Alpha States and the Creative Process

The alpha state is bliss.

Do you know what I’m talking about? That time-is-meaningless, flowing state that you reach when your in the midst of a creative process: the one where the hours seem drift by you as insubstantially as a breeze, where you look outside and are astonished to realize that it’s dark, you haven’t eaten, and that you’ve been totally wrapped up in your creative process.

Everyone has the capability — I think that we all have it as children, and many people seem to lose it as they grow older. (Or do they? Maybe everyone else has their own secret life, and when they go home and work on their hobbies they are happily enmeshed in their own alpha state — but if so, they never talk about it.) It’s what keeps engineers so addicted to their jobs, keeps starving artists alive, keeps children happily occupied with a box of crayons and some paper.

I have been reaching amazing stretches of alpha state, working on my startup/project/web-site, about which I am not ready to talk about. But while I’ve been amazingly productive, I have noticed two unfortunate things:

• Being in my alpha state for such long periods of time predisposes me to avoid other people. This is horrible, I know: I enjoy people immensely. Nonetheless, being in my head for such long periods of time makes me used to the high-bandwidth communication of my local bus, so to speak; it’s an effort to try and drop down into real time to talk with people. (Note that I’m not claiming to be more intelligent or faster thinking than anyone else, but really, it’s much slower to talk with other people than talk with yourself, right?)
• For some reason, my most creative periods are when my personal life is the crap. In looking back, whenever I’m immensely happy with whomever I’m with, it turns out that I’m not as creative, not as productive. Perhaps this is why all the great artists were tormented. Scientifically, it makes me wonder if I picked up another bad habit, like drinking, that I could be super-creative and have a decent relationship, as long as I balanced it off with a nightly bender. I have neither the guts nor the stomach to try that, however.

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