MASTERING CREATIVE ANXIETY
By Eric
Maisel, Ph.D.
Many
anxieties arise as you attempt to create anything: a painting, a new recipe, a
home business, or a solution to a personal problem. There is the anxiety
associated with going into the unknown, with relinquishing control, with making
choices -- innumerable anxieties arise as you endeavor to create, whether that
creation is something as grand as a novel or as everyday as a new filing system
or new decor for your living room.
In
order to deal with all the anxiety that comes with creating, you must
acknowledge and accept that anxiety is part of the process, demand of yourself
that you will learn -- and really practice! -- some anxiety management skills, and get
on with your creating and your anxiety management. Here are some excellent
everyday anxiety management tools.
1.
Attitude choice
You can
choose to be made anxious by every new opinion you hear or you can choose to
keep your own counsel. You can choose to approach life anxiously or you can
choose to approach it calmly. It is
a matter of flipping an internal switch -- one that you control.
2.
Improved appraising
Incorrectly appraising situations as more important, more dangerous or more
negative than they in fact are raises your anxiety level. You can significantly
reduce your experience of anxiety by refusing to appraise situations as
catastrophically negative.
3.
Lifestyle support
Your
lifestyle supports calmness or it doesn't. When you rush less, create fewer
unnecessary pressures and stressors, get sufficient rest and exercise, eat a
healthy diet, take time to relax, include love and friendship, and live in
balance, then you reduce your experience of anxiety. How much harder will it be
to deal with the creative anxiety in your life if your very lifestyle is
producing its own magnum of anxiety?
4.
Behavioral changes
What
you actually do when you feel anxious makes a big difference. If a ten-minute
shower or a twenty-minute walk can do as good a job of reducing your anxiety as
watching another hour of televised golf or smoking several cigarettes, isn't it
the behavior to choose? There are many time-wasting, unhealthy, and dispiriting
ways to manage anxiety -- and many efficient, healthy, and uplifting ways, too.
5. Deep
breathing
The
simplest anxiety management technique is deep breathing. By stopping to deeply
breathe (5 seconds on the inhale, 5 seconds on the exhale) you stop your racing
mind and alert your body to the fact that you want to be calmer. Begin to
incorporate deep breaths into your daily routine, especially at those times when
you think about and turn to your creative projects.
6.
Cognitive work
Changing the way you think is probably the most useful and powerful anti-anxiety
strategy. You can do this straightforwardly by 1) noticing what you are saying
to yourself; 2) disputing the self-talk that makes you anxious or does not serve
you; and 3) substituting more affirmative, positive or useful self-talk. This
three-step process really works if you will practice it and commit to it.
7.
Incanting
A
variation on the last two strategies is to use them together and to "drop" a
useful cognition into a deep breath, thinking "half" the thought as you inhale
and "half" the thought as you exhale. Incantations that can reduce your
experience of anxiety include "I am perfectly calm" or "I trust my resources."
Experiment with some short phrases that, when dropped into a deep breath, help
you quell your anxious feelings.
8.
Physical relaxation techniques
Physical relaxation techniques include such simple procedures as rubbing your
shoulder and such elaborate procedures as "progressive relaxation techniques"
where you slowly relax each part of your body in turn. Doing something
physically soothing can prove really useful in the moment to help you calm
yourself and when used in combination with your cognitive practice.
9.
Mindfulness techniques
Meditation and other mindfulness practices that help you take charge of your
thoughts and get a grip on your mind can prove very useful as part of your
anxiety management program. The better a job you do of releasing those thoughts
and replacing them with more affirmative ones, the less you will experience
anxiety.
10.
Guided imagery
Guided
imagery is a technique where you guide yourself to calmness by mentally
picturing a calming image or a series of images. You might picture yourself on a
blanket by the beach, walking by a lake, or swinging on a porch swing. Determine
what images calm you by trying out various images and then actually bring them
to mind when you are feeling anxious.
11.
Disidentification techniques
"Disidentification" is the core idea of the branch of psychotherapy known as
psychosynthesis. Rather than attaching too much significance to a passing
thought, feeling, worry, or doubt, you remind yourself that you are larger than
and different from all the stray, temporal events that seem so important in the
moment. For example, you stop saying "I'm anxious" and begin to say, "I'm having
a passing feeling of anxiety." By making these linguistic changes you
fundamentally reduce your experience of anxiety.
12.
Ceremonies and rituals
Creating and using a ceremony or ritual is a simple but powerful way to reduce
your experience of anxiety. For many people lowering the lights, lighting
candles, putting on soothing music and in other ways ceremonially creating a
calming environment helps significantly. Learn to ceremonially move from the
rush of everyday life to the quiet of your creative work, whether that work may
be.
13.
Reorienting techniques
If your
mind starts to focus on some anxiety-producing thought or situation or if you
feel yourself becoming too wary, watchful and vigilant, one thing you can do is
to consciously turn your attention in another direction and reorient yourself
away from your anxious thoughts and toward a more neutral stimulus.
14.
Discharge techniques
Anxiety
and stress build up in the body and techniques that vent that stress can prove
very useful. For example, one discharge technique that actors learn to employ to
reduce their experience of anxiety before a performance is to "silently
scream" -- to make the facial gestures and whole body intentions that go with
uttering a good cleansing scream without actually uttering any sound.
If you
intend to create, whether it's building a home business, writing a novel, or
experiencing everyday life more deeply, get ready for anxiety. It is coming! You
can handle it beautifully if you use the simple tools I've just described and
turn yourself into an anxiety management expert.
# # #
*Based on the book Mastering Creative Anxiety C 2011 by Eric Maisel. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. All rights reserved.
To order Managing Creative Anxiety from Amazon.com,
click here!
Mastering Creative Anxiety
An
Interview with author Eric Maisel, Ph.D.
Eric Maisel, PhD,
is the author of
Mastering Creative Anxiety and
numerous other titles including
Brainstorm,
Creativity for Life,
Coaching the Artist Within, and
A
Writer's San Francico. America's foremost creativity coach, he is widely
known as a creativity expert who coaches individuals and trains creativity
coaches through workshops and keynotes nationally and internationally. He has
blogs on the Huffington Post and WholeLiving.com and writes columns for
ArtBistro and Art Calendar Magazine. Visit him online at
http://www.ericmaisel.com.
You've
written many books for creative people. What's your intention with this book?
I'm
continually surprised by how much anxiety the creative process generates and by
how much difficulty creative people have dealing with the many anxieties
connected both to the creative process and the creative life. I've written on
these matters before but in this book I identify the many different anxieties
that can arise -- whether it's about going into the unknown, lacking
self-confidence, experiencing a crisis of meaning, and so on -- and present a
useful arsenal of anxiety management tools from which creative people can
select. I think it's the most in-depth look at these issues to appear so far.
Why
does creating produce so much anxiety?
First
of all, so much is on the line. For someone who's self-identified as a writer,
painter, composer, scientist, inventor, and so on, his identity and ego are
wrapped up in how well he creates -- and when what we do matters
that much, we naturally get anxious.
It's one thing to sing in the shower and another thing to agree to sing at your
daughter's wedding: so much more feels on the line! Second, the process demands
that we don't know until we know: it is a voyage into the darkness of an unknown
place where our plot or image or melody resides. People want to know right now,
even before they begin: they want a kind of guarantee that they will succeed
based on already knowing the outcome. But this guarantee just isn't
available -- which produces anxiety. There are many other reasons, too -- enough to
make anyone sweat!
Which
situations produce the most anxiety for creative people?
It's
quite idiosyncratic, though certain situations are notorious for producing
anxiety. For most performers, waiting in the wings is much more trying than
actually going on. Some painters find the blank canvas intimidating while other
painters feel more anxious as they try to decide when and if their painting is
actually complete. One writer is made tremendously anxious by plotting while
another gets into a panic at the thought of talking with her literary agent. It
is quite idiosyncratic but the general rule is, the more important you consider
the situation, the more anxiety you'll experience. That big audition, that
television interview in front of millions, that conversation with the last
editor likely to want your book -- the bigger you perceive the moment, the more
anxiety gets generated.
Is
there some way to avoid creative anxiety?
There
are certain things you can try but they tend not to produce the results you
want. You can decide not to create. You can decide to do formulaic work and keep
repeating yourself. You can try to handle the anxiety that arises by drinking
too much or by using addictive drugs. All the methods available to avoid
anxiety, like fleeing the creative encounter, or ineffectively managing anxiety,
like getting drunk, are second-rate. It is much better to embrace the reality of
anxiety, rather than to try to deny it, and to learn effective anxiety
management tools like the more than twenty I present.
What
strategies are available for dealing with creative anxiety?
There
are really a great many, from taking charge of your basic attitude and becoming
a calmer person to doing a better job of appraising situations so that they
don't seem so dangerous to using time-honored devices like good luck charms. In
Mastering Creative Anxiety I present
a menu of twenty-two effective anxiety management tools, enough tools that
everyone can find at least one or two that will work well.
Of
these many strategies, what are the top two or three?
The
simplest is to remember to breathe; a few deep cleansing breaths can do wonders
for reducing anxiety. The most important anxiety management tool is probably
cognitive work, where you change the things you say to yourself, turning anxious
thoughts into calmer, more productive thoughts. And creating a lifestyle that
supports calmness is also very important: if the way you live your life produces
a lot of anxiety, that's a tremendous extra burden on your nervous system.
You say
that "getting a grip on your mind" is a key anxiety-management strategy. Can you
tell us how we can get a better grip?
Changing the way you think is probably the most useful and powerful anxiety
management strategy. You can do this straightforwardly by 1) noticing what you
are saying to yourself; 2) disputing the self-talk that makes you anxious or
that does not serve you; and 3) substituting more affirmative, positive or
useful self-talk. This three-step process really works if you will practice it
and commit to it -- it's the way a person gets a grip on his mind.
You
focus a lot on "making meaning" as part of the creative process. How are "making
meaning" and anxiety related?
The
biggest challenge facing a creative person is keeping the belief firmly in place
that what she is attempting matters to her. A creative person's main challenge
is therefore existential: we easily lose the sense that what we are doing
matters, given how many novels or paintings there are in the world, how hard it
is to do the work well, how difficult the marketplace feels, and all the rest.
Two kinds of anxiety arise with respect to this profound existential issue: the
anxiety that arises when we begin to sense that our work doesn't matter to us
and the anxiety that arises when we realize that our work matters very much to
us (and what a burden all that mattering puts on our shoulders!). When you
decide to make meaning these two anxieties confront you: the anxiety that arises
when you wonder if you just fooling yourself about your work's importance and
the anxiety that arises because your work
does matter to you and you want to do it well.
What's
the number one thing that a creative person needs to remember with respect to
creative anxiety?
That it
will take real work to deal with it. None of the techniques in the book will be
available to you when you need them simply because you read about them and nod
your head. You have to practice them and use them. It is not enough to agree
that your self-talk is unhelpful and unfriendly. You must notice what you're
saying to yourself, dispute those utterances that don't serve you, and actively
substitute more affirmative, useful language. It isn't enough to like the idea
of guided imagery or to agree that stress reduction makes sense. You must
practice your chosen visualization and your chosen stress reduction techniques.
If you want the results, you will have to do the work.
Given
that anxiety is an inevitable part of the creative process, isn't creating a
roller-coaster ride of emotions?
Yes, it
is! But if you want to create, you have to a buy a ticket for exactly that ride.
Rather than strenuously defending yourself against the experience of anxiety, an
effort that will prevent you from taking the kinds of risks that the creative
process and the creative life demand, you accept that anxiety is part of your
early warning system and your genetic inheritance and you learn to deal with
anxiety rather than trying to avoid it or deny it. If you strive to acquire a
more detached, philosophical attitude, work to get a grip on your mind so that
you create less anxiety, and master a few anxiety management tools, you will
dramatically reduce your experience of anxiety and effectively handle the
portion that remains. But the bottom line is that creating is indeed one wild
roller-coaster ride!
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click here!