What Advertising Can Learn From Yoga

Image credit: Gemma Bringloe

"I have worked in advertising for 16 years and discovered yoga in my first agency job. I trained as a yoga teacher in 2022, teaching vinyasa, mandala and yin."

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​Why slowing down could be the most creative thing you do all year

Advertising has always been a high-adrenaline sport.

Short deadlines, long to-do lists, an Outlook calendar full of five-minute buffer meetings and a Slack thread that never sleeps. It’s a speedy and urgent life (or ‘hustle culture’ for our American friends). But maybe, just maybe, it’s time to hit the brakes?

To mark International Yoga Day this weekend (21st June), I wanted to share something that might sound counterintuitive in a business that prides itself on its caffeine count and ability to spin ten plates before 9am: what if the key to better creativity isn’t more speed or more pressure, but more stillness?

Because here’s the science bit. Stress, especially chronic, low-grade stress, shuts down the brain's ability to think divergently. The desirable mindset required to do great creative work: curiosity, openness, connection-making - gets crowded out by cortisol. So if we want better ideas, we may have to find calmer minds.

Enter yoga. Or at least, the principles of it.

You don’t need to be able to handstand or own the branded leggings. But here’s what the world of creativity could learn from the world of breath, balance and introspection.

1. Relaxation: Turn down the volume to turn up the thinking

Our industry runs on tension.

Not just the “creative brief tension” kind. But the full-fat, full-body, nervous system overload. The deadlines. The unread emails. The constant ping of Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, and your sixth tab of Google Docs telling you “someone else is editing this file.”

It’s like playing original Game Boy Tetris. The blocks keep falling. No matter how many you clear.

Yoga reminds us that rest is productive. That switching on the parasympathetic nervous system, through movement, breath or even just a moment of stillness - doesn’t slow us down, it tunes us in. It drops cortisol. It widens the lens. And it reactivates the parts of our brain that are built for originality, ready for when we speed up again.

If great ideas come in the shower, imagine what could happen in savasana. 

2. Clarity: Less noise. More signal.

A regular yoga practice teaches us focus. It gives us a front row seat to our own attention span, and helps us pull it out of the past or future, and into the present.

That matters.

Because most of us are trying to be everywhere at once. On top of the campaign. Across the latest round of amends. Logged into five platforms while writing a pitch deck with one hand and answering client notes with the other. But creative thinking isn’t built for multi-tasking. It’s built for depth.

Yoga teaches us to slow the mental scroll. To bring our awareness back to the body and our connection to the ground to find that balance and stability. 

It gives us the clarity to see which three tasks actually matter today… and which seven we can probably dropkick into tomorrow.

3. Perspective: You are not your to-do list

Yoga teaches you that your worth is not measured by how many things you can get done before 10am. Or how many reshares you can rack up on LinkedIn. Or even how many awards your team brings home this year. 

That doesn’t mean the work doesn’t matter. It just means it doesn’t define you. Just like how a physical asana practise can be strong and stable one day and it’s wobbly warriors the next. Accept it at that moment, and then let it go. 

In fact, I’ve found that the more perspective I bring into work, the more I remember that a pitch is not a life-or-death situation, and that no one, not one person, has ever lain on their deathbed regretting that one PO that didn’t get raised - ironically this perspective makes for better work.

We become braver. We take more creative risks. And we recover quicker when those risks don’t quite land. Because it’s not personal. It’s the process.

So what can yoga teach us about creativity?

That space isn’t the opposite of productivity. It’s the soil it grows in.

That calm isn’t complacency. It’s clarity.

That perspective doesn’t mean detachment. It means resilience.

And if you want to stay curious, connected and creative in an industry that moves a mile a minute, sometimes the most radical thing you can do… is slow down.

At Trouble Maker, I regularly run a yoga class in the mornings. It’s one hour. No phones. No slides. A space to move, to be still, to focus on the breath and connect to the self. It’s a small thing. But it’s our weekly reminder that great work doesn’t always come from pushing harder, it can also come from letting go.

See you on the mat,

Tracey

Read more from Trouble Maker here.