It’s easy to see anxiety and creativity as enemies, but this mindset is often the very thing that gets in the way of people being more creative.
If you can learn to change your relationship to anxiety, you can harness it to increase your creativity—and feel a lot less stressed along the way.
Here are three practical ideas…
1. Work in Stranger Places
If you struggle to be more creative—either because of procrastination, self-doubt, limiting beliefs, or similar factors—you can probably relate to the feeling of getting anxious as soon as you sit down to work on a creative project…
- Maybe it’s writer’s block when you sit down at your desk to work on your book
- Maybe it’s imposter syndrome when you get into your creative meeting with your team at work
- Or maybe it’s procrastination when you go into your studio to paint—and end up organizing your painting supplies instead of actually painting.
In all these cases, it’s possible that you’ve unconsciously associated your workspace with anxiety.
Here’s how it works…
- When you repeatedly get anxious starting work on a creative project, your brain associates that environment with anxiety.
- Then, if you continue to get anxious in that same environment, your brain starts to anticipate that something bad is going to happen there.
- Now, the second you enter that environment, your anxiety gets triggered automatically—not because you’re actually worried about something, necessarily, but simply because you’ve conditioned yourself to be anxious in that environment.
Luckily, you can undo this association, and enhance your creativity, by employing a simple but effective strategy…
Work in stranger places.
If you sit down to work on your novel, but immediately get anxious and start thinking about procrastinating, use that anxiety as a cue to shift your working environment…
- Pack up your laptop and go write at the coffee shop.
- Get your notebook and go sit in your favorite park and journal about ideas for the book.
- You could even, like a former client of mine, get a season pass to your favorite art museum and go work on your novel while sitting in front of your favorite Monet painting!
Instead of fighting with, criticizing, or resisting your anxiety, use it as a prompt to work in a new environment that doesn’t have all the built up associations of anxiety and frustration your typical workspace does. Do this for a while and the association between your normal workspace and anxiety will start to dissolve.
Just make sure you acknowledge and validate your anxiety before moving to a new location to avoid intensifying the anxiety through avoidance.
2. Reframe Anxiety As Adrenaline
Biologically speaking, anxiety is basically just adrenaline.
When your body perceives a threat, it activates the fight or flight system by releasing adrenaline, which then causes physical sensations like increased heart rate, faster breathing, muscle tension, and knots in your stomach.
And while those feelings are uncomfortable, they’re not dangerous. In fact, adrenaline and your sympathetic nervous system are performance enhancers!
- Adrenaline improves reaction time and cognitive processing.
- Increased breathing and heart rate increases oxygenation to your muscles.
- And muscle tension makes it easier to take quick, decisive action.
Now, you may not need increased blood flow to your extremities, for example, to be a better painter. But the point is that it’s not dangerous.
Most people feel anxious, then start catastrophizing and worrying about their anxiety. And it’s this compound anxiety that interferes with their creativity and thinking.
But if you can reframe your initial burst of anxiety as normal and even helpful—It’s just my body giving me a little adrenaline so I can perform better.—you avoid that second layer of crippling anxiety and can benefit from the performance and even creativity-enhancing aspects of a small initial burst of anxiety/adrenaline.
So, if you’re working on a creative project and start feeling anxious, try to hold off on your default response of either criticizing or worrying about your anxiety or avoiding it altogether; instead, reframe your anxiety as adrenaline, which is trying to help you, not hurt you.
Learn More:I teach a course called Creating Calm where I share all my best strategies and frameworks for ending chronic worry and anxiety for good.
3. Make Time to Worry on Purpose
For many creative types, their biggest obstacle to creativity is that they get in their heads too much and frequently get lost in worries about not being good enough, what other people will think, and the like.
This chronic worrying then generates excessive amounts of anxiety which can be paralyzing and directly interfere with your ability to do the consistent work of being creative.
Thankfully, chronic worry is not inevitable. And with a small mindset shift, you can channel the energy of worry into your creative work.
Here’s the key idea:
A worry is different than worrying.
It’s inevitable that worries will sometimes pop into your mind. And frankly, there’s nothing you can do to control that.
But, the occasional worry will not lead to much anxiety or be all that disruptive to your creative practice. What really interferes with creativity—and generates boat loads of anxiety—is the mental habit of worrying in response to an initial worry.
For example: the worry pops into your head during a meeting that if you share your new creative idea, one of your colleagues will think it’s dumb and not respect you. But then, in response to that worry, you start elaborating on the worry with more worries: He’ll tell the boss I shouldn’t even be on the team. Then I’ll get kicked off and will lose out on my favorite part of this job. I might even get fired and I know I’ll never be able to get a job as good as this again. I’ll be so screwed…
The solution is to stop giving into or fighting with that initial worry, and instead, harness its energy to be more creative. Because if you think about it, worry is a very energetic and sometimes surprisingly imaginative and creative way of thinking—it’s just moving in a very negative and unproductive direction. However, if you could direct that energy toward something more productive and creative, you could get the best of both worlds: less anxiety and more creativity!
But in order to harness worries productively, you need to change your relationship to worry: instead of seeing it as a threat or something bad, you need to treat it like a friend making a suggestion. And the best way to do this is through a practice called Scheduled Worry.
Scheduled worry means making time every day to write down your worries on paper. And while it can feel cathartic to get those worries out of your head and onto paper, the real magic of this exercise is that it transforms your relationship with worry from enemy to friend.
See, instead of fighting with or running away from worries (which teaches your brain to see worries as threats and enemies), when you deliberately approach your worries with an exercise like scheduled worry, your brain learns the opposite lesson (that worries are a little uncomfortable but not bad or dangerous). Do this repeatedly, and your entire relationship with worry and anxiety will change. You’ll be able to acknowledge your worries calmly, then refocus that mental energy into a goal or creative project.
If you want to learn more about scheduled worry, I put together a brief quick start guide with step-by step instructions, examples, and frequently asked questions.
Next Steps
If you’re interested in learning more about anxiety and creativity, here are a few more resources you might enjoy: