Starting a new job recently I've generally been feeling a bit knackered recently, with so many new processes etc. to learn and all.  As a morning person I've always been at my best in the morning, but even mornings have offered scant respite lately.  When you wake up tired there's not really anywhere else to go.

Now I'd imagined that would be a pretty bad thing for my creativity and general mental alertness.  New research suggests the opposite though – that we are actually at our creative height when we're at our groggiest.

So how does this work?  The researchers suggest that the Eureka type insights that represent our creative peak happen most often when our brain is in an unfocused state and is prone to aimless meandering.

The team rounded up a few hundred participants and asked them if they were morning or evening people.  Interestingly, albeit probably for another blog, most of them were night owls rather than morning people, although as the participants were mainly students this is not that surprising.

Anyway, they were then asked to complete six problem solving tasks, half of which were analytic type questions, half of which were insight questions that required creative thought.  They had just four minutes to solve each question.

To test their performance outside of their peak time, half were tested first thing in the morning, with the rest doing their tess late in the afternoon.  The results are quite something.

For creative tasks the students were at their best at their least optimal time of functioning.  The night owls performed creative taks much better in the late afternoon than they did in the morning!  You might think that the analytic taks might revert to the norm, that people would do best at their peak time, but it was shown that performance in analytic tasks was not affected by the time of day.

So there you have it.  If you want to unleash your creative juices, it might be best to do it when you're not feeling at your best mentally.