How To Increase Your Creativity
TL:DR:
-Creativity is innate and a part of all of us. It brings order to the chaos of life.
-Challenge limiting beliefs about your own creativity
-Little ‘c’ creativity is not only for grand artists but accessible to everybody
-Our culture incentivizes consumption over creation
-Limit choices, embrace boredom, and introduce novelty to uncover your creativity
-Non-creative thinking hurts our problem-solving, our ability to connect to others, express our emotions
-Creative thinking allows us to experience life more fully, and not rely on defense mechanisms for stress
"You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." -Maya Angelou
Creativity can improve our mental health in a variety of ways.
-The creative person is not a slave to his emotions. Instead, emotions are used to create meaning, and functionality, and to add color to life.
-The creative person doesn’t get rigid or defensive when faced with stress. Suffering is confronted openly, with zest, because the creative person knows they can overcome it with their skills.
-The creative person welcomes stress as an opportunity to grow.
-The creative person is not a slave to his environment. He moves with the chaotic punches and creates a beautiful dance with the external environment.
-The creative person learns to balance fear and avoidance with a healthy dose of courage.
-The creative person has improved self-esteem by proving their abilities through problem-solving, and creative acts.
-The creative person rarely gets stuck, as they learn to activate different parts of themselves according to the situation.
-The creative person comes to their own convictions and isn’t afraid to go against the mainstream.
-The creative person doesn’t destroy barriers but rather, learns how to operate within them and creates new ones.
-The creative person understands the fundamentals of life and plays with the potentials.
If this sounds like something you want a part of….. then read on!
When studying psychology and counseling, we as students learn of all the major theorists, and their take on human nature. Freud emphasized our Will to Pleasure, Rogers emphasized our Self-actualizing tendency, Adler highlighted our Will to Power, and Viktor Frankl diverged with his notion of the Will to Meaning in his logotherapy. I would like to propose an even deeper axiomatic will, and that is the Will to Create. Creativity is needed to act out Freud's pleasure principle, being creative and adaptable is needed in Adler's idea of Social Interest, and creativity is surely needed to transform our inevitable suffering into something meaningful, as proposed by Frankl.
Now some readers may hear the word ‘creativity’ and tune out. DON’T DO THAT! To be clear, what I am talking about here is ‘little c’ creativity, not big C Creativity. Big ‘C’ creative people are the artists, musicians, and savants who create amazing works of creation for us all to enjoy. This is NOT the type of creativity I’m talking about per se. I’m talking about the creativity that is required to socialize with others, solve problems, create a loving home environment, and get our psychological needs met healthily. In other words, I’m talking about the creativity required to live a full life.
Humans are creative beings. You can confirm this by how our cells form to create tissues and organs, our hands create tools and buildings, our minds are constantly creating stories, and our spirits always searching for ways to create meaning. Creativity is in our DNA.
The little ‘c’ creativity that I am referring to is our ability to adapt, problem-solve, create rules and systems, and express ourselves in the day to day. This is the energy that enables us, daily, to synthesize and combine all of the different parts and experiences that make us who we are. What I’m saying here is that I believe we are ALL innately creative in the most fundamental sense. Whether you are more of an ‘everyman’, or a professional artist, little c creativity is like the mana that helps us overcome challenges and live a meaningful life. Disturbances or problems arise when our creativity, real or perceived is ineffective, or thwarted.
Having confidence in our creative abilities allows us not to be so defensive to incoming stress. Many psychological disturbances arise not from the external stimuli itself, but from how we respond to the disturbances. These are called symptoms. Creativity allows us not to rely so heavily on our defenses, allowing for a wider range of responses. We can have faith that we will create a solution. We have hope that we can creatively navigate our way back to living a life of meaning. We can trust our skills and abilities to sustain enriching relationships.
Here is an example:
John, a marketing professional, faces overwhelming job demands and unexpected negative feedback. If he relies on defenses rather than his creative abilities, he might react defensively to criticism, becoming more stressed and anxious. He might withdraw from his team, avoid taking risks, and stick to rigid, ineffective methods. This defensive stance could limit his responses, causing him to miss opportunities for innovation and improvement. As a result, his stress would compound, leading to decreased job satisfaction and strained relationships with his colleagues.
By taking a creative stance, John can better navigate his stress by viewing challenges as opportunities for innovation and growth. Instead of reacting defensively, he uses his creative skills to brainstorm unique solutions and develop a flexible project plan. This proactive approach allows him to adapt to changing circumstances and improve his work. Collaborating with his team, John fosters a supportive environment where new ideas are encouraged. This not only alleviates his stress but also enhances his job satisfaction and strengthens his relationships with colleagues, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling and productive work experience.
Here is another more practical example of creative vs non-creative:
Say it has dawned on you that your mother’s birthday is tomorrow, and you wish to get her a birthday card to demonstrate your thoughtfulness and love towards her.
You are posed with 2 options.
One, you respond to the stress by running down to the drugstore, becoming paralyzed by the choices of cards, finally settling on one, purchasing it, and signing your name on the bottom. Only for your mother to read it once and discard it. Not very inspiring or meaningful.
The other option, the creative option, is you take a blank piece of paper, fold it in half, and use whatever writing tools you have to make your own original card. You work within your limits of skill and resources, and you channel that creativity toward creating a card you know your mother will like. (Pro tip, mothers adore almost anything their child creates for them, regardless of skill level). Your mother reads the card, realizes you made it, and cherishes it forever. You get to share your creative process for making it, and you communicate your love toward your mother. Much more inspiring, real, and meaningful.
So that leaves us with the question: How can we tap into our inner creativity?
1. First, it would be helpful to start to change the way we think about creativity. To develop a sort of ‘creative sensibility’. Look at some of these principles of creativity. Do you agree? Have you thought about creativity in this way?
-Creativity is ageless and innate
-Creativity is an openness to life’s experiences not avoidance
-Creativity doesn’t exist without self-expression
-Creativity acts as a balancing agent between the competing dualities of life. (Eg. Art vs science, nature vs technology, individual vs collective..)
-To be creative is to be honest, vulnerable, courageous, and wise
-We don’t create just for the sake of creating, we create to express, solve, navigate, connect, and live life
-Creativity exists in all dimensions of being- Mind, Body, Heart, Spirit, Social & Career
The key takeaway here is that we ALL have the capabilities to be creative. Children don’t need overt instruction on how to be creative. They are curious, accept novelty, and tap into their natural sense of wonder and play. This tells me that being creative is something we all have access to. For adults, the work comes down to peeling back the layers of defense, self-limiting beliefs, and guilt associated with being creative put on from our experience of living in our modern day. It is less about developing an overt skill or talent, and more about uncovering what is deep within us.
2. Once we’ve gotten an understanding of the creative sensibility, next would be to introduce ourselves to novelty. New experiences, sights, smells, architecture, ideas, people, and food are all excellent ways to jump-start our creativity. This by no means has to be a grand affair. Simply choosing to walk a different route, trying out a new place to eat, reading a new book, or exchanging a few words with a stranger are all easy ways to get our brains to absorb new information. This new information will lead to new potentials in our daily lives while also desensitizing us to novel and unknown information over time. We train our defense mechanisms to settle down, and instead let our creative mechanisms take over.
So often, our lives fall into a sense of monotony and repetition. Experiencing the same things in our environment day in and day out leads to stale ideas. Coping mechanisms become out of date, we continue to engage in negative behavioral patterns, and we don’t give ourselves time to RECREATE our spirits. It’s as if our glowing energy of internal creativity becomes calcified. Many modern forces push our lives into a predictable, repetitive and quite frankly -shallow existence. This is easier for our societal elite to monetize and track us. It is up to us to battle against this stagnation by making space for new and novel experiences. Both big and small. The creativity within us carries a tinge of the rebel spirit. I say we use it!
3. My next suggestion would be to learn to filter or limit your choices. As many musicians, and artists can attest, having too many options and choices kills creativity. Any of our most cherished creative works have been completed under specific parameters or limits. The most intricate music still respects tonality and harmony. The most divine paintings are limited to the canvas surface. The most moving poems are bound by language and words on a page. And yet, they retain their profundity.
Why is this?
This is because good creativity isn’t about endless chaotic potential, but it is about bringing functionality and beautiful order to the chaos. I think this rings true for mental health. Wellness is achieved through the acceptance of our limits, and the engagement with our potentials. As soon as we try to do everything, we often end up doing nothing. Creative thinking helps us work within our limits, not without limits.
Start by streamlining your environment and routines. This can involve organizing your workspace with only the essential tools needed for your tasks, which reduces distractions and helps you focus. Delete the apps that you don’t use. Unfollow pages that merely add mental clutter to your life. Throw away old clothes, items, and anything else that adds undue stress to daily decisions. Simplify decision-making by setting specific guidelines for daily activities, such as meal planning with a set of go-to recipes or dressing with a capsule wardrobe. By narrowing down your options, you can concentrate on being creative within those boundaries. Just like an artist or musician. The main point here is that our culture has substituted creative adaptation for more and more choices and options. We want to retain our adaptation skills, which requires practice. This means learning to filter out what is essential and working with what we’ve got left.
4. To uncover our true creativity we need to re-balance our consumption vs. creation axis. As humans, we are consumers and creators. I don’t think I’m saying anything ground-breaking by pointing out that our culture has slipped into a consumer-driven state. In general, it seems the average person has checked out of their creative potential and has adopted a stance of passive consumption. Food is being made for us, music and art are being spoon-fed to us, and we let online ‘creators’ entertain us and tell us what to think while we let our creativity diminish. We have access to technology that makes multi-media creation so easy and accessible, and yet, the majority of people only consume media, rather than create it.
This is even more concerning when we realize the food, art, and culture that is being served to us are actively working against our mental health and wellness. Fast Food is filled with seed oils and preservatives, popular music is vein and uninspiring, and social media has opened up a whole ecosystem of ‘social contagions’. In a society that is reliably producing a positive, healthy, and inspiring culture, the passive consumption strategy may work out.
Unfortunately, that is not the current situation in the USA.
5. If I had to pick one key piece of advice, it would be to learn to be comfortable with being BORED. The paradox here is that the more we avoid boredom and pursue distracting stimuli, the more BORING our lives become. Bordum is the prerequisite for creativity. If we are constantly stimulated, entertained, or running around busy, we have no time to create such things for ourselves. This commentary tends to fall on to children, but I have seen no shortage of adults who could benefit from this advice.
Imagine a Saturday morning, when you wake up, your phone and wifi are down, and you have nowhere to be, and no obligations. Does this give you anxiety? Good! That anxious energy will soon turn itself into creative energy, assuming you don’t placate it with cheap distractions. Before you know it, you’ll be cleaning the house, humming a tune out loud, thinking of a new hobby to try, or playing some original game you created with the kids.
Our inner creativity solves the boredom dilemma if you allow it.
Boredom may feel like it is unproductive. This is the message from our consumerist society and is the key challenge for many who want to develop a creative sensibility. We must resist the urge to distract, escape, or consume our way out of boredom. But if you sit with boredom, you will find that you naturally have mental space to be creative.
6. The last idea I want to explore is the idea of PLAY or RECREATION. It is in the name, you can’t spell recreation without CREATION. Playfulness, and the conditions that allow us to be playful, are a potent source of our creative energy. In America, we don’t have a sophisticated relationship with ‘play’.
Play and creativity are deeply connected. Children, who are naturally oozing with creativity, play so much as kids, and then, with the help of school, adult expectations, economic demands, and society, playfulness is hammered out of them by the time they graduate school. Sports and athletics are the only types of play promoted in our society, but it is far from the only form of recreation.
Common misconceptions around play:
-Play is only for children
-Being playful is immature
-One cannot play when one has work to do
-Play needs to be sectioned off and segmented from other parts of life
Challenging these misconceptions is something we all have to work on by nature of living in America. Learning to take ‘play’ or recreation more ‘seriously’. By that, I mean we need to recognize, honor, and take advantage of, the benefits of recreation. It is paradoxical, but our ability to be playful, creative, and spontaneous is often MORE significant to the outcome of our lives than the “serious” things such as work, education, politics etc. That is to say, the quality of how we PLAY may be more impactful towards our well-being than how we WORK. We need to rebalance the emphasis we place on work vs recreation. Perhaps more importantly, we need to recognize that some forms of leisure are more aligned with our well-being than others.
Recreation is defined as the refreshment of strength and spirits after work.
The trap that I see Americans fall into is substituting true leisure and recreation for more passive consumption. Going for walks, spending time in a forest, skipping stones, playing sports, writing a poem, weight-lifting, cooking a new recipe, meditation, writing, and calling a friend are all going to be BETTER forms of recreation than binging Netflix, doomscrolling, or isolating in one’s bedroom. This is because the former are forms of active engagement, and the latter is passive consumption. From my experience, netflix and doomscrolling do NOT refresh my strength and spirit the same way a more active, creative form of recreation would.
What is needed is an active choice to reclaim our creative potential. We must reaffirm our competence, adaptability, and potential for excellence. It’s essential to learn to trust our sense of reason, purpose, and perspective. We can no longer afford to delegate our creativity away if we wish to manage our mental health.
If we see a better way to work in our careers, we need to explore that. If we have strong emotions, we need to do something with that energy. The uncreative person may displace his anger towards his job onto his wife and kids. The creative person recognizes his anger and hits the gym before coming home from a stressful day. If we want to improve our well-being, on a micro and macro level, then we need to start creating our own food, art, literature, entertainment, and lifestyle. We need to practice confronting our discomfort head-on and avoid the temptation to escape in the world of choices and options.
At the heart of this effort is recognizing the value of our unique experiences and having the courage to create an authentic life based on them. Not forfeiting your unique life to somebody, or something else. No two people will have the same creative response to life, and that is where the magic happens. On an individual level, if we change our internal sense of creativity, that leads to new behaviors, which in turn influence our culture and societal systems. If we as individuals become more creative, so too will our culture.
Embracing creativity isn't about conforming to a cliché of what it means to be "artistic" or "alternative." In fact, relying too heavily on rigid labels or stereotypes can damage creative thinking. It’s not about adopting certain looks or lifestyles, nor is it about engaging in extreme or unconventional behaviors for the sake of it. True creativity involves stepping outside your comfort zone, taking bold risks, and dedicating yourself to creating or living in a way that holds personal significance and fulfills your genuine aspirations.
I will leave you with a few quotes from psychologists, philosophers, and others who have discussed creativity in the past. I’m not the only mental health professional to see the power of creativity.
"The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." -Carl Jung
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." -Pablo Picasso
"Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time." -Viktor Frankl
"Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating." -John Cleese
"The key question isn’t ‘What fosters creativity?’ But it is ‘Why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative?’ Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not ‘Why do people create?’ but ‘Why do people not create or innovate?’” -Abraham Maslow
"Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life." -Rollo May
"The most potent muse of all is our own inner child." -Stephen Nachmanovitch
“Creativity is intelligence having fun." -Albert Einstein
I hope you found something useful, and came away with an increased ‘will to create’.
Live Well!
ST