What You Think About in the Shower Leads to Your Best Work
By: Tim Denning
Tags: Work, Mindfulness, Lifestyle, Productivity, Self Improvement

What You Think About in the Shower Leads to Your Best Work

According to Paul Graham, Y Combinator Founder and infamous blogger.

Drawing by Mary Evans Picture Library

Paul Graham is a badass in the startup world… with a 1999 personal website.

Simple and extremely out of date is the best way to describe his blog where he shares viral thoughts every year, by accident. He’s startup royalty because of his Y Combinator program that has funded tech revelations such as Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox.

Following people like Paul can cause you to discover hidden gems of life. Here’s the one I love from Paul:

“It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”

*Mind blown*

I bet you haven’t thought about the power of showers with any real thought. Me neither, until recently. A shower can progressively impact your mind, one shower at a time. Showers lead to your best work. Here’s why.

A Shower is a Hidden Flow State

Flow states are powerful for doing your best work. You reach them when you’re hyper-focused on your work and the output happens effortlessly.

A shower is also a flow state. When you’re in the shower the barrier between you and your free-flowing thoughts is removed. You can think clearly in the shower. The noise of your mind dissipates in the shower. The water trickling down your back creates a sound like a light drum beat. The steam coming off your skin enters your body and soothes the aches and pains of your life. The steam opens up the pores in your skin and opens up your thinking, too.

The reason showers help you get into flow is because they relax you. When your mind is relaxed you can do anything.

Practical step:

Take a problem with you to your next shower. Deliberately bait your mind with a problem you’re going to discuss with yourself in the shower. Watch how the solutions find you easier than they did outside of the four walls of the shower world.

Your Problems Look Smaller in the Shower

You’re sitting in your car one Sunday afternoon. You’re relaxing and listening to music. Your phone rings. It’s the love of your life. You can’t wait to speak with them.

You answer the call and ask how their weekend away with friends was. The tone of voice changes. “We need to talk…” is the only sign you needed to hear before the inevitable worst-case scenario happens.

Your body starts to go into shutdown mode. They’re breaking up with you forever. This moment can never be repaired.

You will never be the same again. Your heart sinks lower and lower into the earth. You’re already below rock-bottom. You’re stuck in a dark hole with no exit plan and the conversation is still going.

You want the breakup call to end. But you don’t want to let them go. You still love them. You haven’t even finished loving them yet. You had less than twelve months to fall for them and think you’d marry them and live happily ever after in a gated community with a white picket fence and a dog that smiles at you even when you’re covered in baby vomit.

It’s that part of the call where you say goodbye. Forever. How do you even say goodbye in that situation? You don’t. You fumble through it like a nervous teenager on a first date. The call ends. You feel like a failure. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. But you can, strangely, still shower.

You take the breakup to the shower with you. You ruminate on it while the water hits your back. You’re so angry at yourself that you crank up the heat. “This shower’s gonna burn,” you say to yourself.

The shower temperature leads to a mild dose of self-harm. You turn the temperature down midstream and think of the one you lost. You miss them already and it has only been two hours. You wonder in the shower what it’s like to live without them for the rest of your life.

You step out of the shower and dry off. You wipe the resulting tears from your face. Your eyes look Ferrari red in the fogged-up mirror.

Despite the pain, your problem looks a little smaller. You decide you can carry on without her even though it’s going to hurt.

A Shower Is Another Dimension (I Leave My Body and Go Somewhere Else)

If there was a hidden portal to escape life, it’s showers for me. Getting in the shower is like a portal to another dimension. If you’ve ever seen that Simpsons episode where Homer enters another dimension by walking through a wall, that’s what it feels like when I have a warm shower.

Image Credit: Simpsons/Matt Groening/Fox

I feel like I’m outside myself in the shower. Like I am the observer viewing the observed. It’s a strange feeling that has come from practice. The practice of walking into the shower with an open mind and being surprised to see what can happen. The shower is a place to think when every other place you have to think doesn’t seem to be helpful.

I think of showers like a cheat code you enter into Grand Theft Auto to unlock many treasures of a world you have barely explored.

Shower at Different Times of the Day to Change Your Thoughts

The time you choose to shower produces different thinking. Morning showers wake up your thinking. Evening showers close your thinking down for bed. Mid-afternoon showers act as a reset for an exhausted mind.

Try a mid-afternoon shower and see if the rest of your day looks different, so you can produce better work.

Take Two Showers a Day to Be More Satisfied in Life

Research suggests those who take morning showers are the most satisfied with their overall life (78%), health (77%), and career (67%).

The study also says those who shower twice daily are most likely to feel well-rested upon waking up (75%).

A Shower Is a Glimpse of the Work You Love

I think about writing in the shower a lot. Whenever I have a story idea and I take it to the shower with me, somehow, the story comes out better right afterwards.

Your thoughts in the shower give you hints as to your interests. These interests could be future ways to make money, or side hustles to experiment with, or subtle signs of work you could try.

Think of it this way: the shower is where you daydream.

You don’t daydream about stuff you hate in the shower.