We’ve all experienced the sense of escape that comes from drawing meaningless squiggles and words on paper. Usually, we do this when we’re bored and unable to avoid a drawn-out meeting or speech.
It’s very likely that you’ve never paid much attention to your doodles, much less looked at them as doorways to creative thinking. You may have even been chastised for being distracted.
However, doodling is far more than a ‘distraction’. Studies show that doodling helps you remember more, it can help you relax, and become more creative.
Doodling is a common activity amongst many great names. People like Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, NIKE CEO, Mark Parker, Bill Gates, and others are some of the world’s best-known doodlers.
When applied correctly, doodling can help you bring out your creativity at work and in your personal endeavors. Let’s uncover the ways doodling can help you become creative and why you should doodle more.
Doodling Uses More Senses
Drawing or doodling is multi-modal in nature. It engages your mind, your hand, and your vision. It engages more of your senses and makes you more involved in what you’re doing.
Even when you’re in a boring meeting paying minimum attention, you’re still engaged. In this way, you absorb more information from what’s happening around you.
It Improves Memory
Doodling boosts memory since you’re not just sitting and listening. When you doodle, you use your hearing, eyesight, and hand movement to create drawings and scribbles.
Using more of your senses helps you pay attention to what you’re seeing and hearing. You also force your brain to turn complex concepts into simpler visual elements. Images can convey more information and they’re easier to remember. As a result, doodling helps you retain information easily.
You Can Understand Complex Information
Instead of writing down long paragraphs and pages full of notes, you can create pictures out of complex information. Being able to break down verbal content into images uses creative thinking. As the previous point already mentions, you’re more likely to remember information when you doodle.
Turning abstract concepts into scribbles and doodles can help you explore a topic in greater depth. It’s also a common experience to explain difficult concepts to other people on the back of a menu or a napkin with drawings and words. Doodling is a powerful teaching and learning tool that has applications in work, at universities, and at home.
It Reduces Stress and Creates Clarity
Doodling is a powerful stress buster that you can use at any time. The act of doodling on paper and seeing shapes and lines flow from your pen can release tension.
As you feel less stressful, you’ll find greater clarity in your mind. You’ll soon be able to refocus and renew working on tasks with energy.
When you have a clear head, it becomes easier to enter a flow state where your creativity is more accessible.
Doodling Enables Collaboration
Doodling is not just an individual activity, it’s also a powerful tool for brainstorming as a group. You and your team or group members can work together to generate ideas and solutions with doodling.
Use a large piece of paper or work on a whiteboard and use markers. You can lead by starting to create visual representations of the topic you want to work on. Then invite others to join in with their own drawings.
You’ll soon find your group creating insightful diagrams and pictures that will help you explore a topic. As a group, you’ll be able to generate new ideas, rethink old processes, and find solutions to hard problems.
Unleash Your Creativity with Doodling
Anyone can access their creative side by doodling. It’s helpful to know that you don’t have to be an artist or be ‘good’ at drawing to make doodling work for you.
Doodling works by using different modalities at once. Think of children and the way they shift modes as they learn and play. They draw, color, or act out imaginative scenes. Children use different modes to express themselves and this brings out their creativity.
As we go to school and grow up, we spend more time on academic reading and writing, and less time on other creative outlets. Doodling enables you to tap into your forgotten creative side by engaging more senses or modes.
Use it to come up with ideas for your business, or to help your customers with creative solutions. You’ll never run out of ideas for your blog site or forget what was said at a boring conference.
Doodling can enhance your life by helping you find your creative side. Apply it today and make yourself grow.