Creating without angst
“We found that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety….”
That is one of the conclusions of a study by Teresa M. Amabile at the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School - reported in the article : The 6 Myths Of Creativity - by Bill Breen, Fast Company, December 2004
In the photo above, actress and painter Arianna Richards seems to be finding that kind of joy and pleasure in her work. [More on Painting 2]
Joyce Wycoff [of the InnovationNetwork] writes in her article Are You a Creative Person?, “We create. We are creative beings. We create because it helps us survive and it feels good … it brings us joy. When we don’t create, when we don’t learn and grow, it brings us pain. It deadens us. When this innate urge to create is thwarted or stifled, we turn to unhealthy substitutes such as drugs, alcohol, crime, violence, etc. to lessen the pain.”
Bob Baker, in his article Tall, Dark and Brooding: Do You Have to Be Depressed to Be Creative? [from his very helpful and inspiring Artist Empowerment Blog], notes “There’s a notion that the most influential artists, writers and musicians are often plagued with depression, moodiness and other battles with internal demons.
“Some people (many of them artists themselves) think that this mental friction actually fuels their creativity.” Baker refers to the Fast Company article as strong evidence to the contrary.
A related notion is that actors need to be fraught with emotional turmoil to be effective. But that isn’t necessarily true either, as a number of very talented actors have admitted.
And Bonnie Gillespie, author of the book Self-Management for Actors, points out, “A healthy mindset is perhaps the most important element to a working actor’s ability to self-manage.”
In the Aug 30 2004 issue of the Creativity section of her blog, Dina Mehta quotes depth psychologist Carl Jung:
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
That kind of play can only be hampered by depression, anxiety and other mood disorders - or perhaps even by too much affection for our dark emotions.
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Some related pages :
Depression and creativity
Emotional intelligence
Mental health
Positive psychology
