[lionhearted]

> I've been thinking of forcing myself to spend half an hour each day without stimulus, just thinking and writing on a paper notepad to get around this.

This is good. If you find a cafe with the right ambiance for you, that's a great way of doing it. Then you make that place your "thinking cafe" - I travel a lot, and that's one of the first things I look for if I'm getting stuck or distracted at my apartment or hotel. Change of environment, for whatever reason, changes my thinking quite a lot. It's trial and error to find the right sort of environment for your thinking, but very useful when you find it.