Movement as Part of Creative Practice

Physical activity is the flip side of the coin to creative work.

I’ve noticed that the most creative people I know have a physical activity that they regularly practice. I know musicians who run, writers who do yoga, visual artists who hike. I personally love to take walks. When I ask my coaching clients to describe how their creative practice fits into their life, many talk about their physical exercise as something that is at odds with their creative practice. Exercise is often a priority for them because of its physical and mental health benefits, but they don’t generally see it as directly related to their creative practice. I encourage them to see physical activity as a part of their creative practice, the flip side of the coin to doing dedicated creative work.

The reason so many creative people have a physical practice is that movement actually makes you more creative. Most people don’t consciously understand this connection. They may think that the elevated mood generated by exercise is conducive to getting their creative work done, because it’s easier to do stuff when you’re feeling good. But actually, this isn’t the reason exercise enhances your creativity. That endorphin high from exercise is a parallel benefit to enhanced creativity but is not causally related to it. The exercise itself is what makes you more creative.

Creatives through the ages have used physical activity as a component of their creative practice, even if they do not explicitly frame it as such. The American Transcendentalist writers Emerson and Thoreau were well-known for their lengthy nature walks. Thoreau walked, or “sauntered,” as he called it, for at least four hours a day. He identified it as a spiritual practice, but the way he saw spirituality is very much how we see creativity today: as an understanding of life that arises as we gaze through the lens of our inner selves at the outside world. The Transcendentalist perspective emerged in part as a reaction to the development of empirical science that posited that the world can only be known through our observations of the material realm.

The Transcendentalists understood that an intuitive experience of the world is essential to the flourishing of the creative soul. Thoreau intentionally used his sauntering habit as a way to harmonize his body and mind and thus elicit creative thinking. In fact, he did not believe that a mind could be properly inspired unless the body was, too*, making physical activity both advantageous for and integral to creative thought.

Ironically, empirical science now backs that up. Numerous studies have shown the benefits exercise has on creative thinking (this NYT article has a good summation of them). However, some types of physical activity do serve creativity better than others. It is not a coincidence that creatives generally prefer solitary or semi-solitary types of exercise: running, yoga, hiking. Team sports, where your mind is engaged with the other players around you and the strategy of the game, are not conducive to creative thought because they focus your mind too much on the outward circumstances of the game. The goal with a physical activity as part of your creativity practice is to soothe your mind into a state where its subconscious cognitive processes switch on. These are where creativity is born and develops. Thoreau saw this method of unfocused yet guided cognition as thinking with “carelessness.”†

I encourage you to see your physical activities as part of your creative practice. Even activities like gardening count. The only requirement is that they be the type of activity that doesn’t require too much active focus on your part, so that you can give your brain the space to activate its subconscious, intuitive thought processes. Creativity thrives when we expand our perception of what counts as creative work. It’s not just the moments we sit down and start doing our creative work. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes in our brains to make those moments of “performance” possible, and you will reap the benefits if you give your brain the space and time it needs to fully access its creative potential. Integrating your physical activities into your perception of what comprises creative practice is one way to do this.

*This and other insights related to Thoreau were inspired by David C. Smith, 1991, “Walking as Spiritual Discipline: Henry Thoreau and the Inward Journey” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 74:1/2, 129-140. You can find the article here. It is not open access, but you can sign up to the database (JSTOR) using your personal email and read up to 100 articles a month for free.

† Ibid., 134.

Creativity Requires a Different Kind of Productivity

Making anti-productivity work for you.

Can you define productivity? Go ahead, give it a try. Or if you’re anything like me, just keep reading to see where I’m going with this haha.

Most of us would probably define it something like “doing lots of work efficiently.” We may also specify that the work has to be of a certain quality. You’re not being productive if all you’re producing is crap. Another important aspect of productivity is that you have to have an idea beforehand of what kind of work you want to get done and what it’s going to look like when you finish. This is so you can measure whether or not you’ve been productive. Did you accomplish the goal, meet expectation? Productivity is as much about judging results as it is about making them.

So. Productivity = a combination of efficiency and output that is measurable. Do you apply standard productivity goals and measures to your creative practice? I’d be surprised if you don’t. Productivity is the framework we apply to almost all types of work. Do you have a goal to do your creative work on a daily basis? For a certain amount of time? Do you have a time deadline for completing your project? That’s using a standard productivity framework.

Does it work for you?

Does it really?

Do you feel like you’re tapping into your creative potential? Do you enjoy your creative process? Do you feel creatively fulfilled? If you do, then you are suited to standard rational models of productivity. If you don’t, you may want to consider an intuitive approach to productivity. A method I call anti-productivity.

Anti-productivity is how to be productive in the creative realm. And it’s pretty simple. First you toss out all those external goals and measures. No more word counts, hours spent, timelines. Now, it’s difficult to entirely get away from such things. It’s okay if you still have vague goals along these lines, especially at the beginning. Keep reminding yourself that for now you’re experimenting with not doing it that way. You will find as you grow in skill at anti-productivity, you’ll increasingly just not care about that stuff.

The second step is to link your work to how you feel. Pay attention to your feelings and how they manifest in your body not just when you’re doing your creative work, but when you think about it at other times of the day. When you have good feelings that make you feel expansive and excited inside, that’s what you want to focus in on and explore. If something feels bad, makes you tighten up and feel anxiety, that’s your body telling you it’s not the way. Do what feels good. Put what feels bad aside for now. Eventually you’ll get to a place where you’ll trust yourself and the signals your body sends you. Your creative practice will start feeling amazing. And then you’ll take off with it, and nothing will stop you.     

It probably seems like I’m just telling you how to develop intrinsic motivation vis-à-vis your creative practice, but that’s only part of it. Intrinsic motivation helps productivity across the board, not just in terms of creativity. What I’m getting at here is that creativity is productivity in its fullest sense. Standard productivity that centers on goals and measurements is a method that has extracted some components of human labor and drive to work and rationalized them for mass production. Real productivity is inherently creative, and creative work is inherently productive. They are one and the same. We just have an incomplete understanding of what productivity is in our society, one that is suited to capitalism but not to human nature.     

Creative productivity works very differently from standard (extracted) productivity. In fact it thrives on the very aspects that have been eliminated from our understanding of productivity. Procrastination, for example. A recent study has shown that moderate procrastination enhances creativity. So pay attention to your feelings and they tell you that today isn’t a great day to do your creative work. Indirect focus is another counterintuitive part of creative productivity. Standard productivity requires sustained and methodical focus. Creativity thrives when you don’t do that, because creative thought originates in our subconscious mind and requires an unfocused, mind-wandering type of cognition (the type that happens when you are daydreaming, for example).

I like calling this anti-productivity because that appeals to the rebel in me, and I think so much of the info out there about productivity gets it wrong. I like feeling like I’m being anti-establishment and going against the grain. But you may find that a different way of conceptualizing it works for you. Playing around with ideas and framing is part of the process. Ultimately having fun has been shown to be one of the best ways to enhance productivity, so try eliminating the unenjoyable parts of your creative practice and see where it leads! You may be surprised by the results.

Interlude: What I Do When I'm Just Not Feeling It

Instead of pushing through, pivot.

You know those weeks that are an almost-comical series of awful and exhausting things? I’ve just had one of them. The blog post I was trying to write, well, it’s just not done. I could push through, put it up, but I wouldn’t feel good about it. I haven’t said all the things I want to say in it yet. It needs more time to develop.

This desire to give it more time clashes with my equally strong desire to be consistent about putting up a new blog post here every Friday. And for all the time I’ve been writing this blog, this is the first week I’ve ever felt this conflict. I’m sure it won’t be the last, though!

The usual response to this type of thing is to push through, right? I’ve made a commitment to putting up a weekly blog post. And while there will undoubtedly be weeks when I do have a good excuse for not following through, this doesn’t feel like one of them. But I’m equally committed to not forcing myself when I feel resistance turn into that particular brand of anxiety known as dread. And I’ve been feeling that this week.

I’ve written about how I believe creativity should be enjoyable. Not all the time, but most of the time. There are two reasons for this. One, if it’s not enjoyable, eventually you’ll be forcing yourself through it every time, and that’s neither sustainable nor conducive to doing your best work. Two, if it’s not enjoyable, what’s the point? Creativity is what makes my life feel like it’s worth living. It’s what gets me out of bed every morning. For me, it has to be enjoyable.

You can see my conundrum. Do I fail at my deeply held belief that creativity should not be forced, and finish that blog post even if it feels awful? Or should I fail at following through on my commitment to my readers to have a weekly blog post up on Friday?

I finally realized that this perspective was too either/or. It was so constrictive and uninspiring that it was depressing me. What was the third option here? I thought about what is exciting me right now. My fiction. This summer I’m trying to finish the third draft of my novel, The Gentle History. This is a big deal, because it will be the first finished draft of a novel I’ve been able to complete in 15 years. And I’m loving the process, which is itself also a big deal (my attempts to finish novels in the past only led to misery because I was - you guessed it - forcing things).

So I decided that this week in lieu of my typical blog post, I would post some excerpts of my novel. Will people want to read them? Maybe, maybe not. That’s not the point. The point is, I feel excited about it, and it has allowed me to continue to be in touch with my creative flow of inspiration even in an impossible week. It gives me a way of honoring my goal of putting up a weekly post, and it’s a way of sharing my process, which is also something I’m committed to. So many boxes ticked!

Sharing excerpts from a novel is challenging, because novels are longform, and excerpts are short. So these are really more vignettes, in no particular order, that give a feel for the novel.

The Gentle History a novel about a woman who discovers she drowned as a child. It best fits into the genres of literary slipstream, dark psychological, and mystery/thriller.

Draft 3; excerpts.

Sometimes I get flashes in my mind of geometric shapes sliding together, gone so fast that what I sense are afterglows, more a feeling of something visual; apparition. I wonder if they are brief revelations of the inner workings of my mind. Not its organic workings, but the way it perceives how the world fits together. Angles and planes, points and ledges, moving across and over each other, merging, folding, subsuming.

The way yesterday slides under today. Then today bends and buckles at its own horizon, and yesterday emerges again. Yesterday contracts, lengthening into a line that arrows forward in a loop that comes back around to pierce the center of a disc that is another day.

I am a single point that sometimes becomes a line and sometimes a spiral. I spin under the water, a whirlpool, I come up as a wave. I can’t remember what I remember. So I start back at the beginning.

It was dark, and I was alone.

*

When I struggle up through layers of hangover-laced sleep and open my eyes to the pitch black of my basement apartment, I can believe that this is some strange afterlife or purgatory. The house phone’s ringing upstairs. It rings and rings, stops, then begins again and seemingly again and again. Or maybe this happened over the space of days. Or all at once, just one everlasting ringing. I close my eyes on it all.

Later, I pad to the bathroom, the glow of my laptop on my bed my guiding light, keeping the door open so I can pee without turning on the overhead bulb. Then I turn on my coffee maker, which I miraculously stocked at some point so it’s ready. Coffee, a bit of milk from a fridge with the inside bulb screwed out - I find the milk by feel - and I’m back on my bed, leaning on a stack of pillows propped up against the wall, laptop on my thighs. I go straight to the Bandits & Bureaucrats webpage to see if there are any new pictures from the weekend gig.

Paige has a kickass life, she somehow made it and I didn’t. The thing is, I was always ok with that, or I think I was. She was the one who couldn’t handle things. She acted like I was jealous of her success with music and all her cool music friends, but I wasn’t. Things just started getting dark for me. I was less and less of a real person, and she took it personally. At least I think that’s what happened. But I’m not sure, sometimes I’m so utterly confused by it all.

Bandits & Bureaucrats have gotten pretty big in Philadelphia. Paige plays the cello, which makes the band stand out. I’ve never been much into music, but I liked going to Paige’s gigs. Cello is definitely my favorite instrument. I can’t stand violin, it’s too high-pitched, but cello is in the right vibrational zone for me.

Tonight there are some new pictures of their Saturday night gig. Paige sits in a purple-pink haze at the left of the stage, wrapped around her cello. Her expression is what it always is when she’s playing, serious and lost-in-it, eyes gazing at things the rest of us can’t see. In one photo she holds her bow at the ready, head cocked to one side. Her brown hair is pulled back, her face sheened with rose from the lights. She’s beautiful. I mean, really.

No, I was never jealous of her when we were still friends. I’m jealous of her now, though. All the photos of her and the band, her husband, other friends who show up here and there, all people I know but not on my own, outside of Paige…it makes me feel sick. But still I look. I want to see.

*

Minutes pass, or don’t pass. The river moves. A light in an apartment across the way comes on and is extinguished almost immediately. Another light, this time left on for an indeterminate time. I don’t notice when it goes off, only that it is no longer on. The river moves some more. I have another mini vodka, and then one more. It’s the hour of nothing, the empty hour between three and four in the morning. The space between the end and the beginning. My time. It just feels so good to sit here alone in the dark office, drinking, watching the river and the apartments across the way.

Then, there’s something in the water. It floats along near to the shore and catches in some debris. It’s large and lengthy, and it takes my brain some time to catch up with what my eyes are telling it. It looks like a person, possibly face down, what seems like its head bobbing against the debris it’s caught up in. The leg end floats wide, circles, dislodges the head, and it continues its slow float past the office. I stand, peering at it until it disappears under the bridge a few hundred feet down the river.

In this empty hour, I’m not sure I’ve seen what I think I have. Across the way, the condos are all dark now except for one, where there’s a blue flickering from a tv. I stare at it, idly trying to discern a pattern to its intermittent flash, and wondering what I should do. Was it really a body? It could have been a log, it could have been a long cushion or piece of foam – hell, it could have been just a bunch of trash traveling en masse down the watery avenue. Why had I assumed it was a person, a dead person? Now, in retrospect, it seems quite obvious that it wasn’t. I sit again and scoot the chair up to the desk, eyeing the phone. I could call it in, but if it was a dead body, does it matter if I do? There’s no one to save here. I quail at the thought of speaking to a 911 dispatcher. I’ve never called 911 before, and assume they will want me to stay here to speak with the police about what I saw. I clearly can’t do that, they might smell alcohol on me. I really can’t be sure, after all, that I really saw a dead body. It was dark, the lights along the river are not strong enough to illuminate details. More and more I am convinced what I saw was nothing more than trash, an illusion of a body.

“Dammit,” I whisper. I turn on the computer and log on. Can I send an email about it? I do a quick online search. Doesn’t look like it. There is a phone tip line. I could probably call it in anonymously.

But even doing that, for something that is increasingly vague in my mind, feels like too much. I’d be wasting their time, calling. Now I don’t even know if I saw anything at all. I could just be having flashbacks of a dream from last night, or something that came from my subconscious. It’s already gone, a phantom, another lost memory.

Do You Seek Success, Mastery, Enjoyment, or Impact?

Or do you perhaps want a little of everything? (That’s okay!)

I was listening to an episode of Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast, and for the first time ever I had a…hmm…shall I call it a quibble, with the great Brené. I want to be clear that I’m an admirer of hers, because she does good work and I am in awe of her public speaking skills. (Plus, she’s a fellow academic who uses grounded theory, an inductive research methodology that was my own preference when I was a practicing social scientist and that I now use in an adapted form for my fiction writing.) But this particular episode got me thinking.

She and her guest were discussing the difference between two goals of work: success and mastery. And I totally agreed with their assessment. Success is an outward evaluation of the value of your work. It is the rewards you receive when people like what you do. And these are fleeting, often ultimately a let-down, and can serve as a distraction from continuing to do your work. Success isn’t a continuous state; rather, it comprises moments that are soon over, and that are matched by inevitable failures along the way. Mastery is a motivator that can keep you on track through the vagaries of the success/failure binary. It’s an intrinsic goal, based on your own evaluation of the value of your work and your capacity for improvement and excellence. All that sounds good. Except.

Except, I don’t see myself in either of those choices. I’m certainly not a success-seeker, as should be obvious for anyone who has read anything on this blog. But I’m not that interested in mastery, either. I see that quest in my sister, who is a competitive cyclist. But as a writer, what would mastery even look like? I’m sure there are numerous legitimate answers to that question, but I’ve just never connected with the idea of developing mastery. Sure, I want to improve my writing, but that’s not why I do it.

Are there other choices here? Brené wasn’t saying that success and mastery are it. But in this particular conversation, they were presented in that either/or framework. I think she would agree, as an intellectually curious person, that there are perhaps other options that deserve to be included. So I thought about my own goals. The first I came up with is enjoyment. My main goal in everything I do is to enjoy myself, because I spent so many years of my life not. I don’t mean enjoyment here in the sense of fun, although I think fun matters, too. What I mean is that feeling of fulfillment in work, that combination of excitement and absorption you get when you’re doing something that feels deeply meaningful. Enjoyment, however, is about more than just personal fulfillment. It is tied to the quality of your work. When you enjoy the process of doing your work, it adds something ineffable to it: people can sense your work is personal and authentic. The honest truth is, I was never cut out for mastery, in academics or any other field. My specialty is that personal, authentic message.

And that leads me to my final addition to the work goals list: impact. Much like success is the outward manifestation of mastery, impact is the outward expression of enjoyment. When you seek meaning through work, the natural extension is a desire for it to be meaningful to others, just as it is a natural extension of mastery to want it to be recognized by others. But impact, unlike success, is lasting. While success is a benefit conferred on you, impact is a benefit you offer to others. And there’s another important difference between them. While success by its very nature is something you are generally aware of in your own life, you often don’t know the extent of your impact in others’. When I write a blog post or put out a podcast episode, I mostly don’t know its impact. Something I write or say could change someone’s life – I don’t know, and likely never will in most cases. Impact is by nature humble.

You can want all of these things, success, mastery, enjoyment, impact. But most people have one that takes precedence. Understanding which can help you learn what motivates and drives you, and it can also help you find balance. While there’s nothing wrong with desiring success, you can balance its emotional ups and downs with mastery. And while wanting to make a difference in people’s lives is great, you won’t be able to do that unless you first learn how to find meaning and enjoyment in your process.

Should Creativity Be Enjoyable (or Easy)?

The best thing I did for my creative practice was stop forcing it.

I’m going to answer that question straight off. I think creativity should be enjoyable, and while I won’t go so far as to say I think it should be easy, I don’t think it has to be hard. Not only that, I want creativity to be fun. Not all the time, not every single minute, but for the most part.

I didn’t used to think this way. I believed I was compelled to do creative work – in my case, writing – whether I enjoyed it or not because I’m a born writer. For years I didn’t actually enjoy writing very much. What I enjoyed was the idea of myself as a writer. But not the actual writing. Sometimes, on rare occasions, it would all come together and the writing would flow, but mostly I just felt relieved when a writing session was over. I’d been a “good” writer and done my work.

Things couldn’t be more different for me now. I enjoy writing – well, most of the time anyway! – I’m producing more than ever before, and most importantly, being creative brings me joy on a daily basis. I love the work of being creative now, not just the idea of it. I no longer have to rely on the concept of myself-as-writer to feel good about my writing. I feel good about it because I feel good doing it. So what changed for me?

I stopped trying so hard. I gave up the struggle. I realized that forcing things was working against me because it made writing joyless. Which made me not want to write. Which made me try to force things. And through all of this my writing became increasingly lifeless. It wasn’t creative work anymore, it was just work.

We live in a culture that glorifies struggle. If it’s not hard, it’s not worth it. Relationships, jobs, success…we expect everything to be really hard, and often it is. But I made an important discovery about myself. I don’t want things to be hard. I got tired, y’all. Burned out. I was ready for some easy. And if that meant I had to give up on trying to be a writer, so be it. Except something amazing happened. The less I forced myself, the more I felt drawn to writing. And the more I insisted it start to be easier, the easier it got. I realized that the thing that was making it so hard all the time was me. I had all these expectations and insecurities bound up in my creative process. Once I decided that writing wasn’t worth it anymore if it was going to feel bad, and became willing to give it up if I couldn’t find a way to enjoy it, that’s when it all changed for me. I realized it didn’t have to be hard. Challenging, sure, but challenges are fun. That’s different from hard.

When I started feeling that urge to start writing again, I knew I’d have to be careful or I’d be right back where I started. I’d burn out again. I decided that never again would I allow things to get that hard. If I am struggling to the point of having to force it, that’s a sign that I need to back off, take a new direction or take a break. I have relied on that rule since then to guide me. I never force things. Sometimes there’s resistance, and I usually work through that, but if I start to feel significant anxiety or despair, I stop right there. A hard stop. Even if it means I don’t write. Even if it means I get really lazy about it for a while.

The reason this works is because creativity originates in our intuitive, subconscious mind. And when you are forcing things, you are using your rational, conscious mind. The rational mind likes to take control of your process and keep control, and you forcing things is like its fuel. The more you force, the harder it gleefully grips the reins. Your intuitive mind is a bit of a wallflower and will gladly let your rational mind hog all the space and all your attention. Eventually your intuitive mind fades so far into the background that you cease to interact with it in any creatively constructive way. That’s creative burnout.

It’s okay to want things to not be so hard, even to want them to be easy, and to be more fun! That doesn’t mean you’re not a serious artist or serious about your craft. It actually means you understand how your brain works. It’s pretty simple. When you enjoy an activity, that activates the dopamine connection, which motivates you to continue doing it even when you encounter resistance. Think of an exercise routine. You don’t always want to do it, but when you do, you feel great. If that ceases to be true, if you have to force it, drag yourself through it, if it becomes too hard, eventually you’ll quit because human beings only possess so much willpower. Much less than we think.

Sometimes the answer really is to stop pushing ourselves so hard. Sometimes the answer is to take some time to do nothing. Sometimes it’s even learning how to waste time on purpose. Counterintuitive practices such as these can have the effect of freeing your intuitive, creative mind and setting you back on track to be more productive than ever before.

At a Creative Impasse? Here's How to Use It to Move You Forward

A creative impasse just means it’s time to regroup.

I need to come clean about something. I’ve really been struggling with my fiction lately. I’m working on a novel, and am nearing the end of draft #2. Lately I’ve been feeling more and more resistance to sitting down to write. Some resistance is normal, and I’m good at working through it. But this is reaching a level where I feel like I’m forcing things. And as I’m always saying, I don’t force things. To me, forcing it is a signal that I need to consider not doing the thing. And so I’ve slowed down on my fiction writing. And that makes me feel bad, and even resentful toward my writing. And then I want to write even less. Vicious cycle, am I right?

I’m used to this cycle, sadly. It happens every time I try to finish a novel draft. I just can’t seem to get it done. I peter out somewhere around the middle or a little past. I start to struggle more with writing, and feel less and less enthused, until I’m forcing things to the degree that I kind of just give up in despair. I haven’t been able to finish a novel since I finished my first, some fifteen years ago. Yikes.

What am I doing wrong? Why do I always find myself at this impasse? Maybe you’ve experienced something like this in your own creative practice.

Last night, after I decided yet again that I wasn’t going to force myself to write, and was feeling guilty about being a bad writer who can’t stay committed to her craft, I’d finally had enough of feeling terrible about all this. Feeling terrible sucks. I don’t want to do it anymore. What if I stubbornly and willfully refuse to see this impasse as a bad thing, and pretend it’s marvelous instead? Like, eff you, impasse, but wait, come back, because I’m going to embrace you whether you like it or not! That’s more like it.

Here’s what the impasse tells you:

• It’s time to take a break and let things percolate.

• It’s time to find a new direction, and it’s gotta be an enjoyable one.

An impasse just means it’s time to regroup. That’s all. Creative work needs to be enjoyable for the most part – using that dopamine connection is how you can create motivation for consistent practice – and if it stops being (mostly) fun, that’s your sign that something needs to change. For me, it seems to be a sign that I’ve taken the story as far as I can in the current iteration of my novel. In each draft I get a little further, so it makes sense that my impasse signals the need to start a new one. Draft #3, here I come! First I’ll do some percolation activities, like assessing my story and analyzing its themes and character arcs, but then I’ll start in with the writing again. And hopefully draft #3 will take me a bit further.

The most important thing to remember when you are at an impasse is to not give up. It’s not a sign that something’s wrong, or you’ve lost your passion, or the project is a failure! Sleep on it. Go do something else for awhile. And then sit down and think a bit about it. If you start feeling stuck or anxious again, repeat all this until space opens up in front of you for whatever the next step in the project is. It will happen! Trust that it will, and enjoy your impasse while it lasts, because soon enough you’ll be back in the saddle.

Did You Know That Flow Can Be Active OR Passive? Both Are Necessary For Creativity

Learning how to cultivate passive flow can help you enter an active flow state.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

(This is a follow-on to last week’s post about using flow for discovery writing.)

If you are any kind of creative, chances are you’ve come across the concept of flow, and you may even actively cultivate flow for your creative work. Flow is a state where you become so immersed in an activity that you lose track of time, and your actions seem to emerge naturally and without extreme effort. Artists often describe this experience as the work doing itself: the words are writing themselves, the music is playing itself…. Athletes also experience flow states. When I enter the zone while skiing, for example, I feel like the mountain is skiing me, not the other way around. I liken it to the feeling of swimming with the current.

But creative work can often feel the other way around, like you’re swimming against the current. It can feel like pulling teeth. The flow state is coveted by creatives but it’s difficult to get into. It requires us to enter an intuitive space, and our rational mind has us in a stranglehold. It doesn’t relinquish control gladly. So how can you make it easier to get into that zone? You can start by cultivating what I call passive flow. This is a more low-key state of flow that can be maintained at all times. You may dip in and out of it, but it’s always there, and when you stray too far from it you can easily reestablish the connection. I liken the feeling of being in a passive flow state to floating with the current – or going with the flow.

Passive flow is a way of living. It’s a state of being and a feeling you get when you are able to stop struggling so much against the way things are and surrender to the flow of life. In the Chinese philosophy of Daoism, this is called wu wei. The characters that make up this word represent the concepts “without” or “lack” and “action.” Together they are best translated as “effortless action.” This is when you are living in harmony with the natural flow of things, and you encounter little resistance to your actions. You don’t waste energy trying to change or control things you can’t, and you accept the way things are and work with what you have already available to you. It’s an easy and pleasant way of living, one that keeps you largely immersed in the moment. It is a type of flow state, but one that is always there, because you’re living it.

Some people use meditation and mindfulness to cultivate passive flow, but that stuff has never worked for me. After years of failure, I made a discovery: passive flow is something we all naturally have, but the way we live our lives has taken us so far from it that we believe we’ve lost it. We haven’t, though. It’s like a stream that has so much junk thrown in that the water no longer seems to flow. But it still flows! It’s just gone underground. We need to clean out the streambed to encourage the water to flow there again.

We can do that by eliminating some of the stuff from our lives that clutter our streambed. We can’t get rid of all of it, but we can still do a decent cleanup job! The stuff that blocks our access to passive flow is anything that causes us to tighten up, feel debilitating anxiety, that makes our lives smaller, that creates trauma – you get the picture. It’s the stuff that makes you feel bad, that you have to force, that doing is like wading through a tar pit. It’s the stuff that causes you harm, that makes you hide, that makes you fearful. All of that takes you away from your flow. And if you have too much of that kind of stuff in your life, you’ll become totally blocked.

It can take time to eject that junk from your life. Some of it feels inescapable, some of it feels like stuff we have to do or put up with. And sometimes we hang on to the junk because we don’t know anything different, or it gives us a sense of identity. Sometimes we don’t want to deal with the grief of letting go. There are all kinds of reasons we hold tight. So start small. Is there something small in your life that drains your joy? Can you get rid of it or stop doing it, even if there are consequences? Try it. Stand strong in your decision, even if people complain or judge you, or you judge yourself. Tell yourself that you’re doing this for your mental health. Your mental health has to come first! Without that, you have nothing. You’ll start to see that things are still okay in your life without that thing - in fact, they’re probably better. Over time you’ll gain confidence and be able to tackle bigger and bigger things. Your sense of empowerment will grow. And who knows what will happen then! Your world will start to open up once you are living in the flow.

Of course most of us won’t ever reach a state of being in that passive flow state all the time – and honestly I’m not sure that should be the goal. I use it as a reference point for myself. I can tell when I’m straying too far from it, or filling it up with junk, because I get that tight, anxious, small feeling. That’s a signal that I need to pause, take a look at what’s causing that feeling, and work to ameliorate or eliminate it from my life. By cultivating passive flow like this, you’ll be better positioned to access an active flow state when you need to. For more on that, see this post. Even though it’s about writing, you can apply it to other creative endeavors. You can do this!

Toward a Methodology of Discovery Writing: What Is Flow and How Can I Use It?

Learn how to cultivate both passive and active flow.

(Find my other posts in this series here.)

I’m going to let you in on my biggest struggle as a writer: finishing novels. I can make it to the middle, even a little bit past that, and then I just…stop being able to figure out what to write next. I’ve only completed one novel in my entire life. I have three I haven’t finished. I knew that with my current novel project I needed to try something different.

My major issue with past novels is that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think my way through to the end. I can’t plot. I have what seem like great plot ideas, but then when I try to puzzle out how to integrate them, I get a familiar sinking feeling. They’re not going to work. Usually it’s because they don’t seem to suit the story. They complicate things too much – like I’m trying to really hard to hammer an octagonal peg into a square hole. I hammered on that damn peg for years, and could never get it to fit.

I finally found my answer in an intuitive writing course I took with coach Lauren Sapala. She taught me that intuitive writers put themselves straight into a block if they try to force things by explicitly plotting or planning. They have to let things come to them intuitively, from their subconscious. But how?

The answer is flow.

Flow is a term invented by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (ME-high Cheek-SENT-me-high) to describe a state of happiness where you are so completely absorbed by an activity that time and ego fall away. You are able to intuitively move through the activity without explicit thought or control, each action fluidly following on the previous and creating a harmonious whole that just works. Flow is central to discovery writing.

We have all experienced flow at one time or another, usually inadvertently. The trick is to learn how to facilitate and channel it for specific tasks, like writing. Today I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about that and how I cultivate flow. I want to say up front that I’m no kind of expert at this! In fact, I’m only just learning. But when I started trying to channel flow, I realized I’d already been using flow techniques in my life, I just hadn’t recognized them as such. Chances are, you have too.

Facilitating passive flow in your life.

The hardest part about flow is getting into it. Once you do that, it’s easy – that’s the whole point of flow. It stands to reason that you can enhance your ability to access flow by never being too far from it. Cultivating what I call passive flow in your life can help. This is a baseline flow level that is always there. When you stray too far from it in your day-to-day life, you’ll feel it, and you can pause to tap back into it. We all have access to this baseline flow already, but most of us have strayed so far from it that we no longer realize it’s there. You can get it back by eliminating anti-flow things from your life.

Here’s how to do that. Anything that disrupts your inner calm, focus, or equilibrium is anti-flow. Distracting stressful events, mind-numbing or anxiety-producing tasks, too much busyness, people who drain you, emotionally taxing experiences…you know what I’m talking about. Having some stuff like this in life is inevitable and even necessary for our development as human beings, but when it’s too much and overtakes your capacity to feel good about your life, that’s taking you away from your flow.

You may need to become ruthless about what you allow into your life. You may need to make personally difficult sacrifices and eject some things, activities, or people from your life. You can start small, but eventually hard choices need to be made. I’ve written elsewhere about that process, and about hard choices I had to make. Here I’ll just say that making the choice is often the hardest part. Living with the consequences can be easier than you think, especially when you realize how much better life feels when you are living with a solid baseline of passive flow.

Over time you’ll get better at recognizing things that are anti-flow. Look at passive flow like the current of a river that you are floating down. You’re moving with the current, letting it carry you along. When you start to struggle against that you can tell, because things start to feel suddenly very hard. You’re going against the current. That’s your signal to let go and tap into that passive flow again. I’ve written about one technique I use to help me with that in this post about my intentional practice of wasting time. Give it a try the next time you start feeling anxious from all the anti-flow things you have to do in your life.

Going with the current in life is how you can stay close to your flow. But imagine what happens when you start swimming with that current. Wow, now you’re really getting somewhere! It’s like when you step onto those moving walkways at the airport and suddenly you’re walking at double speed. That’s how you cultivate active flow – and it’s this state that you use for writing.

Facilitating active flow for writing.

An active flow state is characterized by these things:

• It entails a balance between controlling the experience and letting go of control.  

• It is extra-ordinary, i.e. an involvement in an activity that is not part of the ordinary, everyday world.

• It is a state of absorbed, focused attention.

• It requires continual challenge.

• It is enjoyable.

Facilitating flow is a strange and precarious balance between rules and chaos. It’s like a sports game. There is a framework of rules that channel players’ energy and action, but within that framework anything can happen. The second feature of a sports game is that it is extra-ordinary, a special event that is set apart from regular day-to-day activities. When you are looking to engage with flow for a specific purpose, you must start with a set of ritualized rules that help you set that space and time apart from the rest of your life.

For writing this can look like establishing a special place where you write, and creating a mood for your writing time. I write in the same chair I use for my business work, so when I go into my office to write my fiction, I turn off all the lights except for an old-fashioned, orangey bulb over the chair. I also turn on a noise machine. After doing this for a while, my brain started associating this specific lighting + noise with my special writing time, which helps me enter what’s called writingrealm, an extra-ordinary mental landscape where writing takes place. It doesn’t really matter what rules you set, just that you use them consistently.

From writingrealm, you enter fictionworld. This is the world of your story. It’s important to understand that you will not feel in flow every single minute of writing. A lot of writing is just kind of slogging through it. I don’t mean forcing it, but you should write whether you feel close to your flow or not. This is because the only way to enter flow is by doing the activity that will get you there. Players in a sports game don’t start playing in flow – they enter into it through playing, and probably most dip in and out of it as the game progresses rather than staying in it the whole time. Writing is like this. You’ll be writing, and then suddenly you’ll feel that electricity in you and the words will just…flow. So start writing whatever the next thing is you need to write, and allow the act of writing itself to focus and channel your attention so you can reach that state of absorption in the activity that flow requires.

Now this next part is important. Flow requires continual challenge. Boring, rote activities do not create flow. This is why sports are so good at facilitating flow, because you are not simply playing the same game over and over. Each game is different, even when you play the same team. There is always an element of challenge – to better your performance and to win this next match. With writing, though, there is really no way to challenge yourself in any competitive sense. You have to find a different way.

This discovery part of writing is your challenge. It’s the adventure of finding out what happens next in your story and by so doing, to figure out how to communicate what is in your mind and soul. The ultimate purpose of flow is to facilitate your own growth, a personal transformation and becoming. It’s important to see your writing as part of a process of personal growth, because this is what will keep you going back for more. That’s what makes it enjoyable.

Thinking about flow in terms of passive and active types can help you cultivate it both for everyday life and for specific artistic pursuits. Start with the passive, and give yourself space to develop your skills there. Then apply what you’ve learned to an active flow state. And remember: have fun with it! Letting yourself loosen up and enjoy the game is essential to cultivating flow.

What the Heck Does a Dissertation on International Water Treaties Have to Do With Creative Identity?

Do you feel like a real creative or artist, or are you just trying to be one?

The other day I opened my dissertation file for the first time in three years. I haven’t looked at it since 2018! When I was done with it, I was done. And because I had decided not to continue on in academia, I haven’t had to think about it since. My dissertation was about international water politics, but believe it or not, it actually informs the work I do in my creative business. Before I get into that, though, here’s the title of my dissertation. Take a deep breath before you read this.

Treaties as Endogenous to State Interest: Politicization and Securitization of International Water Treaties in Bilateral Riparian Relationships.

LOL. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, and I’m sure you’re wondering how the heck that informs my current work. The subject matter doesn’t, but its theoretical underpinnings do. What I was really studying was how identity determines behavior and constitutes our subjective realities. The thread of commonality that runs through all my work, including my fiction, is this: that perception, and particularly how we perceive ourselves, creates our realities. In my dissertation research, I looked at how state identity plays out in international political conflict over water. In my current research on creativity, I’m interested in how changing our perspective even just a little can make us feel more creatively fulfilled, and thus constitute a creatively fulfilling life.

This is why when I work with clients, I focus first on how they see themselves vis-à-vis their creativity and their creative practice. I ask them: Do you see yourself as a artist/writer/musician/creative? Do you identify as a creative or artist, or is your creative work something you are just attempting? For example, if writing is your thing, do you feel like a writer, or are you just “trying” to be a writer (be honest)? Without fail, my clients always say they feel they don’t quite have the right to call themselves a creative or a writer or an artist or whatever it is they’re “trying” to be. Usually it’s because they haven’t had “success” with their art (exposure, money, etc.). Often it’s also because they don’t feel they’re doing enough – “real” artists spend more time on their creative work, are more dedicated, are recognized as real artists by their peers.

All these feelings are based on a certain perspective that it is other people who get to decide what you are worth, what the value of your work is, and who you are. Once other people decide they want to buy your work, you’ll be a real artist. Once other people see your success, you’ll finally be able to stop saying you’re “trying” to be an artist. You’ll have arrived.

Except, if you live your life from within this perspective, you’ll never arrive. Not really. Because the truth is, other people simply don’t have the power to determine who we are, no matter how much we want them to. No praise will ever be enough, no amount of money. You know this is true. It’s not that praise and money don’t matter – they do! But that stuff isn’t ever going to give you the feeling of being settled in yourself, living the life you’re meant to, living your purpose.

You know what will? Taking back your sovereignty over yourself. You decide who and what you are. And once you realize that you have absolute authority over your own identity, you understand that all those extrinsic measures of worth are arbitrary, constructed out of the human mind and burnished with a sheen that is supposed to look like truth. But it’s no more true than anything else. You’re not a real artist unless you make money off your work? Says who? Exactly. Only other humans who have no more right than you to decide that’s true. Or to put that another way, you have just as much right as anyone else to decide things about yourself and your work.

Do you want to know what makes you a real artist? Here’s the big secret. It’s so simple yet so profoundly life-altering when you begin to see it clearly. You’re a real artist if you feel like one. That is your truth: your feeling about yourself and your work. And here’s how you start getting that feeling. By deciding that you are already what you want to be. You’re already an artist, a writer, a musician, a creative. You have a right to decide that! And you don’t have to base it on any “evidence.” What will make it true is that you feel it’s true. I know that sounds very uncomfortable. Things aren’t true just because we decide they are! Well, sure, this isn’t going to work in many cases, nor should we believe that all truth is arbitrary. Obviously. But in this case, when it comes to your own creative identity, you can decide what your truth is.

Step into that identity, claim it as your own, wear it proudly, and your actions and behaviors will start to follow on that and constitute that reality in the world. I should know, after all I did a dissertation on this process! And I went through this process myself when I decided I’d had enough of feeling depressed about not fulfilling my creative potential. So take that first step, and say it out loud to the universe: I am a creative (artist, musician, writer…).

Creativity Isn’t Right-Brained (So You Can Stop Feeling Bad if You Are Left-Brained)

What neuroscience says about creativity.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve associated creativity with the right hemisphere of the brain. And this was always a problem for me because I’m language-oriented, and language is apparently left-brained. Whenever I struggled creatively, I secretly feared it’s because I’m not right-brained enough. Maybe you’ve worried about the same, particularly if you see yourself as being a logic-driven person. The idea that the left brain is somehow the logical, straight-laced side and the right is the free-flowing, creative side, while not entirely inaccurate, has become ingrained in popular understandings of where creativity comes from, and what kind of person gets to be called creative.

In the last decade or so neuroscience has evolved in how it views the brain. It has shifted from seeing brain functions as domain-specific, and now understands that it is the connectivity between brain areas that determine our functionalities. Cognitive processes are complex (shocked, I am!), with multiple regions working together to create different effects. It turns out creativity is both-sided. It relies on two types of cognition that must be used in an iterative sequence, and that use networks that span the brain: the central executive network (CEN) and the default mode network (DMN).*

The CEN is the cognitive process that gets activated when you are involved in an external goal-oriented task, whereas the DMN gets triggered when you are not involved in anything that requires that kind of focused attention in the outside world. The DMN is the “daydreaming” mode of the brain. The thing to understand about these two processes is that they are mutually exclusive. They do not operate at the same time. What this means is that if you are always or even predominantly goal-oriented, you are not giving your DMN enough time to process, and thus dampening or blocking your creativity. If there ever were evidence that compulsive goal setting is toxic to creativity, this is it.

For those of us who live in a task- and goal-oriented societies, such as the US, our CEN is usually well-developed and highly active. Hyperactive, even. We spend relatively little time intentionally encouraging our DMN. It does get activated regardless – any time you find yourself zoning out, thinking about the past or future, about other people’s emotions and motivations or your own, you are in DMN-land. But we don’t know how to use our DMN to our advantage, largely because we tend to view its associated thought process, i.e. daydreaming, meandering thoughts, and rumination, negatively. But they are essential to the creativity, in combination with the task-directed thought processes associated with CEN.

In order to be useful to creativity, the mental wandering of the DMN state must be somewhat directed. A free-for-all going on in there may be useful for other purposes (general relaxation, or just for fun), but for creativity, you must begin in the CEN and create a goal. However – and this is very important – the goal needs to be vague and broad, i.e. diffuse. So for example, lets say I want to write a novel. You’d be tempted to say the goal is “finish novel.” This is too specific. A diffuse set of related goals is better: write regularly, get to know characters better, have fun, learn stuff, etc. The reason diffuse goals are better is that one, they give you more targets to hit, and two, they give your brain more to work with. This is where the DMN shines.

Once you have your diffuse goal(s), creativity is divided into two parts that iteratively follow on each other. The first is CEN-related: you sit down and do your creative work. You write, or brainstorm, or play your music, whatever. The next part is DMN-related: you involve yourself in other activities that do not require you to explicitly focus on completing tasks. Passive enjoyment of something aesthetic is a great way to do this, like music, art, or TV shows that give you space to let your mind wander (ever feel compelled to zone out by binge watching mindless TV after arduous cognitive tasks? Yep, that’s your DMN making its needs known!). Other activities that are somewhat rote, like walking, gardening, or cleaning could also work. What you’re looking for is semi-boredom. You don’t want to be totally zonked, just relaxed. Importantly, don’t try to actively think about your creative project. Just let things percolate.

Guess what comes next? Yes! More CEN, task-oriented creative work. And so on and so forth. As you get better at going back and forth and learn to trust the DMN time more, you may find that you have more flashes of inspiration during your down time. At the very least, you’ll start to feel more creatively fulfilled once you realize that your creative work is part of a larger experience of life, and that your whole life, including your zone-out time, can be part of your creative process. You will begin to feel the benefits of this back-and-forth practice once you understand how it works and intentionally incorporate it into your life, because it naturally facilitates creativity. So give it a try!

* Information for this post comes from Elkhonon Goldberg, Creativity, Oxford University Press: 2018.

The Difference Between Becoming More vs. Less of Who You Are

What if we leaned into the stuff that’s “wrong” about us?

One of the most intriguing aspects of modern culture is our deeply ingrained belief that we must continually be working on improving ourselves. There’s always something we need to work on. Better time management, less lazy. More veggies, fewer bowls of pasta. This work never ends. Some of this has to do with capitalism – most of the things we buy aren’t necessities, they’re to improve ourselves and our lives. Self-improvement is big business and a ubiquitous advertising technique. And some of our obsession with self-improvement is a consequence of reaching a level of wealth where we have leisure time to spend on it. But I believe part of it is that we are afraid being ourselves. Think about it. Most of the self-improvement we are called to do involves becoming less of who we are, not more. Like there’s some kind of magical state of moderation of the personality, where our “good” traits at least equal if not outweigh our “bad.” And we apply this to our lives, too, where we are always trying to balance out or overload the productive/good side of the scale.

When our work begins to drain us and we feel such dread about it that our productivity falls, what is our response? To try harder, stay later, feel bad about ourselves. When we slack off on our exercise routine because life is calling us to focus on other things right now, what is our response? To try harder, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from our muscles, and feel bad about ourselves.

Let’s try a more amorphous type of dissatisfaction. What if you feel like something’s just not right with your life, you’re not sure what, but you are plagued by a constant sensation that there’s more out there for you. But you have a good job, many privileges, and you’re cognizant of that. What do you do?

If you’re like many of my clients, this is what you do: tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have, that something’s wrong with you for not being able to be satisfied with it, and you try harder, stay later, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from your soul, and feel bad about yourself.

But what if the answer is to step further into all the stuff we feel guilty about? Yes, you have privilege. But you’re still unhappy. That’s okay! It’s allowed! Step into that. You can appreciate your privilege but you don’t have to feel grateful for stuff that makes you feel like shit. Got it?

What about this one. You got a degree, maybe even multiple degrees, for a certain type of job. You invested time, money – maybe even other people’s money – in them. Then you get the job. You don’t like it. It drains you to the extent that your life feels dull, gray, and perhaps full of dread. What do you do?

Do you tell yourself that there are things you do like about the job, that you appreciate this or that aspect, that it’s a good job and you’re grateful for it? Do you expend major energy convincing yourself that you can like it enough to keep doing it, because after all it’s what you’ve trained for?

What if the answer is to step into your dislike? What if you stopped punishing yourself into “liking” your job and just decided you’re going to be honest about what you hate about it? What if you let yourself feel the full extent of your antipathy toward what you are forcing yourself to do every day? What if you let yourself stop feeling grateful?

Your life would stop being so dull and gray, that’s for sure. And you’d realize that you probably have to do something about your situation, that it’s not okay to just exist in it and keep going for as long as you can until you burn out completely. Things would become a bit clearer. And all you need is a little crack in that shell of excuses to begin to move forward.

Instead of punishing ourselves into doing things “right,” what if the answer is to step more fully into our “wrongs”? What if leaning into our lazy allows us to find more time and space to do what really matters to us? What if leaning into the boredom or dread we feel about our job gives us the impetus we need to take steps to change our situation?

What if we don’t need to change ourselves at all, but become more of what we already are?

Why Burnout May Be an Inevitable (and Positive) Developmental Stage for HSPs

If you are experiencing a dark night of the soul, keep going.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

Once I was far enough into my recovery from severe burnout, a strange thought began occurring to me. What if my dark night of the soul, as I like to refer to it, was somehow a necessary experience for me to reach my fullest potential as a human being? It’s common for people to feel gratitude for challenging circumstances once they’re well enough in the rearview mirror, but this was different. I actually started thinking that my burnout was inevitable, and in particular the kind I experienced, which I term “existential burnout” (more on this below). I began working on a theory that not only was this burnout necessary for my own personal development, but that it would have occurred at one point or another regardless of what life path I’d chosen…and that it was a very good thing.

And then I discovered I was right. Or, in the parlance of academia, I found evidence to support my theory. A doctor, psychologist, and poet named Kazimierz Dąbrowski (Ka-ZHI-meerz Dom-BROF-ski) developed a theory in the 1960s called Positive Disintegration, which details a process that highly sensitive people (HSPs) are very likely to go through during their lives that is very similar to what I experienced as existential burnout. Unlike mainstream psychological and medical approaches that pathologize the anxiety and depression people experience when going through one of these “disintegrations,” Dąbrowski saw such emotions as an inevitable and necessary part of HSPs’ personality development. He believed that HSPs have a particular developmental path and that they quite possibly have a special purpose in society.  

Before I explain the theory of Positive Disintegration and its implications for HSPs experiencing burnout, let me briefly define what I mean by existential burnout. Some burnout is situational, like being burned out in a job or relationship, and you can deal with it through taking a break or exiting the situation. Existential burnout is a whole-life phenomenon, when you begin to question the very foundations of your life and beliefs. It is the state of emotional, psychological, and spiritual confusion and exhaustion that results from years or decades of trying to follow conventional paths and not finding satisfaction or happiness through them. This is essentially what positive disintegration is: a conflict between an individual and society’s norms, driven by a desire for greater autonomy and a feeling that there’s “more” out there, that results in many ostensibly negative emotions, a dark night of the soul.

Positive Disintegration is a complex theory, and I will only touch on the portions here that are relevant for HSPs and burnout. Dąbrowski did not use the term HSP (it was coined by Elaine Aron in the 1990s); rather, he referred to the constellation of traits comprising high sensitivity as overexcitability, or OE, which originates in an extrasensitive nervous system. If you are an HSP, you will recognize yourself in multiple types of OEs as detailed by Dąbrowski:

• Psychomotor: An excess of physical or mental energy. Can manifest as racing thoughts, jitteriness, and feeling an actual need to either think obsessively or for physical movement.

• Sensual: An extra sensitivity of the five senses. Super-tasters, sound sensitivity, sensitivity to light, etc. are all manifestations of this.

• Intellectual: An extreme desire for understanding, greater knowledge, truth, enlightenment. These are people who are driven to observe, collect data, research, analyze, and theorize. They usually love reading and are highly curious.

• Imaginational: Characterized by a highly active imagination and propensity to lose oneself in fantasy. These people can have very vivid dreams, see less of a stark distinction between truth and fiction or see truth as paradoxical, often find more pleasure living in their head than the real world, and are highly creative.

• Emotional: Experiencing intense and complex emotional responses, often accompanied by physical sensations. These people are often highly empathic, often attracted to or experience the melancholy or the “dark” side of life, and form unusually strong attachments.

I have all five of these OEs. The last three especially are associated with positive disintegration. So basically I was always on a path to existential burnout. It was required for me to reach a higher level of personal development, according to Dąbrowski’s theory. So why do HSPs experience this type of thing, and what purpose does it serve?

A simple explanation for why HSPs often experience burnout is that their sensitivities make them more prone to it. But disintegration is more than just crisis. It is a rejection of the status quo, coupled with a desire for an individual and autonomous path forward. HSPs enter their dark night of the soul because of the particular way that they experience this kind of crisis: as a disquietude with the self; the feeling of being inferior, not just when compared to others but in terms of what they wish for themselves. HSPs are highly self-aware and self-critical, and have a keen sense of themselves as being “different” and misunderstood. The path through disintegration for most HSPs involves self-education and what Dąbrowski terms “autopsychotherapy.” In other words, the path toward greater autonomy is individual and self-directed. Each person must find their own untrodden path – and this, in essence, is both the reason for and result of existential burnout. The outcome is syntony, a state of being in harmony and resonating with one’s environment: integration.

Dąbrowski believed that HSPs play a special role in society, that through their own personal experience of disintegration they could then use their learnings to help raise the level of society. But it is the implications of his theory for individual HSPs experiencing burnout that I find most compelling. I know that for me, I only began to heal when I stopped believing something was wrong with me, i.e. when I stopped pathologizing my experience of burnout (or letting others do that). How different would my experience of my dark night of the soul have felt if someone had said to me, “You’re an HSP, and what you are going through is a normal, necessary, and even positive part of your development. It’s going to hurt like hell, but you will find your way through it and emerge as a more highly functioning individual with something important to contribute to the world.” I wonder.

A Gentleness Revolution

Stop hiding your gentle self.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

Until I was nine years old, I went to a Montessori school where we weren’t allowed to use the word “hate.” We weren’t allowed to play any kind of game involving toy guns, or even pretend our hand was a gun. At home, I was allowed one hour of TV a week, Saturday morning cartoons (and probably only so my parents could sleep in haha). Violent non-cartoon shows were not allowed, even ones with staged sword fights. Sound extreme? Maybe.

At nine years old, I boarded the yellow bus for the very first time to go to public school. I instinctively walked down the aisle to the back – that’s where most of the kids were. And I learned that very first day that I did not belong there. It didn’t take long for those kids to realize I was different: soft, overly friendly, eager to please, naïve, open. I was like an alien among them. As for me, I came away with one overriding impression from that first bus ride and its twin later that day, when I sat at the front of the bus.

Kids are mean.

I can still feel my visceral shock at how mean those kids were. Not necessarily to me – for whatever reason I escaped any really bad bullying that first day (I suppose they simply didn’t know what to do with me) – but to each other. Riding the school bus became a daily exercise in inuring myself to extreme anxiety. And to some extent, that has followed me throughout my life. When I look out at the world, I see a very mean place. And it is mean. We live in an ungentle world, and for us gentle souls, it’s a painful place to be. And doubly so because the personality traits of gentle souls, and in particular our tender hearts, are viewed as weak and undesirable.

We live in a society where toughness, grit, determination, and aggressiveness are admired. I learned fast to hide those parts of myself that were kind, gentle, and sweet because they were met with derision and bullying. That kind of wound festers. To my shame, I occasionally turned that pain outward, even participating in a few instances of bullying myself. Like I said, kids are mean, and I wasn’t immune.

And grown-ups are mean, too. Gosh, they can be so mean. The only difference is that as a grown-up I now know that often the meanest ones are the most damaged.

You know what? I don’t want to be one of the mean ones. Even if all the cool kids are doing it. Not only that, I want to be the gentle, openhearted person I used to be. I don’t want to hide her away anymore, or try to convince myself that I need to toughen up even more to survive in the big girl world, or pretend I’m one of the cool kids who doesn’t give a shit, or coerce myself into believing that I’m supposed to be mean because after all I’m just speaking my truth and that’s how it’s done.

It’s not. That’s just one way it’s done. And it’s not my way. You do you. I’ll do me.

This is me: I want my world to be gentle. I want it to be a place where other gentle souls don’t have to brace themselves every moment against the inevitable meanness coming their way. I want to live in a kind world, and I think it’s possible. Does that sound eye-rollingly naïve? If it does, maybe take a look at your own wounds. We all start out as openhearted kids, looking out at the world with sweet and hopeful expectation. Most of us have that crushed in us. All of us have that school bus moment, when our eyes are opened to the truth. That people can be so mean. That we must protect ourselves, or join them in lashing out, or run away to hide, or… Or we can decide we’re going to keep on being our gentle selves in the face of humanity’s wounded soul.

I think people are exhausted by all the meanness out there. It’s always going to be there, because humans are human, but maybe us gentle souls have a greater role to play in all this. Maybe by refusing to hide our true gentle selves we can help neutralize some of that meanness. I know that there will never be a larger revolution of gentleness in the wider world – even I have limits to my naiveté. But by committing to a gentleness revolution in our own private lives, maybe we can make some small contribution to creating a kinder world. Who’s with me?

Give Boredom a Chance if You're Creatively Blocked

Why we should relearn how to be bored, and techniques for facilitating boredom.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I can remember often being bored as a child. I was of that generation that was largely left alone to raise itself – I had the freedom to run the neighborhood as I pleased, wasn’t overscheduled with extracurriculars, and I was a latchkey kid. I had lots of time to be bored. And I didn’t like the feeling! Being bored is usually an unpleasant sensation, and it’s particularly difficult for children to handle. We learn how to be bored as we mature, but not in a positive sense. We discipline ourselves into being able to sit still and not fiddle when we’re, say, listening to a boring lecture. We inure ourselves to boredom.  

Then when I was sixteen I spent a year with in Italy, where I lived with a family whose mother was from a Swiss Calvinist background. Boredom was not acceptable in that family. This was the first time I came across the belief that being bored is morally suspect. My host sister told me that when she complained about being bored as a child, she got yelled at. She was expected to fill her time with worthy tasks, be they play or work. Being bored was a sign of sloth and mental indolence.

Boredom, suffice it to say, does not have a good reputation. It’s either something to avoid at all costs, or it indicates something is wrong with us. But it may be key to creativity. There is a theory that creative people are more likely to get bored. But what if it’s the opposite?  What if people who are more likely to get bored have the capacity to be more creative? What if boredom is somehow necessary for creativity? If this is the case, it means that those of us trying to access our creative potential need to relearn how to be bored, and unlearn all the negative connotations we’ve internalized around boredom.  

Boredom is a “paradoxical emotion,” i.e. one that creates one emotional state in order to bring about its opposite. When we are bored, our immediate instinctual reaction is to move through it as soon as we can. We’ll pick up our phones, take a look at our to-do list, turn on the TV, anything to stop feeling bored. And that’s good! That shows that our minds are actively seeking engagement. This process contains the seeds of creativity – we just need to learn how to cultivate and enhance that. And the first step is to let ourselves be bored more often and for longer periods of time instead of immediately jumping into the first knee-jerk activity at hand.

One way to do this could be something similar to my intentional practice of wasting time. Whenever I find myself getting time anxiety, when I’m overwhelmed by all the things I feel I have to do, I sit down and breathe, and purposefully “waste” time until my mind has lighted on something I actually want to do. It is easy enough to repurpose this into a creativity practice, with a focus on letting the mind wander instead of settling on an activity. I call this type of thing “staring at a wall.” Give it a try. Just have a seat somewhere comfortable and stare at something. Maybe the scene out your window, or a cozy fire, or a fake fire on TV, or whatever. Sit through the antsy-ness. Don’t give in to your desire to get up and do something. Let your mind wander, and when it settles on something, gently push it to wander some more. The bored mind will naturally try to creatively solve its state of boredom. Let it cycle through a number of ideas and solutions. The important thing is to not see any of them as necessarily requiring action. The purpose of this exercise is to train your brain to work creatively.

Once you’ve loosened up your brain a bit by getting it used to boredom, you can step things up by using tasks that have a meditative quality to them, such as washing dishes by hand, as part of your creative practice. One of the most effective is walking. Writers in particular seem to find a regular walking habit conducive to creativity. Studies have shown that it’s the act of walking itself that enhances creative thought, so it can take place on a treadmill if that’s what’s available to you, but it must be somewhat leisurely. If you are walking explicitly for exercise, i.e. at a fast clip, it doesn’t work. When I was experiencing burnout and couldn’t write, I started walking daily through my neighborhood. I didn’t think of it as a creativity practice per se, but I eventually walked myself straight out of my creative block.

Two final activities that have been shown to enhance creativity are writing or reading something boring. And by boring, I mean very boring. One study actually gave participants pages from a phone book (lol so old-fashioned) to copy down by hand or read, and then tested them on creative tasks. Morning pages, where you write three handwritten pages in stream-of-consciousness style as soon as you wake up, may rely on the same mechanism. Another trick many writers use is to copy passages from other people’s work. While this is meant to help with learning writing style and technique, it is an inherently boring task (trust me, I’ve tried it).

Maybe you already have things in your own life you find deeply boring that you could repurpose as a creativity practice. Something that pops into mind for me is when I have to wait for something, like for other people to arrive, or in a medical office. See what you can come up with! Sometimes those “wasted” minutes and hours can be our most valuable.

My Favorite Three Pieces of Wisdom

These changed my perspective on life and work.

I am notoriously picky about the advice I take. Well, that’s maybe putting it lightly. Anyone who knows me well knows that I don’t generally take advice easily or gladly. I’m stubborn, know my own mind, and I’m an independent thinker who, I’ll be honest, thinks she knows best when it comes to herself. But once in a while I hear something that really makes an impression on me. It sticks in my mind and becomes something I refer to often as I make my way forward in life. I’m going to share with you three pieces of wisdom that have genuinely impacted my thinking. I hope you find them as valuable as I do!

Neil Gaiman’s secret freelancer knowledge.

Fooling around on the internet some years ago, I came across Neil Gaiman’s 2012 commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I recommend watching the entire speech, because it is full of real wisdom about living life as a creative, but the part that rocked my world begins at the 14:10 minute mark. The secret to being a successful freelancer, which many creatives are and increasingly people are just generally as our economy shifts in that direction, is to possess two of the following three skills:

1. Do good work.

2. Get work done on time.

3. Be nice to work with.

Any two are fine! If you do good work and get it done on time, people will tolerate your unpleasantness. If you do good work and you’re really nice, they’ll probably be okay with it if you’re sometimes late on deadlines. And perhaps most importantly, if you are awesome to work with and always hit those deadlines, your work doesn’t have to be quite as high quality as you’d think.

What I love about this advice is that if you’re anything like me, you read those three things and think, “I can do all of them! If you only need two to be successful, I’m definitely going to make it!” And that’s what this advice is designed to do: make you feel more confident about your chances, but also to show you that success isn’t the result of some magical formula. Just do good work, be on time, and don’t be a jerk.

Enjoy the hungry times.

I was a teenager during VH1’s glory days of behind-the-music content, and it was on one of those shows that I saw an interview with a band that was mega popular in the 80s but had disintegrated due to all the typical problems – substance abuse, interpersonal conflict, manager woes, and missing money. I don’t remember which band or anything from that interview except one quote that went something like this: “The hungry years were the best years.”

This blew my mind. Like most young people, I assumed the best times were when you arrived at success – in this case, fame and money. Sure, this band mucked it up by being druggies and fighting with each other, but that wouldn’t happen to me if I ever achieved fame and wealth (Right? Right?!?). Or whatever the equivalent success was for a nerdy introvert like myself. It was the way the guy said it, wistful and sad, that got to me. Suddenly I could see the band in their younger years, all united in their cause, playing tiny venues and excited that they had twenty people rocking to their music tonight instead of ten. I could see how the getting-there years would blow the having-arrived years out of the water. This was my first lesson that the journey is better than the destination, even when that destination is what you think you’ve always wanted, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Ignore the critics in the cheap seats.

This comes from Brené Brown, and in my opinion it’s her most valuable piece of wisdom, particularly in this era of judgement and shaming. It’s based on Teddy Roosevelt’s man in the arena quote, and the gist of it is that there are people who are brave and get out there in the arena, and there are people who opt to stay in the spectator seats who will judge and shame their every move. Particularly when you fail. And if you are in the arena, you will fail. A lot. It’s just part of being brave. Here’s what Brené says about this and how she handles it:

1. It’s not about winning or losing, it’s about showing up and being seen.

2. If you show up, there is only one guarantee – you will get your ass kicked. Especially if you have committed to creating in your life.

3. If you’re not also in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.

I honestly find this to be so powerful. Whenever you put yourself out there, there are people who are going to want to launch their shit at you, because they have a lot of shit and it’s making them miserable. They want you to take some of it on. Misery loves company. You don’t have to make yourself a target. Simply step to the side and let it fly on past. Your peers are the other people down there in the arena with you. Live your life. Do your thing. Be glorious.

How to Be a Late Bloomer

Or better yet, how about being a repeat bloomer?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

Why would you want to be a late bloomer, you ask? Why not? Even if you were an early bloomer, nothing is more liberating and life-giving than feeling that life can have a second act, or a third. Or more! In fact, instead of calling it late blooming, let’s call it repeat blooming. Why wouldn’t you want to be a repeat bloomer? If you’re feeling stuck or bored in life, or if you’re prone to existential despair at seeing your years slip away and your accomplishments remain mediocre, take heart. We are all capable of being repeat bloomers, and I’m going to tell you why that is and how to do it.

Let’s look at this through a lens of what holds us back from being late bloomers. First, we’re told our brainpower declines as we age, so we think there’s no way we’ll accomplish anything at a later age comparable with what we could have accomplished in youth – so why even try? Despite what we’re led to believe, overall cognitive function does not decline with age. One type does, but another type actually improves. The type that declines – it peaks around age 20, so it starts declining before life has even really fully begun – is called fluid intelligence. This is the basic reasoning capacities of our brains, the functions that don’t rely on prior learning. Crystallized intelligence, which is the kind that builds over time as you learn and experience life, continues to increase slowly and then remains stable for much of adult life. But even when it, too, begins to decline, this isn’t necessarily associated with the loss of an ability to continue functioning at a high level.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta tells a story about operating on the brain of a 93-year-old man who fell off a roof while using a leaf blower. Dr. Gupta found him waiting for the operation fully conscious and reading about elections in East Africa on his iPhone. This was clearly a very high functioning old guy, and Dr. Gupta was curious as to what shape he’d find his brain in. What do you think he saw in there? Here’s what: a shriveled-up 93-year-old brain. As Dr. Gupta puts it, this aged brain “had almost no correlation to his function… We think of our organs as having this natural deterioration, and they do, but that doesn’t mean they can’t function like they did when you were much younger.” The incredible plasticity of the brain well into old age is something new research is revealing. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel a lot better about the prospect of aging.

But that’s just brain function. What holds most of us back from being late bloomers is psychological. Our culture tells us that we become irrelevant as we age, and that the time for achieving big successes or making great contributions has passed. The insidious part of this is that while it’s demonstrably false – there are plenty of examples of highly successful late bloomers – the fact that our culture believes it means that it has the power of truth in our lives. Dr. Nell Painter, a successful and lauded historian, found this out when she decided to get an MFA in art in her 60s. As she describes in her memoir, Old in Art School, her classmates, all many decades younger, weren’t even interested in evaluating her work during critique sessions, because her much advanced age created in them an “assumption of my inconsequence” (Dr. Painter is also Black, which added another dimension to this dismissal). Being a late bloomer means facing our own irrelevance in the eyes of the culture at large. As Dr. Painter’s experience shows, having the potential to be a “successful” artist is associated with being young. Indeed, potential is seen as equivalent with youth. And if you don’t have potential, i.e. youth, what’s the point?

Let’s take a closer look at potential. While youth is infused with hopes and dreams for the future, maturity is about having already arrived. As we mature and age, we are no longer looking at our potential as a future destination. We enter the era of living our potential. Knowing this is the key to being a late bloomer. When we start learning something new at an older age, we can leapfrog right over that stage where potential is something we are only ever grasping at and step right into the heart of it. The potential of youth is in the eyes of beholders, the gatekeepers who judge your progress and your possibility of future success. The potential of older age is something you possess and have sovereignty over. Put succinctly, you can do away with giving a shit what the gatekeepers and naysayers think. You’ve earned your right to define yourself and what your potential looks like.

In his book Late Bloomers, Rich Karlgaard lists the strengths of late bloomers, including insight, resilience, compassion, and wisdom, but one stands out to me more than others: late bloomers maintain a youthful and vigorous curiosity. Curiosity often appears as whims, and late bloomers tend to take those whims seriously, regardless of how “important” they seem or - and this is important - their future potential. Late bloomers know the secret, that pursuing your curiosity for the sake of appeasing it is what blooming is all about. The potential is in the pursuit. Something will come out of it, assuredly, because older people have more creative and wide-ranging cognitive resources at their disposal, but you can let that part develop naturally as you go along.

Being a late bloomer is a boon because there is less future ahead. It gives us reason to focus on what really matters about our activities: the process of actually doing them. Whereas a young “aspiring” artist may have big dreams about a career trajectory of prestige gallery showings and art-world esteem, an older artist can more easily understand and embrace the idea that it’s the practice that makes you an artist. And this goes for any activity you choose as your late-bloomer project. You no longer have the luxury of time to be “aspiring.” You must simply be. Being a late bloomer isn’t something you might be later if you accomplished something at some point. You must see yourself as a late bloomer now, as already having arrived there.