The Power of the Incubation Effect for Better Ideas

Published on 22 April 2025

So today we’re going to talk about the incubation effect.

The idea is that the more time you spend consciously focusing on a problem, the more your unconscious mind will continue to look for answers to that problem, even while you may be doing other things.

You’ve probably experienced this in your life. When someone asks you a question and you didn’t have the answer come to you immediately, but then after your conversation, maybe while you’re having dinner or something, suddenly the answer, come into your mind. They don’t come out of thin air. They come as a result of this incubation.You can dramatically enhance the effectiveness of the incubation effect by creating reminders in your life.

Let’s say you can’t come up with a topic for an article right away what you could do is calendar a couple of minutes every single morning to think about this article topic.

If you come up with ideas, great, you write them down and you keep track of them. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. You just move on to the next thing. But the next day, it’s in your calendar again, and you do the same thing.

You get in the habit, the routine of asking yourself, what are some interesting topics?

Another idea would be simply put a little Post-it on your computer screen. I keep Post-it on my computer screen with messages for all the things that I want to be thinking about during the day.

And that’s going to stimulate your unconscious mind to think about these things. It’s going to stimulate the incubation effect, and you’re going to come up with better ideas and more ideas.

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