Hey Creative Souls!
This is the first edition of the creative insights newsletter where I share my learnings and research on better understanding creativity, the greatest of human potentials.In this first edition, I am going to share my recent learnings about creative anxiety. I am going to write about:
Let’s dive in……
Creativity is an important part of what makes us humans. We are designed to create and come up with new ideas. However, often times, we go through these episodes of creative anxiety in our creative process. We start to doubt ourselves of what we are creating, We begin questioning the worth of not only the thing that we are building but also our own creative potential. We start to feel less motivated and begin procrastinating more which ends up taking us away from our creativity.
There could be numerous reasons. May be we are afraid of not meeting society’s expectations of what a creative thing should be, maybe we are afraid of other people’s judgments about our creativity or maybe we are just not able to take the step to be in the creative process because we are so busy in fulfilling the life’s demands.
But what exactly is creative anxiety? Is it an illness that we suffer while we are being creative?
Whenever we set the intention to be creative, we set out on a mission to create something from nothing. We have a unique idea for something that doesn’t exist and we begin a journey to turn it into reality with the power of our creativity.
We often think of creativity as this walk in the garden. Being creative is considered to be a happy and joyous phase. A phase of self expression, where everything is just perfect and we are in the most desired point of our lives.
All this is true but creativity requires a ton of hard work. It is definitely a phase of self expression and a time where we find meaning in the work that we do, but it comes with its own set of challenges. Creativity is about solving problems and finding enjoyment in the process, rather than going after the outcome.
While in the creative process, the challenges become the part of fun but the biggest struggle that most creators face is at the very beginning when we decide to kick start our creative journey. Feelings of overwhelm-ness, self doubt, procrastination and all sorts of negativity forces us to question our own potential to think creatively. If you have experienced all of this, then you have gone through episodes of creative anxiety.
We start to feel anxious while in our creative process due to a bunch of reasons. The problem seem too huge to solve or the solution starts to feel far fetched from reality. We did come up with the idea, but we begin questioning the possibility of it ever becoming a reality. This is creative anxiety.
We begin to think about others judgments of our creative expression.
Thoughts like:
takes over our minds and prevents us from taking that first step into our creative process. This is creative anxiety.Most often, we trap ourselves in the expectation of what the society has defined for us for our creativity. We feel pressured to meet certain standards of creativity rather than just being creative for the sake of it. Interestingly enough this hypothesis of being “creative on demand” was tested in a recent research by A. Bullock Muir, B. Tribe and S. Forster. The researchers tested the hypothesis that creative anxiety is the result of people being creative on demand. When we are pressured to think creatively, that is when we are likely to face creative anxiety. The participants in the study completed Word Association Tasks (WAT) under two conditions. Under the first condition participants were asked to type in words in response to the words that were presented to them without much thought. The second condition was the same instruction but with the addition that this task is being performed to measure their creativity.
The researchers found out that the participants who are already low in creative anxiety, performed better in the word association task when they were aware that their creativity is being measured. On the other hand participants who are suffering through high levels of creative anxiety, took this instruction as a threat that their creativity is being measured and their output was affected.
It is very clear from this research that creative anxiety can have a significant affect on creative performance. But why does this happen? In another research it was found out that people with higher levels of creative anxiety always doubt their potential to be creative and just think of themselves as less creative. They take any new venture or experience as a threat that they might not be able to perform to the creative standards which are demanded.
So how can we manage it and overcome the affects of it?
During my research, I learned about some strategies to help us manage our anxiety in our creative process. I have been practising all these myself and its definitely helping me better control my emotions and maintain my creative confidence.
Using writing as a coping mechanism for creative anxiety can be extremely helpful. There is no scientific proof or research to support this but there has been research showing that it is significantly helpful for individuals with math anxiety. In a research done in 2014, individuals with High Math Anxiety versus Low Math Anxiety were put through some writing sessions and encouraged to write freely about their thoughts and emotions in dealing with any stressful situation. The results showed significant improvement and just after the writing sessions, the performance of students with High Math Anxiety, improved in solving various math related problems.
There is no proof to support this claim that it helps with creative anxiety but this technique has personally helped me in dealing with my creative anxiety. Most of the time, I feel lost and demotivated when working on creative projects of my own. Whether it’s working on a new music idea, trying to improve my technical skills or even exploring my new fond interest in cooking and woodworking, I go through it all the time. What I started doing was spending 15 to 20 minutes every morning to write about my current emotional state. I write freely with whatever comes to mind regarding how I am feeling with whatever is going on in my life. It helps me take a huge burden off of me. As soon as I am done writing, I feel very liberated and it feels really good. Instead of keeping that pain inside of me, which I know is going to come in the way of my work, I am releasing it through writing . It’s like sharing your painful experiences with a dear friend who is always there to listen to you.
Try it out and let me know how you feel after your writing sessions.
This is a great strategy to help control our emotions. Cognitive reappraisal involves changing the way we think about a certain situation and give a more positive spin to a negative experience. What usually happens is, whenever we are faced with something that we didn’t expect, our mind starts rushing through a stream of negative emotions because we fall into the state of confusion and inquiry of why this certain thing is happening to us or what is the reason behind it and on and on.
Feeling all these negative emotions can be bad for our mental health and overall well-being. It keeps us distracted from our work and we constantly think about the situation and reasons behind why something of this sort happened to us.
However, just by changing our perspective on how we look at things in our life, can be extremely helpful. We need to understand and realize that situations in life happens. We can’t really change the outcome of what we expected or didn’t expect to occur. But what’s in our hand is how do we define that outcome. If we begin attaching a positive meaning towards the negative experiences in life, It will allow us to change our emotions towards that situation. The more positive emotions we experience the better it will be for our overall mental well-being and eventually help us deal with our anxiety that we face through our creative process.This is how I have started practicing this through my creative anxiety. Whenever I am working through any problem and trying to figure out a solution, I often go through the same phase where I start to feel imposter syndrome for something that I am trying for the first time. Lately, I have started to dabble into some wood working but feeling so lost and confused on what I am doing. That’s where my creative anxiety usually creeps in. But instead of feeling bad about myself that I can’t really do it, I tell myself that it’s not that I can’t do it, I just haven’t done it yet. This is from the famous author, Carol Dweck who wrote the amazing book Mindset which talks about the power of yet.
This is why this strategy of cognitive appraisal is so powerful. Just by telling myself that don’t worry you just haven’t done it yet, made me feel good about myself and infact it motivated me to keep on going and trying new ways to get better at it. The outcome still remains the same but just by shifting our perspective towards positivity can help us deal through that situation.
This definitely takes alot of deliberate practice but it comes to a point that it becomes natural and automatic to think about every bad situation or experience positively.
We need to start getting comfortable with our creative process. One key thing we should accept is that anxiety is inevitable in any creative work or when you are trying to solve any problem or even trying out something new. You are going to feel anxious when you take on something new because there will be unknowns, doubts and uncertainties that you will need to go through. But these moments on anxiety can be reduced. We need to start practicing our creativity on a daily basis.
Creative work does not only include those masterpieces or great inventions that have changed this world. Even figuring out a solution, to a daily problem you are facing, is creativity because that challenge demands of you to think differently and come up with ideas to solve it. One of the reasons we get anxious during our creativity is because we expect the same creative outcome that the world and society around us has shown to us. We need to get out of that mindset and embrace any little thing that we do differently, as our creative achievement.
There have been studies that show that once we know and accept that our creativity can be trained and we can learn to be creative, we can significantly reduce the episodes of creative anxiety that we face through our creative process. So let’s start accepting ourselves as creatives and begin exploring our creative potential in our everyday life activities. You will be amazed at what you can achieve just by starting small.
Feelings of anxiety during our creative work doesn’t mean we lack creative potential or are any less creative than people we know of. Any sort of creative work is guaranteed to suffer through anxious moments because creative process is always full of chaos and confusion. What is in our control is to learn to manage those feelings of anxiety.We have been trained in today’s society with getting instant gratification. Within hours you can receive a package that you ordered, within couple of minutes you can request a ride to go to your destination and order a meal drop-off of your favorite food right to your door step. This is also training our minds to always expect creative outcomes right away when we are working through any project or solving any problem. We should understand and realize that these anxious moments that we feel are temporary and are eventually going to go away. The more we accept this reality the stronger we get in our mindset to deal with these negative emotions and find ways to experience them from a positive lens.
If you enjoyed reading this month’s edition, please consider sharing it with a friend. Let’s empower everyone to be creative.
