How Your Period Affects Your Imagination (Unless You’re a Guy)- Overview
More practical strategies for maximising creativity involve designing project timelines and brainstorming sessions around female workers’ ovulation cycles. This experiment proved that women communicated and participated in society during ovulation. Having it all in one place can lead to exciting discussions and ideas that solve problems in a creative way.
The Biological Background
Ovulation is the point in the menstrual cycle where a mature egg emerges from the ovary around midway through the cycle. The physiological response to this process involves an uptick in hormones such as oestrogen and progesterone. These hormones are not only essential for reproduction but have also been implicated in a number of cognitive and emotional states.
Oestrogen, for example, stimulates communication between hemispheres of the brain, with effects on location, mood and even judgment. Therefore, at the time of ovulation, women may develop new cognitive and emotional skills. Curiously, these hormonal shifts can spill over into the lives of women and alter the creative dynamics of every encounter between women and men.
Creativity and Hormones: The Connection
Studies have shown that women’s creative output varies with menstruation. Reports in the journal Psychological Science have suggested that women are more creative during ovulation. It’s widely assumed that this increase in creativity is the result of an increase in oestrogen, which encourages flexibility and divergent thinking – the ability to think through alternate ways of approaching a problem.
What about the relation between ovulation and creativity, though?
1. The Ripple Effect on Men
In environments that encourage cooperative creativity (the office, a creative studio, collaborative work), “coordinated creativity” may come into play when women are ovulating. The more energetic and enthusiastic a fertilising woman, the more active mood is apparently encouraged, the more open thoughts and imaginations are at play. Men meeting women during this golden age might be swimming in this torrent of ideas, fed by the products of this broad-ranging experience.
This is, of course, one of the joys of collaborative action: insights coming to the surface, squirting in a mixture of hot female hormones and equally hot male testosterone, can lead to new solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Some brainstorming session with a team of any and every sort could create an outpouring of energy that resulted from this kind of active collaboration – and that’s at least part of the promise of discovering the secret hormone chemistry.
2. The Creative Benefits of Synchronization
In the office, or any other space where creativity is shared, the timing of the cycle of ovulation can generate “synchronised creativity”. If a bunch of women are on or near ovulation, then this dynamic makes the space open for experimentation.
Even men who are dating fertile women might take comfort in the upbeat arousal emanating from these spaces. You might find that a bit of innovation will push your buttons, offering you a new solution to a problem or some new projects and collaborations.
Enhancing Creativity through Awareness
When men and women are educated about the consequences of hormonal cycles, they can tap into their imaginations. These are a few suggestions on how you can leverage this information to guide your work:
1. Timing Projects for Maximum Creativity
More tangible ways to maximise creativity include planning project schedules and brainstorming around female workers’ ovulatory cycles. This study demonstrated that women communicated and interacted with one another while they were ovulating. The ease with which we can express ideas and thoughts can cause vibrant discussion and lead to ideas that solve problems creatively.
Scheduling collaborative time to occur during the most productive hours can help foster creative drive in teams that wish to spend more of their creative time. And whether it’s an idea generation process, a solution quest, or just reworking an idea that exists, creativity can more likely be active right now because people feel involved and motivated enough to put their effort into it.
2. Encouraging Gender-Diverse Collaboration
It is most active in “areas where divergent points of view and emotional intelligence intersect”. So you want to ensure the organisation has an enabling environment in which to co-opt as much influence and power as possible. You can see from the standard counterargument that men and women seem to have different approaches to solving problems. Men are objective, reasoned; women are relational and feeling.
In bringing together groups that blend these diverse forces, companies can evolve a new way of thinking. As long as we provide space for everybody to have their voice heard and understood, larger spaces add depth to artmaking. If people on the team are comfortable with sharing their characteristically weird ideas, the work is more likely to resonate with a broader constituency-section, and thus to generate innovations that speak more broadly to a larger group of experiences and perspectives.
3. Highlighting Personal Reflection and Adaptation
Not only is one needed to be attuned to other people’s cycles, but one must be attuned to one’s own and how that intersects with their own creative impulse. If you think it through yourself, productivity and creativity can be mapped in ways that might not otherwise seem to occur. Others, for instance, come up with their most inventive new thoughts at some point during the cycle, or because they are compelled by the rhythm of an interactive environment.
This self-knowledge, when deployed, multiplies the creative practice of the individual. We can adapt our practices – either scheduling work at our most inspired times or arranging for co-workers to work during peak periods – and do our creative work to its fullest. This slick fix encourages both self-creativity and collective productivity.
Implications for Employment and Social Environments.
What ovulation and creativity have in common has practical implications, especially in the workplace and in social contexts that foster creativity. Companies might want to pay attention to these cycles, knowing that collaboration changes from month to month. Boosting creative thinking or teamwork at certain times could leverage the power of high oestrogen in female colleagues.
Plus, being more aware can result in more empathy and understanding on the team. It can build a more supportive work environment by recognising that individual cycles can have a collective impact.
Conclusion: Why Ovulation Influences Your Creativity (Yet, Not if You’re a Man)
Creativity is a dualistic, inside-out affair. Although the cycle of ovulation plays an physiological role for women, male creativity cannot be denied. Men and women can design and collaborate more effectively by looking at and celebrating these relationships. Because the creative process is driven by variety and collaboration. The next time you fall into your creative rut, notice what everyone else is doing — the egg is your ticket!
