Think You're Not Creative?
At some point in your life, you may have been told or felt that you weren’t creative, so you stopped trying. We encourage you to dispel that belief, replace it with the notion that everyone is creative and start practicing. If you have already been labeled as creative, know that you can grow your creativity even more, into a Super Power.
It turns out that creativity is a muscle, so it can be strengthened, honed and developed. You can develop more creativity by being in a good mood, training your brain, meditating and practicing.
A Good Mood
Something so simple as being in a good or bad mood have been scientifically shown to affect creativity. Guess which one enhances it? You’re right, the good mood, and let’s explain why. Through studies and brain scans, Northwestern neuroscientist Mark Beeman and Drexel University cognitive psychologist John Kounios concluded:
While a good mood increases creativity, a bad mood amplifies analytical thought. The brain limits our options to the tried and true — the logical, the obvious, the sure thing we know will work.
When we’re in a good mood, we feel safe and secure. We’re able to give the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) more time to pay attention to weak signals; we’re also more willing to take risks. This matters because creativity is always a little dangerous. New ideas generate problems, and they can be flat-out wrong, tricky to implement and threatening to the establishment.
But this also means we pay a double penalty for negativity. A bad mood not only limits the ACC’s ability to detect those weaker signals; it also limits our willingness to act on the signals that we do detect.
Putting yourself in a good mood will spur creativity. You hopefully have your own methods that you can call upon to reset yourself into a good mood. It might be watching funny baby TikToks, telling jokes, or reading poetry. If you need ideas, other ways to get in a good mood include gratitude, mindfulness, exercise and rest.
Train Your Brain
Creativity is a muscle, and there are ways to train it. Just like your body adjusts to a workout in the weight room and you need to introduce variation and different routines to continue building muscle, your brain adjusts too. To stimulate creativity, it is important to disrupt your norm by connecting various parts of your brain, seeking new experiences and getting into nature.
Just like Olympic athletes will train their bodies for peak performance, we can train our brains for peak performance. When you connect your two brain halves, it can stimulate creativity.
Creativity is far too complex to live in one area of the brain. Creativity blossoms when different brain regions talk to each other. The default mode network makes spontaneous connections. When you focus, that activates the executive control network where you can evaluate the ideas and determine if they are any good. Both together will lead to creative ideas.
Art and travel are two great ways to unite the brain. Take in a play, visit a museum, go on a road trip. The language, history and culture activate a variety of networks that help the whole brain work together and creativity is the result.
Nature is another place to train your brain for creativity. Being in nature sparks awareness and fuels imagination. Look at how plants produce and scatter seeds. It’s actually quite amazing. Some seed pods are hard and need to be broken down for the seed to take root. This is the case for castor bean plants. It makes sense since many parts of that plant are poisonous. Other seeds are created for flight like the dandelion seed. Look how easily it is lifted into the wind and spreads into new areas. Being in nature is calming which helps the brain drift to new ideas. Being in nature exposes the mind to incredible shapes, forms and ultimately new ideas.
Meditate for Creativity
Harvard Business Review shared ways to train your brain and meditation made the list. For those of you who don’t like meditation, sorry, but meditation seems to be the magic pill for nearly everything. Want to control your emotions? Meditate. Want to reduce stress? Meditate. Want to increase patience? Meditate. Want to gain a new perspective? Meditate. Want to train your brain? Meditate.
Oprah offers a different view to meditation because the term seems to scare people. She suggests not calling it meditation but rather she calls it sitting in the prayer chair or just being quiet. Calling it something else might make it easier for people to adopt. Whatever you call it, it seems to be a good idea for nearly everything but definitely for creativity. Since meditation is cumulative, starting today is better than starting tomorrow. Just. Start.
Since I’ve run out of Netflix romcoms to watch, I started watching documentaries about the body and the brain. One I highly recommend is about the friendship between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama called Joy: Finding Happiness in Troubled Times. Their laughter and good-natured teasing were surprising at first but then underscored the deepness of their relationship.
Meditation is a daily practice for the Dalai Lama and in some cases his practice lasts 4-5 hours. (Don’t worry. Start with 5 or 10 minutes if you’re a novice.) One segment talked about the effects of meditation on the brain regarding pain. Researchers showed the areas of the brain that light up in response to pain for people who meditate and for people who don’t.
The ones who meditate had an area of their brain light up when they experienced pain.
The people who don’t meditate had pain areas light up in their brain before they experienced pain, while they experienced pain and even after the pain was no longer there.
Draw your own conclusions about the benefits of meditation from that example.
Practice
Practice makes perfect, so the saying goes. 10,000 hours of practice will typically make a person a master of that activity. So it goes with creativity. If you want to be more creative, then practice creativity, and you will get better at it.
How should you practice and what should you do? Find something you want to do every day that speaks to you, whether that is writing, drawing, photography, painting, dancing, singing or creating music. If you normally write, try dancing. If you normally sign, try creating your own song. Push past your first ideas. We often focus on concepts we already know. Try to get to something different.
Research highlighted in the The Mind Explained series provided more scientific ways to increase creativity.
It is said there are very few new ideas. Rather, constantly recombining old ideas will create something new. The more you experience, the more you have to draw from. Whenever brains collide, there is the potential for creative sparks to fly. Creativity is combining things in new ways.
We Are All Creative
Remember, we are all creative beings. Try some of these methods to spur your creativity - get in a good mood, train, meditate and practice.
Then let sleep help nurture the ideas. Let go and lose your sense of self and let your subconscious take over. See how your ideas can grow and flourish.
Thank you for reading.
Wishing you beauty and joy, kindness and compassion, and creative super powers.
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About Super Powers
We break the year down into 12 areas of balance. You will achieve greater growth and life balance by intently focusing on one area at a time. This month’s Super Powers focus is on creative life. Next month is about community life.
See the full year’s schedule.
Our goal with the Super Powers newsletter is to guide you with small, easy steps to improve many areas of your life. Over time these small changes add up to significant growth and improvement. You will be amazed at how far you have come when you look back at all your progress.
Do you need a positive boost each day?
Read a weekly positivism on our website.
Here’s one:
Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. – Coco Chanel
It’s time to start building your Super Powers!
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