and measure creativity?
I mean, creativity can be actually defined in so many different ways, and so I've chosen a definition that actually my father worked on years ago in the sixties. It's called the remote Associates tests. And the reason why it's about association is that that creativity really comes from creating associations between things that are disparate ideas, you know, things that don't really have a lot to do with each other.
But you can of course create connections between anything. Creativity isn't just oh I just made a connection between things that aren't usually associated. His definition was that they have to be new and useful. And I think that that's the part that I think is really interesting for creativity is not just that you're creating sort of oh, I, you know, made these this new connection between these two,
you know, the elephant and my grandmother. But it's actually that somehow that the that that connection has been able to solve a problem.
It's useful.
So that's really how I've explored the idea of creativity.
So you're not measuring overall problem solving. Like Adam's mom, she does a crossword puzzle every day. Like, give me an example of what you mean in terms of like a creative associate that would be useful.
It could be something like a crossword, but really crosswords are sort of learned behaviors that you can figure out what the answers are and you just have this whole store of knowledge. I think that the important part of being able to have a creative idea is that it's an original idea that you actually are seeing all the elements of the problem and somehow you figured out how those elements of the problem can conform together to create
a new and interesting, potentially useful idea. Like solving the problem of a vaccine or solving the problem of how to write a song. You found a way to put them together that is new and useful and original.
Really really cool.
That's fast. I never really thought about creativity that way, Katie.
I mean I haven't either, but I know the zone you're talking about, Like I know the zone.
It's the same idea. It's the aha moment that we're getting to.
Oh yeah.
It's like when you're in flow and all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, I just my brain fired on like a really sort of inspir tired kind of way. You know.
Sometimes when I'm getting a lack of sleep, sometimes I feel a sort of creativity flow through me, you know, when it's like the middle of the night, I'm completely exhausted. Sometimes I find that that's a creative space for me.
When Adam and I started dating, I would be asleep at eleven PM and we lived in one room, and he would have his computer up with music going and headphones and he was just like making websites and making short videos and all this stuff till four o'clock in the morning.
Like yeah, but you know, that is the thing about creative people. A lot of the time they are night people, because it's a space where you have sonic and visual
and just attentional privacy. And I think, you know, whether you really are biologically night people or whether it's just a space where everyone else is asleep and your brain can just go I but I have a lot to say about exactly those two points that you made about the relationship between REM sleep and creativity and the relationship between sleep deprivation and creativity, because they're actually very similar
brain states. You know, when we go through sleep, we go through several different stages of sleep, and at the end of one sleep cycle, you go through this rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, and it's a period where we have all of our dreams, you know, these kind of crazy, fanciful dreams. We dream in other types of sleep as well, but these are the real wild ones.
They're very emotional and they're inspired dreams. But they also have one particular aspect is that your brain at that time has high amygdalah content, a lot of this kind of emotional motivational content from the singulate and different areas of that, but you also have very low prefrontal cortex input.
And the prefrontal cortex is kind of you can think of it as the executive at the front who is sort of making all the smart decisions, or you could think of it as sort of rational mind, the rational super ego, the parent, whatever it is that tells you, no, don't think that that's a stupid idea.
Don't make those connections.
And so in rem sleep you actually have this brain state where your creativity can flower. You can make these wild associations, which is why when you're in your sort of wild middle of the night whatever it is that you're doing while everyone else is asleep, your brain is
also your frontal cortex is also at its ebb. You know, sleep deprivation first hits the frontal cortex and you see that, you know, that whole brain area you start to stop having as much glucose drawn to it, and this is why you're more likely to, you know, eat bad foods at night, meaning that that whole brain area is kind of shutting down. It's tired, and so you can have that same kind of creativity. You see these kind of brain states as actually being pretty similar.
Wow, Katie mean, does that sounds exactly like? WHOA, I'm just literally at my creative Oh.
My god, he's working most creative self wild crushing ice cream.
And I'm showing on Yeah, ice cream Sundays and cookies.
Drew.
I want to ask you something because I am the opposite, right, I like to equate.
I'm the opposite too.
Oh good, see Drew and I verse Shapiro over here, so like right, yeah, like so we're the creative.
We can all co exist happily.
Yes, yes, Katie, I'm married to one.
We're married.
This is literally what we do.
I want to talk about, Like, what is the link exactly between quality sleep? Thank you, Drew and Katie team over here and creativity.
So I'm a composer and before I went to graduate school in the mid Zeros, I was a tortured middle of the night like candle light eating bad food, you know.
A composer.
And I assumed because that was how it was, you know, an undergraduate where you'd never sleep and you're just up all the time. And I just assumed that that was how it operated. And I got to grad school and there was a point in there where we you know, we have to churn out a lot of music every week just to get the discipline going. And sure, I found that I was up at three in the morning, and I go to bed, and I get up at eight and look at what I'd written, and I hated all of it.
And I had to rewrite.
It for like two hours, and I talked to one of my classmates and she's like, oh, I just go to bed at the same time every night, and if I have to get up a little earlier to like fix stuff, I do that. And my head exploded. I was like, that's an option. Like I just didn't even realize it. So now it's since then, my husband and I both go to bed at ten thirty every night and get up at six every morning, and every day, seven days a week. And I mean sometimes we'll stay up,
you know, if we go out or whatever. But like I have discovered since then that I hit peak flow state at like eight am, and I go from like eight to twelve, and I can write more efficiently in those four hours than I ever could before because my schedule is so regimented now me too, and I don't even have to think about it. I don't have to think about when I'm going to bed, I don't have to think about when I'm getting up. I just I just kind of go with the day and I'm always.
That's the schedule, and that's when this is allotted for. Yeah, Sarah, can you talk? You said, I heard you say, yup, me too, so can you speak to Is this also true that quality sleep is connected to creative output, that's quality?
Yeah.
So I mean it's really interesting because I think that that is part of what it's like to be in our twenties and being graduate school and be doing the crazy life of wanting to be either the crazy scientist or the crazy artist or whatever it is. Yeah, exactly, the tortur itself, right, and then suddenly you hit a wall and realize, wait a second, maybe this is actually
not working. And you know, we are superheroes when we're young, and we have unbelievable amounts of energy, and we can overcome any amount of sleep deprivation and any amount of junk food, and we can just be eating at three am and doing all that kind of stuff. And then suddenly you hit like your thirties, and everything just kind of stops right and it stops working as well. And I think that's when people really get into the idea of hmm, when am I actually functional? And that is
for a lot of people the morning hours. So there's the other part of sleep that's really important is called non rapid I'm non rem sleep, or really the slow wave sleep, and that stuff happens in the first period of the night. So we have these two big bookends of your night. Right when you get to sleep, you go into this very restorative state.
Yeah, that's my jay exactly, my favorite part.
I crushed the first half of a disaster. The second half.
Oh that's great.
I mean, that's really the one that is all doing all the brain cleaning and doing all the memory consolidation, and doing all your protein synthesis and all this really
important restorative stuff that keeps you young. And it actually can only really happen in the first period of the night, which is if you're a night person and you go to bed at three and you probably are not getting that actually driven by your circadian rhythm, So you really want to try to get to sleep early because that mixture of having this kind of non REM first and then REM is actually very very important for being able to process these creative ideas but also process your emotions
and process your memory and really learn from yourself in a sort of a healthy creative way. If you have too much REM, people with depression have too much REM, or they have too early onset of REM, they stay in REM for too long, and it's a very emotional state that doesn't.
Have that.
I would say processing.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like non REM is teaching you what actually is reality, and then REM comes in and starts to make all these creative associations between what really happened. So if you don't have that non rem first and then you just have too much REM, you can kind of be in a state where you're really associative, but you're not necess necessarily tuned into reality.
Okay, so hold on a second, Like, Okay, Drew, you're a composer, would you say that some of the greatest rock stars of all time are spending too much time in the rim cycle? Like, for example, Keith Richards the Rolling Stones wrote that guitar riff of I Can't Get No Satisfaction, which is like one of my most favorite songs ever.
And I read that this dude.
The story goes, he woke up in the middle of the night, but he gets up and he writes, I Can't Get No Satisfaction and.
He wrote the yeah, and he wrote the guitar riffs in the middle of the night.
Okay, if it is true that Keith Richards woke in the middle of the night wrote the guitar riff or I can't get no satisfaction.
Wrote it down.
I believe that completely, wrote it down real quick, went back to sleep, woke up, played what he had written, and was like, dang, this is.
Good, the opposite of my grad school experience. But yes, do you think that that? But that's why he's Keith Richards And I'm not.
Yes, well, come on, Drew, you are chasing sleeps Keith Richards my friend. But wait, do you think that that is someone who just operates Sarah in getting a lot more of the rem sleep.
So I think that there's a real strong stereotype about artists that they're the Jackson Pollock or Keith Richards who goes absolutely NonStop and never sleeps. And I think, for the most part, that's kind of.
Bull I love this that.
Many of the most famous artists are the most standardized in terms of their schedule. They wear the same clothes every day, they eat the same foods every day, they stick to the same time to take a walk every day. Because when you stick with their rhythm, which is you know, the whole book that I wrote last year, The Power of the Downstate is all about our rhythms and The truth is is that artists that I know who are successful artists, they're up in the morning and they're in
their studio. They take their morning walk, you know, the constitutional or they take in the afternoon, and they eat the same foods, and they wear a uniform and they stay inside this space of creativity while not being fettered by all of the craziness of all the you know of.
You're creeping me out, Sarah, because you're describing my life.
But anyway, is that right, Drew?
Yeah, yeah, wait, absolutely, Drew.
Take us through. So your day to day.
You're such a creative person, do you like wear the same so tell us?
Tell us, yeah, well, like.
I have five of the same jacket and a bunch of the same shirts, and a bunch of vests and a bunch of the same pants. And then I, you know, I wear this if I'm going out. It's my armor and I can just put it on and I feel great wearing it, and so, uh yeah, I don't have to think about it. I get up every morning at the same time, I feed the cat, I make coffee, I do the crossword puzzle, if my husband make his lunch, send him off to work, and then I go in the studio or I do a podcast, which is what
I'm doing this morning. But I regimented every every morning, like I don't even have to think about it, and.
That frees me up.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a point where you have to realize in order to be a professional as a composer, I have to be able to deliver X amount of music every day at X quality level always. And so I figured out at some point that that helps me get out of my own.
Way in terms of being creative.
It's like I do this for a job, and once you get into the pattern, it's like my brain is ready for me to get into the studio at eight in the morning, like it's excited to.
Be in there.
This has been a great conversation and we're going to pick it up soon more Chasing Sleep in a moment.
Welcome back to Chasing Sleep.
We've been exploring how sleep is related to our creativity with psychologist, author researcher Sarah Seed, Mednick and Andrew Edwards. Who needs to be at his creative best just score films, TV shows and video games. I want to move on to something called the twilight zone, which Adam, you got to talk all about the twilight zone. I feel like that's your space.
This is what some people call it. It's that time between sleep and wakefulness, when you're sort of asleep and you're sort of awake. But can you just tell us a little bit about what is happening to our brains and our bodies during this time? And then, Drew, I want to ask you kind of what your experience with this zone is.
You start to.
Have what are called hypnogogic dreams, these very vivid experiences, right, things that are salient for you, things that are on your mind. And it's called stage one sleep, and it's really just what most people think of as a transition between wake and sleep. You can get into that kind of crazy overthinking mind.
Is is that when you step on the stair that's not there.
And you're those are called hypnic jerks, which I think is a great line.
I always get those every night.
I get one jerk before I sort of fall asleep.
One yeah, I do too.
Yeah, And it's a very vivid dream, right where you feel like you're falling or something right, and you suddenly yeah.
Yeah, for just like a second exactly.
Yeah.
And so the thing that's interesting about stage one sleep is that you have the same sort of brain activity as you have in REM sleep, but you just don't have that atonius. So when you're in REM sleep, you have is no muscle control. You're totally paralyzed, which is good because it means that you're not going to act out all your crazy dreams. But in stage one sleep you still are able to move right. You have that kind of sudden jerk experience.
Oh that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, that's right, Drew.
I wanted to ask you about that, like you do you have experience with that sort of zone.
I feel like I get into that zone when you just have to stay up and keep working, where when you're super tired, you lose your you know, your.
Frontal frontal cortex.
Cortex control element.
I feel like when I get into that space, you know, I'm just knocking the wall down with my head. I'm definitely not at my optimal there, and if I get any random ideas, I tend to forget them.
Right, you also need your frontal lobe to form memory, so that's why you forget that.
I think that just comes down to the fact that I'm so used to working when I'm like sharp and focused, you know, in the morning with a good night of sleep.
Here you also came up with an accidental great band name called Cortex Control Element.
Yeah, that is good.
I like that.
It's an industrial band, into industrial totally.
I also like Hypnic Jerks.
Yeah, Hypnic Jerks is a good Yeah.
I always thought that was a good like punk band.
Yeah, that's a punk band for sure.
Okay, sleeping and napping is a huge component to my creativity. It's like, if I am having a trouble memorizing a line or really feeling inspired about an acting scene, we would get an hour lunch break, Let's say on the set of Scandal, I would go back to my trailer, which Adam would call my like nap sanctuary. Even if it was fifteen minutes or twenty minutes. I would read the scene. I would think about it, and I would
sometimes completely conk out. And sometimes I'd be in this weird sort of meditative sleep and I would wake up from that and I would have ideas that I didn't have.
The lines would be.
There, which is weird, and when I would wake up, my perspective would have shifted.
This is straight out of my own laboratory. I work with an artist named Lyla Friedland, and we did a show at the Scope Art Fair called the imagine Aption where we did exactly as you said. We built this soundproof, beautiful soundproof room and we had this really nice bed. We'd have people lie down and we'd go in there with them and we'd say, okay, think of a problem.
Think of all the elements of the problem. We'd write it down for them on this board and then we would say, okay, it's time for a nap, and then we would have the light and it was you know, it was a sunrise when they woke up, and it was a sunset light situation when they went to sleep, and then we would let them nap for maybe twenty minutes, maybe a little bit longer, and then we would turn on the lights so it was a sunrise. And then we'd just walk in there and say, okay, what were
you thinking about? And then we would put together this the thoughts that came up with them so that we could have them sort of figure out problems for themselves.
It was a really great project.
But it's straight that's a really cool story.
Yeah, it was straight out of my lab, because that's exactly what we're finding is that if you really can, you know, put put the elements of the problem up at the forefront of your mind and then take a nap, you can wake up and have potentially have some solutions there.
I was just gonna dovetail off of what Sarah was talking about. This sort of thing I did that really has helped me immensely is splitting when I'm writing, like being purely creative, and when I'm editing myself. I made those completely separate things, like I do one in the morning and I do the other in the afternoon, with like a break in between.
Oh wow, because then when I'm in my flow.
State, what do you do in the morning?
I just write, you know.
And so if I write five notes, this is the thing any writer or composer will know. You write five words or five notes, and then you sit there for three hours wondering if those are the right five notes, instead of like are those the right five words? Instead of just keeping on right, like just keep writing and then see what you have when you're done, you know, when you're tired and you need to go take a nap.
And yeah, so yeah, splitting those two things made it so that I can just crank in the morning on music because I'm just playing and it's just coming out, and then in the afternoon I can go back and look at it and be like, oh, that would be better there, and that would be better there, and then I'll erase that and.
Take a nap, Change Your Life was my first book.
Take a Nap, Change your Life. This is all me, This is all me.
It's all about that. It's basically, you can get two days out of your day.
That was my whole graduate work was all about napping and showing that people could be twice as creative, and they could have twice the memory consolidation effects they and they twice the perceptual changes, Like you know, you didn't need a whole night of sleep. You could take a nap in the middle of a day and get the same benefits as a night of sleep and then have you know this, the second part of your day just be as effective.
No, I'm losing my mind.
I think this is the most important podcast that's ever been created since the beginning of time, Drew, Have you ever had something like that where you've come up with an idea or solution in your great quality sleep schedule that you have or have you ever like, put out a creative question before going to bed and wake up with the answers.
I have to be careful about doing that because I am prone to go through one rem cycle, get up at three in the morning and start making lists in my head.
Have you ever written music? Do you write music in your sleep?
I have?
Like, I just think being a composer must be the coolest thing in the world.
I don't do a lot of sort of dream got it conceptual. I did write a piano concerto in my sleep in college and then immediately forgot it when.
I wrote when I woke up, so frustrating, I write.
I remember that vividly it was there because I can't remember it. I remember it because I can't remember it.
But I mean what you're saying, it takes so much focus, right, It takes so much being so present, and if you're sleep deprived, it's really hard to go with a thought whatever it is, right, So I think that no matter what, it's going to require a well rested mind.
I mean, that's you know.
Well, otherwise it's really hard to get out of your own way, like you're the problem. Otherwise, Like if I can't focus. It's because maybe I went out the night before to a party or whatever, and I get up in the morning and I'm not going to start writing till ten, you know, because I'm like, I'm gonna sit and play video games for an hour.
Yeah whatever.
I think that concept of getting out of your own way is so critical. I think that that's such a critical, important thing.
Very cool, Drew.
I would love to hear your score for this podcast episode.
Oh me too, It's what I do you know?
Like?
Where would that go?
Me?
Three?
I hang on just a second.
You can't swing a cat and Drew's place without hitting.
This is so exciting, And Sarah, I wanted to ask you what do we not know still about creativity and sleep? You know, if you if you could jump into a new study right now, what would that study be?
Oh so much.
I would love to know are there individual differences that ideas everybody creative or are there some people who can actually put themselves into a zone and then what is actually happening in the brain? So I think that would be really the forefront. Is it actually seeing the neural mechanism of creativity and action would be a really exciting next step.
I have a good turn.
I'm going to set you up.
This is Chasing Sleep, a production of Ruby Studios from iHeartMedia in partnership with Mattress Firm.
Honestly, it would be very I mean, there wouldn't be a lot there because we're talking a lot. I don't want to get in the way of the dialogue. The dialogue is the dialogue is another line of counterpoint.
Oh see, okay, Let's say Drew, you were going to take us into a really nice quality night of sleep or a sleep creative nap.
What would you play us? What would what would sound nice?
Dreamy chords?
That sounds so nice?
Okay, Now, if you were going to be the hypno jerk, is that what it's called hypnic jerk?
If you were the hypnic jerk.
Hypnic jerks?
Oh no, if I know, if you see, if it was hypnick jerks, you see, I broke a string on this guitar just now, so like, so yeah, we're ready for hypnick jerky.
It's hard to say.
It's hard to make a twelve strings sound angry.
So yay, Drew, yay, Sarah, creatively awesome.
Katie and I just really want to thank you guys, Sarah and Drew for being here. This has been another mind melting episode of Jason Sleep.
Thank you for being.
Here, Thanks for having us.
Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thank you.
I thought this would be the episode that we sort of connected with the easiest, but that being said, it is.
Oh.
All signs in this episode pointed to you getting.
On a better sleep schedule and a better routine, which is so funny because I've always thought of creativity as the opposite, you know what I mean.
If she didn't nail it by saying, artists we think of as dark and brooding and up all night and wild and all of this stuff, and she's like, no, Actually, like the most creative people are wearing the same things, are on a sleep schedule and getting quality sleep.
One of the things that I thought really inspired me about what dr was saying was the fact that he knows so well when he's at his most creative and how that relates to his sleep. His routine has enabled him him to be able to schedule and depend on his creativity in a way that I've never been.
Able to do.
Honey, You're going to try this week.
Yeah, Well, now that I'm a parent and I'm a husband, and I got two full time jobs, and I host a podcast. I think scheduling my creativity would really I'd really benefit from something like that, and getting to know exactly when it is that I'm at my most creative could really help me sort of organize my day a little bit.
Yes.
Also, weren't you mind blown by the actual definition that she gave of creativity?
Yes, that was really I never really thought of creativity as problem solving.
And also just taking two ideas or plans or whatever that aren't necessarily associated with each other, which is what we do when we sleep and dream.
We make these associations.
You make an association that is original.
Well, working in a creative environment.
I'm excited because our next episode is going to be specifically about sleep and work. So we can get our ducks in a row with our sleep and then we can start talking about sleep and work.
I can't wait to hear about that.
And we are several episodes in now, Adam, So we really want your all's.
Uses use guys's.
Opinions about the podcast, So please go to your podcast player, give us a rating, or maybe even write a short review.
Please or hit us up on our socials. You can find me on the Gram at Shappy Shapes.
And me too on the Gram at kt q Low's.
And Another Thing.
Follow or subscribe to Chasing Sleep on your apps so that you never miss an.
Episode until next time. Hoping you're living your best while sleeping your best. Chasing Sleep is a production of Ruby Studios from iHeartMedia in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Mallisosha.
This show was written and produced by Sound That Brands Dave Beasting, Jason Jackson, and Michelle Rice.
Chasing Sleep is hosted by Katie Lows and Adam Shapiro.
Thank you to our partners at Mattress Firm.