• Sit Quietly: You can do any number of meditation techniques. You can sit quietly and concentrate on your breath. To yourself, you can say a word that brings you peace (love, one, etc…). You can sit and visualize yourself in a calming environment like a forrest, on the beach, by a pond, or in your garden. Or, you can listen to calming music or sounds from nature.
• Be in a Relaxing Place: Instead of just imagining yourself in a relaxing location, you can actually go there.
• Pet Your Pet: One of the most relaxing things you can do is pet your pet.
• Remember Your Dreams: In the morning, many of us have a hard time remembering our dreams. If this is true for you, you can use this as a way to quiet your mind.
• Take a Walk: This is one of my favorite ways to relax. Just calmly step outside and slowly walk. It could be around the building, back and forth in your room, or anywhere where you can focus on your steps, on your breath, or in any rhythmic activity that relaxes you.
• Take a Bath: There’s almost nothing like a hot bath to soothe your tensions.

What are some of your favorite ways to relax?

1. Fresh Eyes: Look around the room and find some common item that you may not have thought much about. Then, try to see if you can look at it a new way. First, bring to mind what you “normally” think of the item, and then try to see what else it could mean. Is a chair just an item to sit on? What else could it be? What is its history? What might be it’s future? Think of the fact that it’s simply a composit of atoms or that it is mostly empty space. Etc…
2. Try to relax: You can walk around, sit quietly, go for a jog, listen to soothing music to build creative approach. Do something that gives your subconscious thoughts space to bubble to the surface.
3. Read Poetry or Fiction: Get your mind thinking non-literally or through images. Stimulate your imagination.
4. Doodle: Don’t need to be a Picasso to make visual art. Let your hand do what it wants to do on a piece of paper. Just go with the flow of whatever images, sketches, or unusual visual patterns arise.
5. Free Associate: Start with an idea or a question and let your mind wander off of it; day dream about it. Don’t try to control where your thoughts go. Do the opposite. Just watch to see where they lead you. You may want to do this all in your head, or you can write them all down in a mind map or just as clusters of ideas–randomly on a piece of paper.
6. Recall Your Dreams: Dreams are some of the most unique associations of ideas you’ll come across. Try to remember them in the morning. If you do, see what ideas they may stimulate about something going on in your life. If you can’t remember them, at the very least maybe you’ll find yourself in a very relaxing state.
7. Do Creativity Excercises: Check out this website for games and puzzles that can stimulate your creative faculties and enhance your creative problem solving skills.
8. Learn a New Technique: Try to learn a new creative thinking “technique” or strategy, or a new technique for whatever creative endeavor you are participating in.
9. Diversify Yourself: Just learn new things in general. Learn about a new subject, pick up a new hobby, visit a new location, surround yourself with new people.
10. Play & Have Fun: Find some way to loosen up. Dance, sing, play a game, do something adventurous, act out a scene, tell jokes–especially tell jokes! Find ways to “not care what others think.” It’s this type of attitude that needs to be fostered in order to explore new ideas.

All these tips will helpful for you to get started with building creative approach.