How to Draw Inspiration: For Digital Marketers and Designers

While social media and has brought about lots of changes when it comes to brand awareness and new design solutions, it also has its side effects — namely, doomscrolling. It releases dopamine in your brain, which is normally a good thing. However, dopamine is usually released as a reward for your hard work by your brain. When you watch short-form content, your brain keeps getting fed dopamine, which is why you keep finding yourself doomscrolling every chance you get.

So what does this have to do with inspiration?

When you're constantly consuming content, your brain gets used to being fed ideas. While these ideas are good and can serve as inspiration, they're just building blocks. To create something truly original, you need to give your brain the space to process these ideas and combine them in unique ways. This is where the importance of mental breathing room comes in.

Inspiration is similar to cooking, and social media is like the grocery store that gives you ingredients. But to make food that's truly yours, you need time to experiment with these ingredients, try different combinations, and develop your own recipes. This only happens when you let your mind truly explore, wander, and let it breathe.

This is why activities like doodling, writing, or typing work so well. They keep you busy while giving your mind the freedom to process and remix all the inspiration you've collected. Unlike scrolling, which constantly demands your attention with new content, these activities create a background rhythm that allows your creative thoughts to surface naturally.

As someone who struggles with ADHD, my therapist recommended an activity to me to help let my brain breathe — doodling.

Strange as it sounds, I realized that I’d been doing this way longer than I thought I did. My college notes were filled with tiny doodles in every page. So I decided to look up its authenticity, and there it was, research from Harvard Medical School that suggests that doodling isn't just idle scribbling - it actually helps improve focus and memory retention. When we doodle, we engage in what's called "constructive distraction," which keeps our minds just active enough to prevent complete daydreaming during tasks that might otherwise lead to zoning out.

However, in today's fast-paced work environment, taking out time to doodle might seem like a luxury we can't afford. This is where digital solutions come in handy. I discovered typersguild.com, a website that wasn't specifically designed for creative inspiration but has become an invaluable tool for this purpose.

Typersguild is primarily a typing practice website where you can type out entire books and classic stories. What makes it particularly effective is that it combines three productive activities into one: improving your typing speed, reading literature, and creating mental space for inspiration. While your hands are engaged in typing, your mind is simultaneously absorbing stories and allowing creative thoughts to surface.

Unlike doodling, which might be seen as unproductive in a professional setting, typing practice is a tangible skill development activity. You're not just creating space for inspiration; you're also enhancing your typing efficiency. The added bonus is that you're reading classic literature while doing this - from novels like "Dracula" and "Les Misérables" to timeless children's stories that often contain surprising depth and complexity when revisited as an adult.

The beauty of this approach is its efficiency. In a single session, you're improving your typing speed, engaging with literature, and creating that crucial mental space for inspiration to strike. When ideas come, it's as simple as switching to your work document to note them down before returning to your typing practice.

The digital age has revolutionised how we work and create, but it's also changed how we find inspiration. While social media and constant content consumption have their place, the key to genuine creativity lies in finding the right balance. Tools like Typersguild offer a practical solution - they help us step back from the endless scroll while still being productive. By combining skill development with mental space for creativity, we can break free from the dopamine-driven content cycle and discover our unique creative voice. After all, true inspiration doesn't come from endlessly consuming others' ideas, but from giving our minds the room to transform those ideas into something entirely new.