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35 Hilarious And Brilliant Realizations People Had In The Shower, As Shared By This Online Community (New Pics)
Let’s get one thing clear: the shower may be a great place to sing your heart out, but it’s even better to get those creative ideas flowing. Just think about it, you’re in an enclosed space with warm comforting water, and your mind is simply roaming where it wants to. Suddenly, you realize you’re doing much more than just mindlessly shampooing your hair — you’re allowing your brain to find brilliant fleeting thoughts you can’t wait to share with everyone else.
There’s one corner over on Reddit that eagerly waits for you to do so. Let us introduce you to the Shower Thoughts online group that serves as the perfect outlet to share those "miniature epiphanies you have that highlight the oddities within the familiar." With over 24 million members, it has archived quite the collection of unexpected, hilarious, and profound Aha! moments.
We have scoured the community and gathered some of the best gems of wisdom that might leave you pondering all day, so have a read through them right below. Upvote the ones that surprised you most and share your own earth-shattering ideas with us in the comments! After you’re done musing about this compilation, be sure to check out our earlier parts of this post right here, here, and here.
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The shower is one of the very few places where people can be alone with their thoughts. While it’s the perfect place to get some deep thinking done, the eureka effect occurs virtually anywhere we let our minds stay still. According to the moderators of the community, "'Showerthought' is a loose term that applies to the types of thoughts you might have while carrying out a routine task ... At their best, showerthoughts are universally relatable and find the amusing/interesting within the mundane." Whether it’s taking a long walk, meditating, or simply laying on the grass watching the clouds pass by, these are the calm moments that really rejuvenate the brain.
To learn more about how doing nothing can boost our creativity, we reached out to Nancy K. Napier, Ph.D., a Distinguished Professor Emerita at Boise State University and author of Unfolding Curiosity: Wrinkles and Surprises from Business and Beyond. "Several authors, including one of my favorites — Pico Iyer — talk about the value of stillness, of silence, of doing nothing," she told Bored Panda.
They are both true, we just have many different freedoms.
According to the professor, even when we think we're doing nothing, our brains keep on buzzing. "I've begun strength training and have learned that you should do it one day and then 'rest' the next, to give your muscles time to readjust, recover, and revive," she said. But when it comes to exercising our minds, we bend over backward to get those brain cells going and often forget to give our thoughts a breather. "I feel that way when I 'do nothing' in my work or thinking — it gives my mind some time to readjust (to not pushing so hard), to recover (from hard work and thinking), and to revive (and play with something that may not have had a chance to pop up)," Napier explained.
When i was first reading it, i thought it said "when you ar wearing noise" and I was so confused
The professor suspects that if we let our minds rest during work hours, just as we have a "rest day" in exercise, we'll see benefits and perhaps generate new ideas fairly quickly. After all, nearly everyone knows how drained we feel after several hours of tiring consecutive work. Then, coming up with beautiful innovative ideas is far from an easy task. But if we pause regularly during the day and give our brains a little break from thinking, we might avoid hitting creative burnout.
"Years ago, I worked with a group of faculty members (five of us, very different fields, ways of thinking) to design a new academic program. We started with an empty whiteboard for every meeting. After a few false starts, we learned to trust that we would have some great ideas by the end of each meeting. By removing the expectation and pressure of being creative, we became dramatically more competent at finding ideas. We allowed 'nothing' to be our starting point and that freed us to generate some great (and many not-so-great) ideas," Napier added.
Yes!!! I explain this to people but they don't always believe me. Certain things I can google quite proficiently and other things I prefer my husband to search or a friend.
Very true. And caffeine is like the only drug that they encourage you to use at work.
it's because people tend to unite easier against something, than to unite for something
Unfortunately, the modern world makes it hard for our minds to wander into the wilderness of unrelated thoughts. We’re constantly bombarded by daunting headlines, interrupted by our ringing devices, and feeling the weight of our personal and professional responsibilities every second of the day. So even when we strive to be peaceful and at ease, we find it extremely difficult to do so. Luckily for us, Napier explained that increasing our creativity doesn’t require much effort.
"I have a brutal commute from my home to my office — in heavy traffic, it can be....nine minutes! I'm lucky, of course, but realized a few years ago that even that amount of time could help me 'do nothing' and become more creative," she said and added that simply driving in silence to a place she knows how to get to without thinking made a huge difference. "I generated ideas, I solved problems, I came up with new dinner meals… It's a very simple act that I've recommended to many people who have real commutes — 20 or 30 or 45 minutes."
Like the monk that transcribed celebrate to celibate and now all priests are forever punished by essentially a typo... :-)
However, turning off the audio book or radio can be challenging for many people, so she suggests starting with one day a week or in the evenings on the way home. "Now that we're working from home more, however, it seems harder to find that clear cut quiet or 'nothing time,'" Napier noted. "I've been trying (not fully successfully, I'll admit) to take 30 minutes after my morning work time to just lie down, go into that semi-sleep mode, and boom, good ideas seem to come then. Once again, by giving my brain a little 'downtime,' it continues to work but maybe goes at its own pace and then drops some creativity on its own time."
There are several animals I‘d prefer to be alive over some people.
Napier pointed out that to become better at doing nothing, we have to "find activities that don't require heavy thought and use that as a time to let your brain wander; or have a set routine or habit that builds in some snippets of downtime." The professor mentioned several pockets of time that allows her to be in a relaxed state, have a distracted mind and let her imaginations run free. For example, her commute, taking a shower and making a coffee or a tea are short periods of time when she doesn't have to think.
Moreover, she sets the alarm to work for 40 minutes and then stop for 10, using that as downtime. "Some people lie down on a yoga mat and just meditate or sleep; ironing (20 minutes); laundry folding (5-10 minutes). Then, there are the specific gifts of time I offer to myself — when I declare I'll take an hour in the day to look at the clouds or birds," she said and added that while this doesn't happen often enough, she continues to work on it.
"I suspect now, more than ever, we need the self-care of doing nothing now and then, and we need to make it something that happens regularly, not just when we're forced into it (when we get sick, injured)," Napier told us. So our advice for you today, dear readers, is to allow yourselves to be bored and witness how quickly you can come up with fascinating and deep musings. If you have any other ideas on how to get better at doing absolutely nothing, let us know about them in the comments!
So true, I went to the wolf park and they where much more "leggier" tall and thinner then I expected. Still beautiful animals..
And since SOME people still believe in flat earth, fake moon landing and the inability of a vaccine ....we've got a long way to go
Load More Replies...?? Learning takes time. 100 years ago you could have said the same thing about the "mysteries of genetics" or a few hundred years earlier about the "mysteries of chemistry". Why do people always assume knowledge is instant?
Right? Give us a chance! We are still learning so much.
Load More Replies...Don't confuse intelligence with knowledge. Every time intelligence makes a new discovery it becomes knowledge. Even if you are not intelligent you can know the sun is a fusion reaction, but you will not discover that it's fusion reaction. Before we found out what powered the sun, we had to discover the atom and how it worked etc etc. Each little piece of knowledge pushes intelligence to discover new knowledge. The physics we teach at school today was stuff of investigation and schoolers 100 years ago. Einstein himself started wondering as a kid what would it be like to travel at the speed of light, what would he see if he saw anything. 200 years before investigators were discovering the properties of light. The knowledge about light is what triggered Einstein’s thoughts. We know more now about the universe then we ever could have imagined, every little discovery adds to the knowledge.
There is still the limit of comprehension. A five year old will never comprehend quantum physics formulas, no matter how much time you spend explaining it. As such it is perfectly possible that there are things that no adult human will ever be able to wrap their head around.
Load More Replies...animals understand alot more than we think. be thankful they don't speak
Actually......I see a lot of humans who can't understand things past the intelligence level of animals, like jellyfish.
But jellyfish have lived thousands of years with no brain.
Load More Replies...Somewhere something is watching us and either thinking how cute we are or how we might be dangerous..
Trust me. Animals are much smarter than the majority of humans. And weirdly enough the more people in a group, the higher level of stupidity shows. I work at the zoo and see the craziest behavior from the hundreds of people I see while on shift.
And yet we can't ever truely know with certainty what animals really know or think about. We only measure their perceived intelligence as compared to our own understanding.
:) you draw this line with your statement of humans and animals. It is, in fact, the bold step of hope which makes us different, despite being animals of this world. Read your words again, but slower. You have the rare talent of writing the answer within the question.
And if our brains were simple enough for us to understand how they work, we would be so stupid we wouldn't understand them.
We would have been on the Moon by at least 1200 CE if not for Primitive Mythology.
We may not be capable of unraveling ALL the mysteries of the Universe, but we've certainly figured out a lot. We haven't reached our limit yet. The biggest reason we have figured out so much is simply due to our collective intelligence, working together. I can't and likely never will understand Quantum physics, but there are those that do. And I don't have to understand it to benefit from that knowledge.
It's still better to admit not knowing than believing the convenient made up ones
We have the abillity to accumulate knowledge, pass it on, collect it from other people and learn about other ideas and discuss it with others. That's what pushes us foreword, not individual intelligence or individual knowledge.
The bit of advice I try to follow (but honestly don't always) is to treat everyone like they're new to the topic you're discussing. Just because you might be a wiz in a certain area of discussion doesn't mean they are too.
I don't think anything/one (mammals, birds, reptiles, humans) can understand things BEYOND their intelligence level.
Yes and no. While we use pretty much the same amount of cerebral energy as other Mammals we have a much higher cognitive use than other animals. We can process complex thoughts and ideas. Other animals are not exactly stupid but they have no concept of self. You wouldn't see a bear questioning the meaning of Life for example. The closet match to our higher based intelligence is a dolphin. Imagine if they hand opposable thumbs.. We'd be in trouble
Humans have a more sophisticated method of accumulating genoration knowledge, which has already allowed us to far exceed what any individual human could have ever figured out.
Or is it that we are unable to comprehend the level animals understand things and communicate it with each other. So actually we're the ones with a limited intelligence level
We have definitely advanced far beyond what nature intended. As evidenced by her attempts to take us out constantly.
Animals can't learn 2 + 2 = 4 and why that affects everything. Our understanding and learning is generational. Just a few years ago we wouldn't understand the internet.
Humans ARE animals so they can indeed learn maths. But other animals can do simple maths, like apes and some macaques
Load More Replies...My team and I are currently working on a theory related to this. We've had people think about the size of the galaxy and subsequently the universe is a very particular and specific way. Every single participant so far reaches a certain point before experiencing physical symptoms starting at dizziness and headaches, going right up to loss of consciousness. I'm not allowed to go into any detail but we hope complete a paper by the end of next year. But yes, in short I believe this to actually be correct.
Can your dog speak French. Then we can't work past our abilities
Load More Replies...Well yeah, there's a webcomic called "The Little Trashmaid" which works off this exact premise: https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-little-trashmaid/list?title_no=300138&page=1
And now "manufactured" stone/granite causes silicosis that's killing installers...
Your 9am may well be my 9pm - Time is relative to the person experiencing it.
No single person should have more than (random high number!) 100 million dollars. Everything over that amount should go to contributing society not a single rich a*****e's penis shaped rocket flight!
I mean, getting stabbed with a sword is getting stabbed with a sword even if you only lose 1 HP
Note: this post originally had 38 images. It’s been shortened to the top 36 images based on user votes.
I read a heck of a post on Tumblr a while back that’s haunted me. Have you ever looked at someone and wondered how they moaned during sex? Because I hadn’t before reading that post and now sometimes I do.
Using the swipe text feature on my phone is like typing in cursive 😄
I'm used to typing so I can't use the swipe feature without getting annoyed
Load More Replies...Normally...my brother received a stuffed bear as his first ever gift though, he was nameless for a good two hours after birth.
Load More Replies...Why do a lot of country songs include a line about a girl sliding right on over in the guy’s truck? There is no way a girl could do that in any modern truck. Also why are tattoos and piercings looked down on as not professional yet make-up and cosmetic surgery (like nose job, lips plumped, etc) is perfectly ok?
The natural colour of your lips is the very same colour of your... Sensitive parts down below
And the skin on your lips and your b******e is the same.
Load More Replies...If you could count 1 atom per Planck time instant, it would still take over 2*10^42 (2 tredecillion) years to count every atom in the observable universe. That's about 144 nonillion times longer than the observable universe has existed.
Our brains are weird, those are just words, impossible to comprehend.
Load More Replies...I read a heck of a post on Tumblr a while back that’s haunted me. Have you ever looked at someone and wondered how they moaned during sex? Because I hadn’t before reading that post and now sometimes I do.
Using the swipe text feature on my phone is like typing in cursive 😄
I'm used to typing so I can't use the swipe feature without getting annoyed
Load More Replies...Normally...my brother received a stuffed bear as his first ever gift though, he was nameless for a good two hours after birth.
Load More Replies...Why do a lot of country songs include a line about a girl sliding right on over in the guy’s truck? There is no way a girl could do that in any modern truck. Also why are tattoos and piercings looked down on as not professional yet make-up and cosmetic surgery (like nose job, lips plumped, etc) is perfectly ok?
The natural colour of your lips is the very same colour of your... Sensitive parts down below
And the skin on your lips and your b******e is the same.
Load More Replies...If you could count 1 atom per Planck time instant, it would still take over 2*10^42 (2 tredecillion) years to count every atom in the observable universe. That's about 144 nonillion times longer than the observable universe has existed.
Our brains are weird, those are just words, impossible to comprehend.
Load More Replies...