Too Fast to Think

Have you ever felt that the harder you work, the less inspired you become? In Too Fast to Think, Chris Lewis explores a paradox of modern life: the faster we move, the less we truly think. He argues that the hyperconnected, always-on culture—fed by social media, email, and digital multitasking—has created an epidemic of busyness that erodes deep thought, empathy, and creativity. Lewis contends that while the world celebrates speed and productivity, these very habits undermine the quiet and reflection necessary for innovation and human meaning.

The book is both diagnosis and prescription. It blends insights from business leaders, artists, scientists, clergy, and educators to reveal how genuine creativity works and why it is dying under the weight of interruption. Lewis defines eight traits—Quiet, Engage, Dream, Relax, Release, Repeat, Play, and Teach—that form the foundation of creative thinking. With them, he invites you to slow down, reconnect with purpose, and rediscover the space where real ideas emerge.

The Speed Trap

Lewis begins by examining the relentless acceleration of the modern world. The rise of smartphones, social media, and instant communication has blurred boundaries between work and life. We check emails in bed, scroll through news while watching TV, and measure success by how busy we are. This digital noise creates what he calls a 'soufflé in a storm'—an environment so turbulent that creativity cannot rise. Every ping from a device fractures concentration, pushing us toward shallow thinking and reactive decision-making.

Research and anecdotes illustrate the scale of this overload. The average worker receives hundreds of emails a day and dozens of alerts per hour. Millennials, the first generation raised entirely within this ecosystem, often multitask even in bathrooms or while driving. The result: declining attention spans, rising anxiety, and decreasing capacity for reflection. As film director Tony Palmer warns, 'Social media has been a catastrophe for the young—they’ve stopped thinking deeply.' The tragedy is that the technology built to connect us now disconnects us from ourselves.

How Busyness Became a Badge

Lewis explores how busyness has replaced productivity as the measure of worth. Through the story of Carol, a high-achieving executive who organized every minute of her day into 15-minute slots, he shows how the cult of time management leads to burnout and guilt. Carol equated speed with success until Lewis challenged her to 'do less, not more.' The result was transformative—by freeing an hour a day for reflection, she became calmer, more strategic, and more inspiring to her team. Her colleagues described the shift as cultural: from frightening to fun, from manic to supportive.

This case reveals a key insight: creativity is less about constant doing and more about being. Carol’s father embodied this truth—he wasn’t good because of what he did, but because of who he was: constant, generous, loving. Lewis argues that leadership and creativity share this quality of presence. You cannot project values when you are too busy to see the big picture. To think well, we must reclaim idle time as fertile ground for ideas.

From Information to Insight

Beyond personal burnout, Lewis traces how information overload has corrupted media and culture. The chase for clicks has replaced depth with speed; journalists produce four stories a day instead of four a week. News has become dominated by celebrity gossip and negativity, feeding the illusion that the world is getting worse even as data shows global health, wealth, and safety improving. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s statistics on declining violence contrast sharply with the pessimism of social feeds. The faster a story spreads, Lewis notes, the less truth it contains.

“Speed kills truth.”

Lewis visualizes this dynamic as an inverted curve: as story speed rises—from historians to Twitter updates—accuracy declines. The mind favors binary judgment over nuance. We process headlines faster than we think, and our worldviews narrow accordingly.

The Cost of Connection

Social media’s emotional toll, particularly on women, forms another thread. Surveys show that women dominate visual-based platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, using them to connect family, work, and brands—yet this engagement breeds stress and unrealistic standards. Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful campaign revealed that four of five negative beauty tweets came from women themselves, illustrating a cycle of online self-criticism. Lewis suggests that while social media amplifies female creativity, it also magnifies vulnerability, turning personal expression into a source of pressure.

Rediscovering the Quiet Mind

Ultimately, Lewis proposes a radical cure: stillness. Drawing on the experiences of artists, designers, and neuroscientists, he shows that great ideas arise not from speed but from slowness—from walking, dreaming, and sleeping. Whether it is Oxford neuroscientist Russell Foster on the power of sleep, Vanessa Brady on the discipline of separating creative and commercial time, or Admiral George Zambellas on how belief transforms leadership, every perspective converges on one truth: creativity requires space. As Lewis writes, innovation happens 'like creating a soufflé in a storm.' You must calm the air before it can rise.

If modern life makes you feel fragmented and frantic, this book offers both diagnosis and liberation. It teaches that thinking fast may make you busy—but thinking slow makes you whole. To reclaim your creativity, you must begin by reclaiming your quiet.

Our digital lives are overflowing. Lewis calls this the 'information overload'—a crisis of quantity displacing quality. We don’t merely work faster; we live faster, filling every spare minute with messages, updates, and alerts. This omnipresence of technology has blurred boundaries between professional and personal life until both are interrupted by each other. You may recognize this symptom yourself: answering emails at dinner, scrolling through Twitter in bed, or feeling guilty for taking a break. The new normal isn’t productivity—it’s perpetual distraction.

The Science of Interruption

Lewis supports his argument with research from organizations like The Radicati Group and Pew Research Center. The average business user receives a new email every six minutes. Add instant messages, social media, and online ads, and the cognitive bombardment is relentless. Each alert draws on the same neural circuitry as addiction: dopamine rewards us for checking messages, so we keep checking more. The mind’s quiet spaces—where imagination flourishes—are drowned out.

He also highlights a striking physical correlation: global coffee consumption has doubled since 1975. Overstimulated brains crave caffeine and connectivity. The result? A civilization running on borrowed energy, mistaking stimulation for creativity.

Social Media and Gender

Beyond the universal overload, Lewis reveals that its effects are uneven. Women, he finds, are disproportionately affected by social media’s emotional demands. More likely to engage visually and socially online, women lead usage across platforms except LinkedIn. The upside is creative engagement—brands like Dove build entire movements through women’s online interaction. The downside is stress and self-criticism. Pew research shows that women experience higher awareness of others’ distress online, which, in turn, compounds their own.

Lewis uses Dove’s campaign as a turning point: by encouraging positive speech (#SpeakBeautiful), the brand turned dystopia into empowerment—a reminder that creativity can still heal even in noisy spaces.

Echo Chambers and Extremes

Information overload also reshapes public discourse. As people tailor news to fit their beliefs, they create 'echo chambers' that block opposing views. The result: polarization, intolerance, and the rise of radicals who feel like majorities. Speed favors simplicity; binary thinking replaces nuance. To avoid offending anyone, mainstream news grows bland—while extremists, who 'tell it like it is,' attract followers. Lewis warns that this dynamic rewards outrage over understanding.

Shifting Perspective

Yet Lewis ends on optimism. Quoting Steven Pinker’s research, he shows that the world is safer, healthier, and richer than ever. The problem isn’t reality—it’s perception warped by constant bad news. 'Speed kills truth,' he reminds us, because quick stories lack context. Real creativity demands slowness; real understanding demands perspective. When you pause long enough to see the whole picture, you discover that things aren’t falling apart—they’re unfolding.

In the grand narrative of human progress, information overload is simply noise. What matters is learning to hear the signal again—the calm, creative voice beneath the din.

Lewis argues that the roots of our overload lie in how we’ve been trained to think. Our education systems reward conformity, competition, and efficiency—the very traits that now stifle imagination. Drawing inspiration from Sir Ken Robinson’s pioneering work, he suggests that schools and universities function like factories of the Enlightenment, designed to produce compliant workers, not curious thinkers. The system educates 'from the neck up'—prioritizing logic and testing over intuition and creativity.

Teaching to the Test

Standardized testing, Lewis notes, reduces education to right or wrong answers. Students learn to please rather than to think. Reverend Alasdair Coles, chaplain at St Andrews University, observes that universities are overwhelmed by psychological crises: students arrive unable to cope with relationships or silence. There is plenty of communication, he says, but little real conversation. Technology amplifies this—students scroll rather than reflect, losing the ability to concentrate for long stretches.

The Fear of Falling Behind

Parental pressure, debt, and underemployment worsen the problem. Degrees no longer guarantee jobs; young adults become both anxious and overqualified. Lewis observes gender contrasts here: men leave school with more confidence, women with more skill—but both suffer from systems that reward rote performance over creative risk. The result, as Vanessa Brady notes, is that 'most creatives fail not because they can’t come up with ideas, but because they don’t know the business side.' Universities isolate creativity from practicality, leaving graduates talented but unemployable.

A Better Blueprint

Lewis highlights innovators who break the mold. At Portsmouth College, principal Steve Frampton rebuilt timetables around human biology: starting classes at 10 a.m. and teaching long, immersive lessons rather than fragmented sessions. He also embraced technology mindfully—issuing iPads to all students while rejecting personal smartphones for himself. The result was greater engagement and calm. Similarly, philanthropist Peter De Haan invested £25 million in art programs outside conventional universities, arguing that creativity thrives when freed from rigid institutions.

Art as Education

Lewis closes this chapter with George Blacklock of Chelsea College of Arts, whose deceptively simple question—'Why have you done it in such a conventional manner?'—captures the essence of creative teaching. Learning, he insists, is about removing fear. Great teachers use playfulness and critique to encourage risk-taking. Creativity cannot be taught as a formula; it must be nurtured as trust. This, Lewis concludes, is the true purpose of education: not to prepare people for tests, but to prepare them for curiosity.

To restore creativity, we must unlearn the habits of control and rediscover the spirit of exploration—the child’s joy of asking 'what if?' rather than 'what’s the grade?'

Lewis dives deep into neuroscience to demystify how creativity works. The brain, he shows, thrives on balance. It’s a dialogue between the analytical 'left' process and the intuitive 'right' process—not a war between them. Creativity happens when analysis pauses long enough for intuition to speak. This insight reframes the myth of 'right-brained creatives.' Both hemispheres collaborate, with the corpus callosum acting as bridge and filter. Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who experienced a stroke in one hemisphere, described the resulting flood of emotion and insight as revelation rather than disability.

The Left and Right in Practice

Lewis redefines the two processes as conceptualization versus reductionism. The left analyzes, compares, and critiques—the 'compare, contrast, analyze' engine. The right imagines, believes, and connects—the 'trust, faith, and belonging' intuition. Overload forces dominance of the left, turning us into anxious detail-obsessives. The cure is engagement with the whole: relationships, art, movement, empathy. David Eagleman’s Botox experiment illustrates this—subjects who couldn’t smile also couldn’t read emotions. Human contact literally keeps our neural empathy alive.

Plasticity and Flow

The brain adapts to whatever it practises. London taxi drivers, who must memorize 'the Knowledge,' develop enlarged hippocampi for spatial memory. But this specialization can shrink capacity elsewhere—a parable for cognitive balance. Prolonged overload rewires brains for short-term attention, undermining imagination. Positive psychology’s concept of Flow—coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi—offers escape: total absorption in creative action. In Flow, time disappears, self-consciousness fades, and joy replaces judgment. Lewis argues that sustained creativity is the art of balancing focus with freedom.

Mind and Body

Physical health underpins mental creativity. Nutrition, hydration, and movement influence cognition. In one case study, Lewis helps 'Anika,' a designer suffering from fatigue and irritability, rediscover balance through diet and exercise. By combining practical discipline with self-care, she regained clarity and composure. Neuroscience supports this: sleep, oxygen, and rhythm synchronize brain function. In short, creativity is not mystical—it’s biological. Treat your brain like an ecosystem, not a machine.

Lewis’s conclusion: when we understand our brain’s structure and cycles, we stop working against it. We learn that peace, empathy, and play are not luxuries—they’re neural necessities for imaginative life.

Sleep, Lewis insists, is the 'parent of all creative traits.' You can’t think well if you don’t rest well. In conversation with neuroscientist Professor Russell Foster of Oxford, he explores how sleep restores the brain, consolidates memory, and fuels imagination. The myth of sleepless success—from Margaret Thatcher to tech entrepreneurs—masks a dangerous truth: chronic deprivation kills creativity, clarity, and eventually health.

The Brain at Rest

Foster explains that the sleeping brain activates genes for restoration and self-regulation. REM sleep generates theta waves that promote free associations—the neural state linked to dreams and invention. Leaders who ignore sleep, adds Lewis, function cognitively like drunk drivers after 20 hours awake. One productive night can double insight; one sleepless night can halve compassion. Sleep-deprived brains misread others’ emotions, undermining trust—the bedrock of leadership.

Technology’s Blue Light

The link between screens and insomnia is clear. Blue light emitted by devices suppresses melatonin, delaying sleep and shortening REM cycles. Clinical psychologist Dr. Michael Breus demonstrates that even dim blue wavelengths trick the brain into wakefulness. Lewis connects this to our culture of endless engagement—scrolling through feeds is both visual stimulation and emotional overload. To sleep—and to imagine—we must disconnect. Apps like f.lux and mobile 'night shift' modes help, but the deeper solution is behavioral: don’t let your phone be your pillow.

Health and Resilience

Sleep isn’t only mental; it’s physical maintenance. Less than six hours per night increases the risk of obesity, diabetes, and even cancer. Night-shift nurses show higher breast cancer incidence due to circadian disruption. Foster’s advice is simple yet profound: reduce light before bed, avoid caffeine after lunch, keep bedrooms cool, and seek morning sunlight. These habits literally synchronize our internal clocks—the biological 'conductor' of life’s orchestra.

By reclaiming sleep, we don’t just recover energy—we recover imagination. In dreams, the brain rehearses creativity itself, weaving metaphors, solving problems, and practicing freedom. Sleep, Lewis concludes, is not passive; it is the silent rehearsal for your next great idea.

If creativity thrives in rest, where exactly do ideas emerge? Lewis’s research shows a surprising consistency: great ideas come when you’re not trying. From Einstein to everyday professionals, moments of insight appear in routine or solitude—showers, walks, flights, or sleepless dawns. Why? Because these activities silence the analytical brain long enough for intuition to speak. The 'to-do list,' Lewis writes, must be replaced by a 'to-be list.'

Incubation and Flow

Author Alan Lightman describes his scientific epiphany as 'a surrender to the mystery of life'—the instant he stopped forcing rational solutions, insight surfaced. Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed the periodic table in his sleep. Lewis gathers such stories to show that incubation—the gap between effort and idea—is not laziness but necessity. Flow follows surrender. You fill the brain with information, then step back and let connections form naturally. Like yeast rising, creativity needs time and warmth, not pressure.

Fear and Vulnerability

The main inhibitor of this process is fear—especially the fear of failure. Elizabeth Gilbert reframes creativity as partnership with a 'daemon': an external muse that visits unpredictably. By treating inspiration as collaboration rather than judgment, you free yourself from anxiety. RAF pilot John Peters learned the same lesson after surviving torture as a prisoner of war. In fear’s depths, he discovered confidence through vulnerability: admitting weakness allowed his team to solve problems faster and more honestly. The creative mind, Lewis concludes, grows strongest when it stops pretending to be invincible.

Art, Faith, and Aesthetics

Artists like Robyn Graham and Jheni Arboine embody the union of stillness and spirituality. Graham kneels to paint, echoing prayerful meditation; Arboine hums to center her thoughts. Their practices create rhythm and silence—the same ingredients Lewis identifies as catalysts for imagination. Citing Gandhi, he connects beauty with truth: 'All true art helps the soul realize its inner self.' Whether through religion, painting, or quiet contemplation, creativity is an act of faith: the belief that something meaningful lives just beyond reason.

To generate ideas, stop chasing them. Relax your mind, listen inward, and trust stillness to unveil what hurried thought cannot. In Lewis’s words, 'You must calm the air before the soufflé can rise.'

To prove that creativity can be taught, Lewis developed a practical framework at the LEWIS Rise Academy—a global training program that immerses participants in art, reflection, and teamwork. Its philosophy: to think better, first unlearn speed. Rise embodies what the book calls the Eight Creative Traits: Quiet, Engage, Dream, Relax, Release, Repeat, Play, and Teach. Together, they form a circle of renewal, enabling creativity as habit rather than accident.

Quiet and Engage

Quiet is the antidote to overload. In the Academy, participants paint on massive canvases in silence, discovering patience and focus. Engagement then follows—not digital engagement, but emotional investment. Listening and believing in your own and others’ potential replace multitasking and judgment.

Dream, Relax, and Release

Dreaming, Lewis writes, is not escapism but envisioning possibility. Relaxation lowers resistance, making space for intuition. Release means letting go of control—trusting that creativity cannot be scheduled. These traits remind us that 'doing nothing' is often doing the most important thing: allowing insight to surface.

Repeat, Play, and Teach

Repetition establishes mastery; play introduces joy. Without play, creativity dies of seriousness. Teaching completes the cycle—sharing what you’ve learned amplifies creativity across teams. At Rise, participants apply these principles through art and business projects, discovering that collaboration, reflection, and humor are as essential to innovation as logic and speed.

Lewis’s academy reminds us that creativity isn’t a flash of genius—it’s a discipline of curiosity, courage, and kindness. You can relearn it by slowing down enough to listen to your own imaginative heartbeat.

The culmination of Lewis’s argument lies in leadership—the point where personal creativity meets collective purpose. He profiles leaders across industries to reveal that the most successful are not the busiest but the most human. Creativity, leadership, and integrity flow from authenticity, not algorithm.

Leading by Listening

Entrepreneur Sinclair Beecham, co-founder of Pret A Manger, declares, 'I don’t understand business people—they’re too short-term.' His success stems from trusting instinct over analysis and prioritizing customer happiness over spreadsheets. Similarly, Admiral George Zambellas revitalized the Royal Navy not through resources but belief—combining logic and passion to restore faith in a struggling institution. Both leaders show that creative authority comes from presence, not command.

The Outsider Advantage

Fred Cook of GolinHarris and Jackie Cooper of Edelman embody the 'outsider’s edge.' Neither had conventional credentials; both turned curiosity into career. Cook’s 'Unternship' sends interns away from the office for months to explore the world—living with Amish families or hiking mountains—because life experience fuels creativity better than cubicles. For Cooper, success came from rejecting complacency and valuing stillness. She works four days a week, keeps some days speechless, and uses silence as strategy. In a noisy industry, she found power by stepping away from noise.

Purpose and Play

True leaders, Lewis argues, create playful cultures. They model curiosity and vulnerability, letting others fail safely. Lord Chadlington’s habit of weekly solitude and Sir Cary Cooper’s insistence on fun in science both show that joy and ethics are inseparable from sustainable creativity. Each proves Gandhi’s idea that beauty and truth are one: good work emerges from good intent.

In the end, the most creative leaders do less but inspire more. They lead not by telling people what to do but by being someone worth following. As Lewis writes, 'You can’t do these words—you can only be them.' In slowing down to think, they speed up the world’s progress.