Mindfulness, flow and creativity : an exploratory study on how mindfulness training can affect creativity through the experience of flow

Abstract

Creativity is often named as one of the most important skills of the 21st century. Especially for creative professionals such as designers, it is a lifelong task to understand and nourish their creativity. Building and maintaining a career in the creative industries not only requires disciplinary expertise and technical skills but also the capability to capitalize on different states of mind. This exploratory study suggests that mindfulness is a key player on the way to entering and maintaining a state of flow, which in turn positively influences creativity. In this context, creativity refers to the participants’ creative personal identity and their creative self-efficacy. A two-week mindfulness programme was designed to test the mediation model, where mindful meditation has a positive effect on flow resulting in enhanced creativity. During the intervention, 43 design students worked on creative projects related to their studies and practised mindfulness on a daily basis with the help of guided openmonitoring meditations. Following a quantitative research design, the participants filled out online self-assessment questionnaires to provide control variables for mindfulness, flow and creativity on a trait level before the intervention started. Every day during the mindfulness programme, the students submitted their experiences regarding mindfulness, flow states and self-perceived creativity through online surveys. Since different levels of engagement with mindfulness during the intervention were anticipated amongst the participants, a control group was not included in the experimental setup. Data was analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, where correlations, regression and mediation analysis were carried out. Interestingly, the effect of mindfulness in the model differed depending on the operational definition used. While mindfulness, operationalized as time spent meditating, had an indirect effect on creativity with flow as a mediator, no mediation took place when state mindfulness acted as the independent variable. Apart from the mediation, mindfulness, operationalized as time spent meditating, enhanced flow states, while state mindfulness had a direct effect on self-perceived creativity. These findings not only show the complexity of the involved constructs, but also suggest that the concepts of mindfulness and flow, often perceived as contradictory, work hand in hand while being in interplay with creativity.