Overcoming Creative Blocks

If you’re a creative of any kind - an artist, a writer, a youtuber, etc. - you’ve probably experienced creative blocks at least a few times on your journey as a creative. It can be so frustrating and feel debilitating. It hinders you from doing what you love and, for some of us, can limit you in growing a creativity-based career. There are things you can do, however, to overcome a creative block and get that creativity flowing again.

Understanding Creativity

Before we go into creative blocks, let’s talk about creativity. What is it? Where does it happen in our brain? How does it affect our brain?

As I shared in my What is Creative Living and Healing blog, creativity is innate. All humans are creative. Creativity is our ability to problem solve. It’s the ability to make connections and see possibilities, to have an open mind, and to think fluidly. It’s like a muscle that you either develop or let atrophy. Even those of us who say they are “just not creative,” or “don’t have a creative bone in their body” are simply stuck in a creative block.

I learned a lot about how creativity works in the brain by reading The Agile Mind: How Your Brain Makes Creativity Happen. Creativity is associated with the right side of the brain where we process information in a visual, holistic manner (versus the left side of the brain which processes linearly and is responsible for our ability to write and think logically).

Being creative is not easy. It takes a considerable amount of effort and brain power. Thinking new thoughts uses up the most energy in the brain. In fact, the brain actively tries to exert the smallest amount of energy when processing new information, so the majority of the time, when we are confronted with something new, our brain uses past knowledge to automatically respond. This is a vital function of our brain since it is constantly processing millions of bits of information per second from our senses (source). However, it also means that our brain resists creative thought. It wants to stick with automatic thinking (what is known) rather than innovative thinking patterns (new ideas). Given this, it’s important to understand why our brains tend to resist creativity to understand how to encourage creativity to flow.

What Makes Creativity Flow

There are two key internal factors that encourage creativity to flow: rest and inspiration.

1. Creativity flows when we are relaxed and rested

You may have experienced this while driving or falling asleep: you’ll get a rush of ideas or all of a sudden a solution for something you’ve been wrestling with comes to mind.

2. Creativity flows when we are inspired

Well, duh! What I mean is the more new ideas you produce, the more creativity will flow. It is an infinite resource, but takes practice to keep your well of inspiration flowing. It takes time and patience. It takes loving care just as it does to grow a fruitful garden. Creativity runs on curiosity and play, and takes developing fear resilience.  

What to Do When You Feel Creatively Blocked

Most often, creative blocks are brought on by emotions. Creativity flows with positive, abundant energy and slows with negative, scarcity energy. So if you’re feeling stressed or fearful or coming from a space of scarcity, it makes a lot of sense for your creativity to be stuck. 

The first thing to do when you’re feeling blocked is to take a beat and lean into where you are emotionally. Close your eyes and tune into yourself. What is your headspace like? What do you feel in your body? Send yourself lots of love and compassion. Most often blocks are caused by fear - fear of failure, fear of not being good enough - so being nice to yourself is the best way to move through a block. Fear is not something that can be avoided in being creative. It is literally built into the creative process. Every single time I sit down to make something, fear is there, but that doesn’t mean I have to allow it to control me. I have autonomy over my fear because I can sit with it and use tools to understand it.

Our society values emotional repression and pushing on over dealing with hard emotions and sitting with uncomfortable feelings, but if you want to increase your creativity, understanding your emotions will open up a wealth of space in your mind for creative thoughts. It actually takes a lot more energy to suppress thoughts and emotions than it does to let yourself feel and address them, and we’ve already established thinking creatively requires a lot of energy, so you need that energy in the reserve if you want to be more creative. 

I personally am quite the emotional repressor. It’s something that I’ve been working on a lot over the past couple of years. I’ve found journaling to be a great tool for exploring where I’m at emotionally and releasing thoughts and feelings. This is why Julia Cameron created her morning pages practice as a way to clear out her mind at the beginning of each day to create space for creative thinking. 

Other ways you can clear your energy are through movement or a change of scenery. Take a walk, dance to your favorite song, go for a drive, or even just move to a different space in your home. Sometimes you just need a fresh outlook. 

Infuse Your Creative Process with Play

I will be sharing more in depth about this in a future blog, but making space for fun and play in your creative process really helps decrease fear and give you more freedom in your creative journey. It helps you to remember why you love being creative and find joy in your creativity once again. Here are a few tips for infusing your creative process with play:

1. Lower the stakes

Often when I get stuck, it’s because I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself to make something great, to be the best, but those expectations put me into a place of fear or scarcity. Find a way to make it less about the end product and more about the process.

2. Get outside your comfort zone

Try something completely different from your normal medium. If you’re a musician, go draw something. If you’re a painter, try collage. This also creates more room for play. If you aren’t an expert in the medium, then there’s no expectation to be great, which therefore allows opportunity for play.

For example, when I was reinvesting myself in my creative practice post-college, making things brought up so much fear and anxiety. It was difficult to get myself to sit down and draw (something that in the past had brought me security and joy) because of how much fear I was living in. I desperately needed a creative outlet, yet drawing was not bringing me the joy I needed, so I supplemented my creative practice with cooking. Cooking became a powerful creative outlet for me without the pressure to make a masterpiece.

3. Meditate

In a state of meditation, the activity in our left brain decreases, which is where our conscious brain activity lives. As our thinking quiets, activity in the right side of our brain (the one responsible for holistic and unconscious thinking) increases, creating more opportunity to find solutions and insight. It’s also a great relaxation technique and we already know that creativity increases with relaxation. 

4. Procrastinate

This sounds counterintuitive, but one of my favorite Ted Talks by Adam Grant explains this perplexing phenomenon. Just as I explained with meditation, our best insights come when we quiet our thinking mind and rely on our unconscious mind. We can enable the use of our unconscious minds through procrastination. If we encounter a problem that we get stuck on, while our conscious mind is focused on doing something else, our unconscious mind continues to tinker away. Then, all of a sudden a connection is made and we receive insight into the original problem.

5. Change your scenery

As I stated earlier, creativity flows with more inspiration, so it’s important to be taking in inspiration wherever you are. If you’re feeling stuck, getting outside for a walk can be a great way to reinvigorate your creativity. Before COVID-19, I would go on museum dates with myself to find new inspiration.

6. Rest

Creativity is a cyclical energy source. It is not always available at the same amount. We need periods of rest and recharge to refill our creative energy source. Unfortunately, most creative jobs are not designed with this in mind. As creatives for hire, we are expected to produce and create consistently. I’ve experienced this in many of my jobs and it’s a recipe for burnout. It’s a lot of why I started working for myself, so I could make space for rest and manage my own schedule. You may not be a creative who is currently managing your own schedule, but it’s still important to find rest in the places you can control, like your home life during non-working hours.

Embrace Creative Blocks

Creative Blocks are extremely frustrating, but if we allow ourselves to sit in that place of frustration and try to just push through, the results won’t be our best work. We won’t be satisfied with the outcome, and this will lead to more pressure to create better, which leads to fear of failure, which leads right back to creative blocks. So let yourself be blocked. Take advantage of the block as an opportunity to explore what you’re feeling, uncover what you need in that moment, and possibly pivot to something completely new. Make your creative blocks work for you instead of treating them like the enemy, and you’ll find yourself having them a lot less often.