The Noetic Spiral

Navigating New Creative Rhythms

I am tired. Bone tired. The kind where you find your coffee in the oven and accidentally flood the kitchen when you forget to turn the tap off because you've forgotten basic functioning. Where 4am finds you haunting hallways like some sleep-deprived ghost, questioning your grip on consciousness and reality. Two babies, solo parenting (thanks to my husband's work), and a business to run – time has become a luxury I can't afford.

And yet, I'm creatively on fire.

Ideas ricochet through my mind at warp speed, spilling onto bedside notepads and filling Google docs. Articles and concepts tumbling out, like an overstuffed closet finally giving way. The paradox is fascinating. How can someone be simultaneously running on empty and creatively supercharged? These two states shouldn't coexist in the same universe, let alone the same brain.

Then it hit me, during an email exchange with a stranger in India, in which we were discussing creativity, parenting and life. He asked what media I consumed to generate so many ideas. The answer stopped me short: "Honestly? Almost nothing these days."

2020-me devoured 70 books in a year, along with three podcasts and 30-40 articles a day, all whilst mainlining Twitter. Now I'm lucky if I finish a book every 18 months, catch one podcast weekly, or read five articles. And yet, here I am, more creatively stimulated than ever.

The irony is perfect. I used to think gorging on inputs was the key to making connections, to building on others' ideas. But while I filled my head with everyone else's thoughts, I was drowning out my own voice. No space left to wonder, to ask “what do I think?”, “but why?” and "what if?"

Now, with the noise turned down (though sadly not the baby-plus-toddler decibel level) and Twitter (sorry, X) in my rearview mirror, my brain has room to breathe. To think. To actually process.

Turns out silence isn't just golden – it's rocket fuel for creativity.

I'm not alone in this revelation. Just as I was writing this, someone shared David Mattin's latest piece where he hits the same nerve: "amid the acceleration we're living through — in what may be the last days of the Before Times — the most important variable of all is thinking time."

Even AI is teaching us this lesson. OpenAI's Noam Brown discovered something startling in 2017: giving an AI just 20 extra seconds to "think" matched the performance boost of scaling the model 100,000 times larger and training it 100,000 times longer. Their recent o3 reasoning model is crushing benchmarks by doing exactly that – taking more time to think.

Twenty seconds versus a 100,000x scale-up. If that's not a wake-up call about the power of the pause, I don't know what is.

I've been turning this revelation over and over, like a stone in my pocket. And it's even more intriguing to me because it collides perfectly with where I am right now – neck-deep in ancient practices, poring over grimoires and indigenous wisdom, tracking down age-old rituals and forgotten knowledge for my book research. Hours lost in worlds of witchcraft, sacred ceremonies, and traditional teachings. And in all this exploration, something keeps surfacing, like a truth that won't stay buried; these cycles of stillness and surge mirror something far more fundamental, they're written into our very existence, playing out at every scale of life.

An example is the Celtic Wheel, which maps eight sacred festivals marking the dance between light and shadow, growth and rest. From Samhain's sacred darkness to Beltane's explosive creativity, from Lughnasadh's first harvest to Imbolc's stirring of new life. Our forbears understood that each phase held its own magic, its own necessity. They knew that fallow periods weren't empty – they were pregnant with possibility.

We echo this ancient wisdom too. Our circadian rhythms orchestrate a daily cadence of energy, body temperature, and cognitive function. Each day has its peaks of creative fire and valleys of restoration. Modern science is only now catching up to what our bodies always knew – that certain types of thinking belong to certain times of day, that our brightest insights often come in moments of lower alertness.

For women, there's an even deeper rhythm at play. Our monthly hormonal cycles aren't just about reproduction – they're a masterclass in creative phases. The outward-focused energy of ovulation, the deep intuition of the luteal phase, the reflective wisdom of menstruation. Each brings its own gifts, if only we'd stop fighting them.

Look at nature itself. Trees don't apologise for shedding their leaves. Bears don't feel guilty about hibernating. The moon doesn't try to stay full all month. Yet we've convinced ourselves that constant output, constant consumption, constant "productivity" is the only way forward.

It’s madness.

Having started to digest some of this, I'm now able to see my current creative surge differently. It's not happening despite my exhaustion and forced disconnection – it's happening because of it. Like the land after a forest fire, sometimes we need to be cleared of all the undergrowth before new life can take root.

But we live in a world obsessed with linear progress. Our economies demand constant growth, our careers are expected to follow an ever-upward trajectory, and our minds are pushed to produce without pause. We've created a society that treats rest as resistance, stillness as stagnation, and cycles as setbacks.

And this extends to how we treat our intellect and creativity. We're urged to optimise every moment, to fill every silence with podcasts, every commute with audiobooks, every evening with endless content streamed into our living rooms which we dutifully consume, operating under the assumption that more input equals more output, that constant intake leads to greater creation.

In fighting our natural rhythms, we're not just burning out—we're cutting ourselves off from our deepest source of creative power. The same force that pulls the tides, turns the seasons, and spins the galaxies lives in us. This is both poetry and science.

These patterns of rest and creation have led me to something I call the Noetic Spiral – from the Greek 'noesis' meaning deep understanding or pure thought. Picture a spiral: unlike a circle that simply returns to its starting point, a spiral moves both around and upward. Each turn builds on what came before while creating something new. We see this pattern everywhere in nature – in shells, in galaxies, in the unfurling of ferns. It's how nature achieves growth while maintaining connection with its origins.

The Noetic Spiral works the same way with our creative process. It moves through four distinct but flowing phases:

First comes Gathering – the active consumption of ideas, experiences, and information. It's the reading, the listening, the observing. But unlike our usual content binge, it's intentional and purposeful. Think of it as carefully selecting resources rather than mindlessly accumulating them.

Then comes Rest – the phase we're most likely to resist. It looks like nothing is happening. It feels unproductive. But beneath the surface, our minds are doing the essential work of processing what we've gathered. This is when we step back from active consumption and let our unconscious mind work through the material.

Next emerges Integration – the phase where disconnected pieces start connecting in unexpected ways. It often happens when we're not trying – in the shower, on walks, during mundane tasks. Those insights aren't random; they're the result of giving our minds space to process.

Finally comes Expression – where everything comes together. New ideas and insights emerge naturally, not through force. When we've prepared well through the previous phases, creativity flows more easily.

Each cycle through this spiral builds on what came before. Your next Gathering is shaped by what you've already created. Your Rest becomes more productive as you learn to trust it. Integration draws on an ever-deeper well of experience. And each Expression benefits from all the cycles that came before.

The Noetic Spiral shows us a different way to operate in our always-on age. Think about how we typically structure our work. The constant march from kickoff to deadline, from meeting to meeting, from quarter to quarter. Each phase expected to be more productive than the last. We schedule time for action but never for absorption. We make space for planning but not for processing.

But what if we built our timelines differently? Not just the standard checkpoints and milestones, but deliberate pause points. A week between strategy sessions to let insights settle. Three days after customer research to spot patterns. Time set aside not for more analysis or more creation, but for the vital work of integration. Those moments when we feel least productive might be when the most important work is happening, because sometimes the best thing we can do is absolutely nothing at all.

Complex decisions especially benefit from this rhythm. When faced with thorny problems, our instinct is to push harder, schedule more meetings, generate more analysis. But often, our best thinking emerges when we step back. When we give ourselves permission to take that long walk after an intensive workshop. To sleep on a major decision rather than forcing an immediate answer. To let our unconscious wisdom surface through periods of apparent stillness.

This ties back to what the OpenAI research revealed - that 20 seconds of processing time could match the power of massive computational scale. Our brains work the same way. Given space to process, they make connections and generate insights that no amount of active pushing could surface. Our creative process needs both the feast of input and the fast of silence.

I see it in my own life now. Those pre-dawn feedings that once felt like lost time have become spaces of integration. The repetitive tasks of childcare – the rocking, the walking, the endless loading of dishwashers – have transformed into periods of deep processing. Even my exhaustion has become an enforced pause, stripping away the noise and leaving only what matters.

In what should be my least creative season – sleep-deprived, time-starved, running on fumes – I'm experiencing the richest creative period of my life. Not because I'm pushing against these limitations, but because I've finally stopped fighting them. I've learned to trust the spiral, knowing that every quiet moment nurtures what comes next.

Maybe this is what we're being called to understand in our age of artificial intelligence and accelerating change. Our uniquely human advantage isn't in processing more, faster - machines will always outpace us there. Our strength lies in something far more foundational: our capacity to move in cycles, to integrate deeply, to mine the creative wisdom that emerges from stillness. While AI races to compress time, we can expand into it. True innovation comes not from pushing harder, but from moving with these ancient rhythms of contemplation and action.

Our creative lives, like everything in nature, need their seasons of dormancy. Every fallow period prepares the ground for future abundance. Our ancestors knew this truth that we're now rediscovering: the spiral always turns, and spring always returns.

But first, we need to learn to winter.

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*This essay was inspired in part by Katherine May's "Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times" (2020), which explores the importance of embracing life's fallow seasons. While May focuses on wintering as a response to difficult periods, this piece examines how even our busiest seasons can offer unexpected opportunities for creative rest.*