When you are stressed, doing something creative is a great way to relieve your stress. On the other hand, when you are stressed, trying to be creative is far from being easy. And for anyone working in the creative field, that can spell Doom. With a bolded D.
Many things contribute to stress, such as lack of sleep, overworking, taking on too many responsibilities, thinking too negatively and maybe even from a lack of exercise. With all the things that we have to deal with every day, fixing your mental wellbeing might be the last thing on your TO-DO list.
Hence the Creativity Catch 22. Frustration is felt as you struggle to think clearly, to perform well. When a little simple creativity will free yourself from the stress.
If you’re working on a project or problem that requires a certain degree of creativity to solve, you want to be in your best mental condition. Having a big stress knot in your head will not only make your mind difficult to focus, but any creativity that comes will be slow and tainted by your tense mind. So how do we get around that?
Create an Emergency Creative Box.
What the heck is an Emergency Creative Box? Think of it as a time capsule, from the stress-less you, to the over-stressed you in the future. Think of the last time something made you smile and feel awesome. What was it? Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in the box. And you can use any sorta box for this. Small jewelry box, cigarette box (smoking adds to stress by the way!), snuff box, tin candy box, any box that won’t get thrown away easily.
This way, when you are totally stressed out and unable to think of anything but going on a rampage upon those around you, dig into that box and follow a helpful suggestion. You might be surprised what the past-unstressed-you actually thought of to help lift your current mood!
You can do this by anchoring actions or thoughts to inspiration and motivation, by working feverishly after the action to etch it in your subconscious. Using trinkets is a good idea too. What I find this is really good for is completing useless, misguided projects you feel you can’t escape. If I’m doing what I love, I don’t need any help. But it could help me to be even more prolific.
Richard X. Thripp’s last blog post: Subject vs. Persona in Blogging
Great idea! Another way is to put something totally unrelated in the box, or pick a word randomly out of the dictionary. Use those as platforms of association to come up with totally new ideas.
Michael Plishka´s last blog post: Ask Nature - the Biomimicry Design Portal
Dictionary idea sounds awesome, I definitely gotta try that next time, thanks!