Words by Bethan Winn
I’ve got a confession to make: most of my best work ideas don’t happen at my desk. They emerge during my morning walks, whilst pottering about the house, or while brushing my teeth. And if you’ve ever solved a thorny problem while on holiday or had a brilliant idea whilst barbecuing snags, you’re not imagining things. Your brain genuinely works differently when you give it room to breathe.
As a critical thinking specialist, I often share something crucial: the best thinking often happens when we’re not trying to think hard. Summer, with its slower rhythms and lighter schedules, offers a natural opportunity to reset our mental operating system. You don’t need a month-long digital detox or an expensive retreat, just a willingness to approach the season differently.
Here are four science-backed ways to use summer to boost your creativity, focus, and decision-making capacity for the year ahead.
Change your thinking location
Charles Darwin walked the same quarter-mile path daily at Down House, dropping stones to mark each lap. Modern neuroscience confirms what he discovered intuitively: movement activates our brain’s Default Mode Network, responsible for unexpected connections and insights (Olafsdottir et al., 2018).
Summer gives us the perfect excuse to take our thinking outside the box and the house. Morning swims, beach walks, garden pottering – the rhythmic movement and absence of screens create ideal conditions for ‘background processing’ whilst your unconscious mind untangles yesterday’s challenges.
The hack: Choose one regular summer location (beach, river, park, or backyard at dawn) and make it your thinking spot. No phone, no podcast, no consuming. Even 15 minutes can reset your mental clarity. The consistency matters: your brain starts to associate this location with open, reflective thinking.
Embrace strategic disconnection
Many of us check our phones over 200 times a day, fracturing our attention every few minutes. Research shows 47% of people feel their capacity for deep, creative thinking has declined in recent years (Hunt, 2023). We’re constantly consuming information but rarely giving our minds space to make meaning from it.
Summer’s social rhythms naturally support disconnection. Weekend camping? Leave the laptop behind. Boxing Day beach day? The phone stays in the car.
The hack: Rather than attempting an all-or-nothing digital detox, create ‘technology boundaries’ around specific summer activities. Beach mornings are screen-free. Sunday arvo barbecues mean phones in a basket. Evening walks happen without earbuds. The goal is creating regular pockets where your brain can default to reflection rather than refreshing your feed.
Rediscover the power of play
Remember childhood summer holidays? Building sandcastles, inventing games, getting gloriously absorbed in utterly ‘pointless’ activities? That was your brain’s creativity laboratory at work.
Play activates different neural pathways than focused work. When we’re playing (bodysurfing, experimenting with recipes, identifying bird calls) we shift from goal-oriented thinking to exploratory thinking. This shift is crucial for innovation and problem-solving, but it’s exactly what gets squeezed out during packed work schedules.
The hack: Commit to one ‘micro-adventure’ each week of summer. Explore a beach you’ve never visited. Try cooking a cuisine you’ve never attempted. Learn three constellations. The activity matters less than the mindset: approaching something with playful curiosity rather than productivity goals.
Leverage summer’s slower pace for reflection
Elite athletes spend far more time on recovery than competition. Yet most of us treat our minds like they’re meant to sprint continuously. Summer’s natural slowdown offers a rare opportunity for reflection that can compound into wisdom.
I keep a whiteboard marker with my hairbrush because my best insights emerge in the shower. For you, it might be whilst gardening, driving, or making breakfast. When we’re engaged in simple, repetitive tasks, our brains finally have bandwidth to integrate experiences and generate insights.
The hack: Build a summer reflection ritual. Mine involves writing a three line diary before bed – just a moment to reflect on what brought me joy that day. It often leads to insights on what’s working and what’s not. Two minutes, that’s all. But that time creates a little mental space where scattered thoughts turn into actionable understanding.
The paradox of summer thinking
You’ll likely do your best thinking for 2026 not by working harder, but by working differently. Summer invites us to step back, to let our minds wander, to create conditions where insights emerge naturally rather than forced.
In an increasingly AI-driven world where machines excel at processing information, our distinctly human capacity for reflection, play, and meaning-making becomes more valuable. Summer isn’t an interruption to productivity, it’s an investment in the quality of your thinking for everything that follows.
So this summer, give yourself permission to move slowly, disconnect intentionally, play curiously, and reflect regularly. Your 2026 self will thank you for it.
