Stress

Is Stress killing your creativity? We cannot be creative when we are chronically stressed. 

I have built a whole career on my playful sensibilities. But I have had periods in my creative career where I have felt unable to create and I have felt so bloody far from playful, it's unreal.

During these periods, I would be stressing, panicking, getting frustrated and feeling a lot of fear and anxiety, all of these emotions moving me further and further away from my original goal of producing something creative.

It impossible to create when we are stressed because your brain is freaking out and it is consumed with SURVIVAL. You are in Fight or flight (or freeze).

When you're in fight or flight your brain does not give a shit about how to design the perfect perfect logo for your client, or how to design that puppet for that tv commercial with a fast approaching deadline, your brains priority when you are in fight or flight is, to keep you alive. 

Stress hijacks our higher brain functions because it believes that we are in danger. We lose the ability to problem solve and come up with new ideas.

The opposite to fight or flight, is rest and digest mode.  When we are in Rest and digest  we are able to be our authentic selves, we are relaxed, open and we can create, we feel safe and secure, we can spot opportunities and come up with solutions and new ideas. This is when we can enter a state of play. We are also far more likely to be open to experimenting and if things don’t work out, we are able to figure out why it didn't work and try again. 

To shift from fight or flight and into rest and digest you need to tune into your body. 
A few of my go-to’s coping strategies when stress is blocking my creativity: 

- Physiological sigh (two inhales followed by an extended exhale)

- Meditation 

- Get out into nature

- Yoga 

- Talk the dog

- Belly breathing 

The techniques above are also great to practice when we are not already in fight or flight. 
Consciously practising techniques that calm us helps us to build a stronger connection between our body and mind.
This helps us to bring our body back into balance, the more we practise and the more awareness we build the easier this becomes.

Stress is part of the human experience and it can actually help us grow and adapt, however chronic stress does not help us grow, it stunts us and can make us ill in all manor of ways. 
BUT when we build an awareness around what is going on in our body’s we can develop our own coping strategies to return us to baseline, so once recovered we can go out and start creating again. 

If you want to learn how to tune into your body and start maximising your authentic creativity (in a healthy way!) , I can help you!
Book you’re free mini session here