Mastering Creative Anxiety
24 Lessons for Writers, Painters, Musicians, and Actors from America's Foremost Creativity Coach
Eric Maisel is one of my favorite writers and teachers and thinkers. In addition to being one of the world’s leading creativity coaches (and therapists), he’s also an amazing exemplar of creativity—having written dozens of books on a broad range of subjects. Big Ideas we explore in this Note include the fact that anxiety goeswith anxiety (yes, “goeswith” = one word!), existential decisiveness and why it matters, enervators —> energizers, a cool mantra, cognitive restructuring and step 1 to creativity.
Big Ideas
- Anxiety Goeswith CreativityAnxiety goeswith creativity.
- Existential DecisivenessHow’s yours?
- Enervators —> EnergizersLet’s make the switch!
- Here’s a Cool Mantra for YouYour favorite?
- Cognitive Restructuring: The Coolest Project in Town= The coolest project in town.
- Step 1: You’ve Gotta Really (!) Care. Do You?You’ve gotta care.
“Are you creating less often than you would like? Are you avoiding your creative work altogether? If so, anxiety may be the culprit! Anxiety regularly stops creative people in their tracks and makes their experience of creating more painful than pleasurable. It stops would-be creative people entirely, preventing them from realizing their dreams. Anxiety is the number one problem that creative people face—and yet few even realize it.
Do you procrastinate? That’s anxiety. Do you resist getting to your work or marketing your work? That’s anxiety. Do you have trouble deciding which creative project to tackle? That’s anxiety. Do you find completing your work hard? That’s anxiety. Anxiety permeates the creative process. Learn what do about it! In this book you’ll learn how to start and complete your creative projects without experiencing disabling anxiety. You’ll learn little-known anxiety-management techniques that can help enormously. And you’ll also learn what not to do in dealing with creative anxiety. …
The more you understand the sources of anxiety and learn how to hone your anxiety-management skills, the better you’ll be able to deal with the rigors of the creative process and the realities of the creative life. Get ready to create calmly!”
~ Eric Maisel from Mastering Creative Anxiety
Eric Maisel is one of my favorite writers and teachers and thinkers.
In addition to being one of the world’s leading creativity coaches (and therapists), he’s also an amazing exemplar of creativity—having written dozens of books on a broad range of subjects.
We’ve covered a couple of his other great books including Rethinking Depression and The Creativity Book. Check out those Notes for more of his wisdom.
This one, as you probably guessed from the title, is all about helping us master the anxiety that naturally arises when we aspire to create. Although geared toward “writers, painters, musicians, and actors,” it’s really a manual for ALL creative people. As I read it, I benefited as a writer, teacher AND entrepreneur.
Eric took a creative approach with the format of the book that I really enjoyed. There are twenty-four chapters in the book—each dealing with a different form of anxiety and a practical tool we can use to conquer it. Plus, and this is what I found particularly charming, each chapter has a “Teaching Tale” in which we enjoy a simple, short story that helps bring the wisdom home.
I really enjoyed the book and if you ever face anxiety as you create, I think you will as well. (Get the book here.) (And check out Creativity 101 for more on creating cool stuff. :)
Of course, it’s packed with Big Ideas. I’m excited to share a few of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!
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Download PDFCreativity is the word we use for our desire to make use of our inner resources, employ our imagination, knit together our thoughts and feelings into beautiful things such as songs, quilts, or novels, and feel like the hero of our own story. It is the way we make manifest our potential, make use of our intelligence, and embrace what we love.
Get the BookAnxiety Goeswith Creativity
“Since both creating and not creating produce anxiety in anyone who wants to create, you might as well embrace the fact that anxiety will accompany you on your journey as a creative person—whether or not you are getting on with your work. Just embracing that reality will release a lot of the ambient anxiety that you feel. Since anxiety accompanies both states—creating and not creating—why not choose creating?”
That’s from the first chapter: “The Anxiety of Creating and Not Creating.”
Rule #1 of mastering our creative anxiety (and any other type of anxiety for that matter), is the recognition that anxiety inherently goes with creativity.
As Alan Watts put it (thanks, Steve Chandler for the wisdom!), some things so naturally and inextricably go together that we should have the word “goeswith” to capture their relationship.
Night goeswith day. Light goeswith dark.
Anxiety goeswith creativity.
This is an exciting truth. Once we embrace it, we can stop blaming ourselves for the anxiety we feel and realize that we are experiencing it not because of some flaw within us, but because we are simply human.
Eric captured this wisdom in The Creativity Book as well. I love how he puts it there: “It turns out that creativity and anxiety travel the same road together. Just as the Buddhist pays special attention to suffering and the Christian pays special attention to sin, the everyday creative person pays special attention to anxiety. She understands that she must write her songs against a backdrop of anxiety, and that because of anxiety she may be tempted by tranquilizing drugs. She understands that her inability to write her novel and her anxiety about writing a bad novel are somehow intertwined, and that if she could just calmly say yes to the book it would spill right out. I am calm as I write this, but also anxious, anxious about getting this section right so that I do not fall behind on my schedule and raise a specter of missed deadlines and upset editors, calm because I’ve written many books and have the sense that this section is going well. Is life nothing but suffering? No. Are we perpetual sinners? No. Is there nothing but anxiety? No. But there is plenty of anxiety to go around; it is real, and it matters.”
Ultimately, here’s what we need to know: We’re going to experience anxiety whether we’re creating or not. So… We might as well CREATE and get something from our anxiety, eh? :)
That’s the first practical tool to mastering your creativity anxiety. Quit fighting it. Know it’s part of the process and get on with learning the tools that will help you create with more confidence and calm clarity as you deal with the inevitable moments (or months) of anxiety!
Vow: I will create, even if doing so provokes anxiety and when it does, I will manage it through the use of the anxiety-management skills and techniques I am learning and practicing.
Existential Decisiveness
“Indecisiveness about what matters, about whether you personally matter, about whether meaning resides over here or whether it resides over there, and about what constitutes the right life for you breeds anxiety. When you tackle these issues directly and become existentially decisive, you become less anxious. The first step in becoming existentially decisive is returning the control of meaning to you by asserting—and really believing—that you are in charge of the meaning of your life.”
“Existential decisiveness.” I love that phrase.
What’s it mean?
It means recognizing and accepting the fact that YOU are the one responsible for creating meaning in your life. Period.
We can’t afford to be wishy-washy about the deepest, most fundamental truths of our lives.
In Rethinking Depression—which is basically an existential program on how to conquer depression—Eric tells us about the importance of living authentically and consistently making meaning in our lives.
He tells us that it’s all about organizing our lives around these three questions:
What matters to you?
Are your thoughts aligned with what matters to you?
Are your behaviors aligned with what matters to you?
To the extent you are decisive with these fundamental questions, you will reduce your anxiety (Are you?)
Here’s another extraordinarily direct and powerful way Eric helps us create meaning in our lives: Ask yourself, “How can I make myself proud?”
So, how can you make yourself proud today?
When your sense of who you are does not match your sense of who you ought to be, you experience anxiety. Become the person you long to see in the mirror, and match your reality to your vision of your authentic self.
Enervators —> Energizers
“What you actually do when you feel anxious makes a big difference. Behaviors such as playing games or watching television for hours quell anxiety but waste vast amounts of your time. Behaviors such as smoking cigarettes chemically quell anxiety but increase your health risks. 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 golf or smoking another several cigarettes, isn’t it the behavior to choose?”
One of the key ways to conquer our anxiety?
Choose better behaviors when you feel the tendrils of anxiety creeping into your consciousness.
Which begs the question… What do YOU do when you feel anxious?
Think about it for a moment and, if you’re feeling inspired, make a list. What do you do?
My hunch is that, like all of us, you have some behaviors that aren’t particularly helpful AND some habits that are pretty awesome. We’ll take a full inventory in a moment.
In the past, I’ve talked about Stephen Covey’s four quadrant model that maps out the urgency and importance of various activities. Quadrant IV stuff is both not urgent and not important. These activities are basically time wasters. Quadrant II activities, on the other hand, are not urgent but are important—these are the things that help us “sharpen our saw” and include nourishing activities like meditation, walks, exercise, time with our family, insert-your-favorites.
I liked to play the game of shifting from Quadrant IV time wasters to Quadrant II soul nourishing behaviors.
These days, I’ve been framing it for myself as moving from “enervating” to “energizing.”
I noticed that, when feeling a little stressed, rather than step back and re-charge, I’d tend to do even MORE intense stuff like hopping online to check in on the biz + social media or whatever.
But that’s the exact opposite of what I needed to recover and properly oscillate. It’s enervating.
Alternatively, I could do one of the infinite number of things that take me out of that addictive dopamine rush of constant (!) never-ending (!) stimulation and actually give my brain a break. My personal favorites are going for a long hike, getting a massage or even just petting the ol’ poochie, Zeus.
Those activities? They’re energizing.
So, the game is simple: Can we swap ENERVATING stress relievers (that actually just keep us on the hamster wheel of stress) with ENERGIZING stress relievers (that truly replenish).
Let’s take your list and split up your potential behaviors so you can easily see how to swap out the enervators with the energizers, shall we?
Enervators → Energizers
______________________ → ______________________
______________________ → ______________________
______________________ → ______________________
______________________ → ______________________
Check in on your behaviors. Make the switch and optimize!
Create a lifestyle that supports calmness. This is infinitely easier said than done. Nevertheless, you must start somewhere.
Here’s a Cool Mantra for You
“Mindfulness means becoming more aware of the contents and activities of your mind and learning to do an excellent job of monitoring, influencing, and controlling those contents and activities. The best-known mindfulness practice is meditation, a discipline that includes breath, body, and mind awareness. Different meditation practices have different goals. Some help you exercise thought control, while others are designed to allow your thoughts free rein. If you would like to begin a meditation practice, you will want to examine a few different methods and styles to see which one feels most appropriate.
A simple mindfulness technique is the use of a mantra. As Stephanie Judy explains, ‘A mantra is one kind of thought pattern you can use to block negative thoughts. Often taught in conjunction with a meditation technique, a mantra is a word or short phrase that is simply repeated quietly, over and over, aloud or in thought. Peace can be a mantra, as well as one or love.’ Is there a word that holds great meaning for you and works like a charm to reduce your experience of anxiety? That word can become a mantra. (For me it is a word that may strike you as odd: it is the word process.)”
First, I *really* like that definition of mindfulness:
“Mindfulnessmeans becoming more aware of the contents and activities of your mind and learning to do an excellent job of monitoring, influencing, and controlling those contents and activities.”
Second, I REALLY REALLY like Eric’s mantra: “Process.”
In fact, I love it so much I just used it as my mantra this morning.
I actually went with “I am fully engaged” on the inhale and “with the process” on the exhale in this AM’s meditation. I did that after some breath work meditation I’m doing from The Oxygen Advantage. 10 minutes of breath work then 10 minutes of mantra work. Gotta optimize my carbon dioxide tolerance while I strengthen my mind. Hah. So fun. :)
How about you?
Do you have a word that “holds great meaning for you and works like a charm to reduce your experience of anxiety?”
Use it as a tool to focus your energy and to shape your mind.
Creating makes us anxious. There are countless reasons for this, so many reasons that if we laid them all out they would stretch from wherever you find yourself to the door of your studio. Open that door anyway.
Cognitive Restructuring: The Coolest Project in Town
“Affirmations are very useful tools that you use to change the way you think. Affirmations are step three in the three-step cognitive restructuring process that I described previously—monitor your thoughts, dispute the ones that don’t serve you, and substitute more affirmative thoughts. They can be used to replace a negative thought, or they can stand alone, in the absence of any particular thought, to help you feel more capable, confident, and calm.
Affirmations are simply positive thoughts that you substitute for any negative or anxiety-producing language you may consciously or unconsciously be using. You affirm that you have no need to worry. You acknowledge your strengths rather than focusing on your weaknesses. You applaud rather than disparage yourself. You affirm that you are equal to the ups and downs of the creative process and the rigors of the creative life. You say yes to life instead of no. You use the power of positive suggestion to block and even extinguish negative thoughts and give yourself an emotional boost.”
When I first read “cognitive restructuring” I immediately thought of our 4-year-old son, Emerson. As a little boy, he loves (!) watching construction guys at work.
Only, he calls it “restruction.”
As his 42-year-old lover of wisdom dad, my favorite “restruction” job (by far) is this one: cognitive restructuring.
As Eric tells us, there are three steps to the process.
First, we need to NOTICE when our thoughts are off. If we simply get swept up in our thoughts and can’t even *see* that we’ve lost it, we can’t change—which is why meditation is so powerful as it helps us cultivate this “observer” perspective. (See Notes on Fully Engaged for a fuller discussion on what Thomas Sterner calls “Thought Awareness Training.”)
Second, we need to dispute those thoughts that don’t serve us. Easiest way to do that? Ask yourself, “Is this thought helpful?” Not, “Is it true?” Whatever you’re telling yourself might be “true” but it’s still not a useful thought to allow to dominate your mind UNLESS it’s helpful. Challenge your negative thoughts. See alternative perspectives that are as true and more empowering.
Third, substitute more affirmative thoughts for those negative ones. We can do that via an affirmations. Short, empowering statements like some of my go-to’s: “I’ve got this!” + “Let’s do this!” Whatever focuses your mind and fires you up. Your favorites?
We’ve talked about this in a bunch of Notes.
Navy SEAL Mark Divine shares one of my favorites. In The Way of the SEAL, he tells us that during Hell Week he would chant to himself, “Looking good, feeling good, I should be in Hollywood.” (Laughing as I type that. Pure awesome.)
Check out the Notes on that book for a *great* process that nearly perfectly mirrors what we’re talking about here. Mark calls it DIRECT and tells us we need to first “Detect” every thought that distracts us from our current task. Then we need to “Interdict” it with a simple command such as “Stop!!” or “No!!” Then we “Redirect” our mind to a new, empowering thought. Then we “Energize” that new thought by getting our whole body to reflect our power. Then we “Communicate” with ourselves via that affirmation. And, finally, we “Train” our mind to be a powerful ally by *constantly* practicing DIRECTing our minds all day every day.
That’s one heck of a restructuring project.
Sign me up!
Get a clear picture in your mind of what it takes to create a real body of work. Such a body of work is not created piecemeal by doing a touch here and a dribble there; it is only accomplished when you pay attention to one project at a time, project after project.
Step 1: You’ve Gotta Really (!) Care. Do You?
“Life is all about caring and attaching. We want to care about our loved ones, our causes, and our creative projects. We want to attach to our current project, pursue it with genuine neuronal devotion, and attack it with a passion that amounts to productive obsession. Yet, we also want to learn how to detach and disidentify, as it is imperative that we not overidentify with and get too attached to any given creative project, since this project may need to be abandoned and that project may need to be turned over to the marketplace players. But first comes caring.”
That’s from a chapter called “The Anxiety of Attaching and Caring” in which Eric teaches us how to step back and detach from our work a bit to best handle the inevitable anxiety.
BUT (big, very important BUT!!!), *first* comes caring. We need to have the courage to really, really, really want to bring something into the world. That burning desire can come with so much anxiety that some people simply choose to give up—to not allow themselves to care so much because the anxiety that level of caring produces overwhelms them.
We can’t do that. We must allow ourselves to be consumed with a healthy, productive obsession to bring our vision to life AND we must bring the same passionate, grounded, consistent intensity to practicing all these tools so we can manage the challenges with grace and power.
So… What do you REALLY want to create? Like, REALLY REALLY REALLY want?
Get clear on that. Welcome the anxiety to the party. And practice these tools like your creative life depends on it, because it does. :)
A time never comes when life is settled and anxiety is banished. This is true for life in general, and triply true for the creative life.
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