If you hit the wall, find yourself getting overly attached to ideas or resisting feedback it’s time to step away. Distance improves your perspective and calms your nerves. Start researching creativity and a couple scenarios come up over and over again. People get big ideas while showering or taking a walk. Sure, they produce results at their computer, in meetings, etc but showers and walks are consistently associated with the generation of big ah-ha ideas.
Taking a walk is the one tool that I’ve used every single day for the past 20 years. I started doing this when I was a political cartoonist and had to produce a comic every single day. I'd wake up, read newspapers, do some sketching then throw on some shoes and roam the nearby WMU campus. The news and sketches would percolate in the back of my brain while I walked. Since then its became an essential part of my daily routine. I wake up, I feed my brain with information about a project then I take a walk to let those ideas connect in the back burner of my thoughts. It's important to let your mind wander and create associations between the ideas you just consumed. While walking I’m more likely to make connections between ideas and almost 100% of the time I get back home and I have a plan of action.
A friend of mine, a lifetime freelancer who worked from home, once called this morning walk 'faking a commute.'
Whether I need the break or not I try to take a walk every day in the mid-afternoon. It's good to intentional step away from your work, to create some distance and perspective, between you and your project. Since I now do most of my work from home I can take a whenever I like but when I was in an office (for many years) I'd take a walk around the block every day at 3pm. It was usually when I was getting the post-lunch exhaustion and I'd use a coffee-run as an excuse to step away from the computer.