Listen to Your Body to Control Your Thoughts: The Dynamic Interplay of State Self‐Regulation, Creativity, and Cardiac Interoception in Everyday Life

ABSTRACT Trait self‐regulation, as the effort to monitor and alter thoughts, feelings, and behavior using feedback from the body (interoception), is important for creativity. But what about the role of state self‐regulation in everyday life situations? We investigated the dynamic interactions between state self‐regulation, creative idea generation, as well as interoceptive skills in the cardiac domain as a potentially mediating mechanism. In this study, n = 77 participants took part in an ecological momentary assessment for four consecutive days. Participants answered 10 random prompts a day, including items on self‐regulation, divergent thinking, and cardiac interoception tasks. Consistent with the preregistered hypotheses, we found that creative performance was higher in situations with higher state self‐regulation and higher interoceptive accuracy. Furthermore, state self‐regulation was positively associated with interoceptive accuracy. Findings indicate that moments with higher self‐regulation may be beneficial for creative thoughts, partly due to better access to one's own body, indicating greater body–mind coherence.