Creativity and Anxiety
How they cannot co-exist and the offering/gift that is for us
I finally got my hands on Dr. Martha Beck’s new book, Beyond Anxiety and tore through it.
I’m a fan of her work and her memoir books, but this was -by far- my favorite.
I appreciate how she borrows from many different fields, like neuroscience and IFS - Internal Family Systems in psychotherapy- to help us understand anxiety and the role that it plays in limiting our creativity.
She discusses at length how when we have anxiety we reside in our left hemisphere or allow that to take the wheel. Because the right hemisphere- where creativity takes charge—has to exist in the present.
She discusses how when we truly lose ourselves in creating something - be it cooking, painting, drawing, theatre, making music, knitting or crocheting, or crafts or whatever it is that we’re doing - it tempers anxiety.
Anxiety—as she reminds us—is lies, imagined realities that we fool ourselves into believing will happen and that we have little control over, but we keep ourselves in that place of terror and downward spiraling because we think it does/will protect us because we will be prepared if we imagine and dwell on all the worst-case scenarios.
Which - again - is a big fat lie. It won’t help protect us. It’ll just make us miserable and our lives a living hell.
Her rhetorical move of arguing (back) that creating and imagining, grounding and sensory experience are all silly or ridiculous because they aren’t productive or real -
She counters that by asserting how -
If we are honest with ourselves - so is our anxiety. She distinguishes anxiety from fear, important I think because many of us collude the two.
It was a remarkable read and I love the way that she provides exercises and invites you to try them out, so you understand—from first hand experience—what she means and how anxiety and creativity do not co-exist well or at all, because you’re drawing from very different places in your brain.
I see this especially as such a timely book and lesson - as so many —myself including - can turn into an anxious bundle of nerves from the news.
Or - when more and more people are experiencing symptoms of anxiety and are diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
Especially when we consider current stats of those affected with anxiety, especially among teenagers and young adults/traditional college age folks - they were already high but are sky-rocketing in the last few years.
Even if you suck at creating and aren’t going to make your living from it - it’s not just play or frivolous. It may actually save you, keep you sane and help you find/form your life’s purpose. While regaining happiness which also resides in the right hemisphere - in the present moment.
I want to find ways to bring in parts of this book to discussions, activities, homework and self-investment assignments for my students who are often so creative and so riddled with anxiety.
I think for many of us it’s also how we can manage and survive the trauma that is watching the news these days.