God must have been *really* bored one day…

[ornoth]

Here’s the assertion: your brain wants a rough balance of activity and rest.

If your brain has to work really hard most of the time, it has a tendency to seek out quietude when it can. If you’ve ever worked in a high stress position, you know how precious “down time” can be. On the other hand, if your brain doesn’t get enough exercise, perhaps it becomes restless. Once you reach a certain level of boredom, you start looking around for things to occupy your mind.

Let’s start with that latter state. I’m going to kick around the idea that “creativity” (in general) may be a symptom of your brain looking for things to occupy it. If you have the spare mental energy to noodle on things and wonder about this or that, you’re more likely to produce stuff we’d call “creative” than if your brain is overwhelmed and working hard all day. No?

The reason why I say this is because I think that the converse explains some things I’ve seen in myself. When I’m slammed at work and putting in twelve-hour days, the last thing I can imagine is sitting down and writing a story or designing a web site, even when I happen to find myself with ample time on my hands. But those are exactly the things that motivate and excite me when I’m not challenged at work and there are few demands on my limited attention.

Is “creativity” a symptom of your brain searching for something interesting to do? Does intense, focused work sap your brain of the desire or the impetus to create? I’m curious about others’ experience.

I’ve struggled in recent years to justify my self-perception that I’m a creative person. I rarely find time these days to write fiction, take pictures, or design web pages, and when I do… I keep finding myself stymied by a complete lack of creative energy or inspiration.

Should I attribute that to creative burnout from a very stressful career? Or is it just that I have become less creative with age? Or should I resign myself to the idea that I’ve never been a very creative person, since even my prior successes were mostly derivative in nature?

Whatever the cause, these days my brain seems to be less willing to jump into creative pursuits, but very attracted to just turning off the internal discourse and letting my mind just rest.

Comments

[dafyddcyhoeddwr.livejournal.com]

Is “creativity” a symptom of your brain searching for something interesting to do? Does intense, focused work sap your brain of the desire or the impetus to create? I’m curious about others’ experience.

You've heard this from me before, so this is really for the others reading your LJ.

I have absolutely experienced exactly the thing you're describing, though I personally wouldn't attach exactly your explanation to it. Then again, perhaps my expression of the phenomonon is simply another way to state the same thing.

Back at the beginning of the millennium, I had a *huge* project I was completely involved in at work. Two years of nearly constant work, iterations of program specs, mock-ups, revisions to specs, programming, revisions to programs, moving on to the next portion of the project, repeat again and again. During that time, my productivity on other creative fronts, writing most especially, suffered greatly. It didn't vanish, but it diminished. The explanation I put to it was simply that my creative reserves were being used for my programming project, and there wasn't anything left over for writing, or needlework, or whatever.

I've seen the same at other times, recently at the end of this past year when I had another project (a subset of the huge project from earlier, which I still support) occupying my brain, and I found myself coming home and playing computer games even though I knew I had stories that needed to be written, and even had the ideas for what they would be.

So, whether creativity is a function of an idle brain, or the mind has a limited reserve of creativity that can be occupied by one thing to the detriment of another, I think that the phenomonon is a real one. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're becoming less creative ... after all, I bounced back rather well after both work projects stopped plugging up my brain with code (expect another story, probably on Monday!).

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess the proof of the hypothesis would be testing it by putting myself into a non-stressful situation. My experience of that during my unemployment was that it really didn't help much, but that could have been exacerbated by all the work I was doing in graphic design school at the time.

Dunno. I just thought I'd share the idea that "creativity" might just be an expression of one's brain's nervous energy. I don't think it's entirely accurate, but it was an interesting idea.

Thanks for the response!

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

I don't see exactly that effect. When I'm in crunch, even if it's fairly intense, I'm still able to write. If it also has emotional stress such as abusive relationships with coworkers or worries about layoffs at the end of the crunch, I have to give myself a break from writing.

The second kind of stress is what I turn to SCA fighting or (when we were working together) Aikido to deal with.

Do you ever get too stressed to read for fun?

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Huh. You're very structured about how you write, though, aren't you, with word-count goals and such? What's it like to come home at 11pm for the third night in a row and face the keyboard? What inspires you to undertake that additional effort of writing, when your mind and body just want to shut down after a stressful week? And why do I find it so much easier to put hands to keys to write LJ posts than fiction?

Re reading for fun: depends on what you mean by "fun". I don't think I read for "fun" much. When I read before bed, it's 99% nonfiction; purpose-driven stuff like photography technique or blackjack guides or Buddhist stuff. 99% of my fiction reading is occupied by the stories I have to crit for DargonZine, which is usually more work than pleasure, believe me, especially when you're reading the seventh draft of an amateurish story. In fact, last night I finished the only real non-Dargon fiction I've read in over a year. The only fiction I read for pleasure: Pratchett, sadly.

Thanks for the thotz!

[iniren.livejournal.com]

Hm. I definitely know what you're talking about, though I find your conclusions kind of... odd. I don't think creativity is facilitated by idleness. In fact, my personal experience is just the opposite!

I would say, that creativity thrives best in a state of relaxes balance. Just enough mental activity to keep you interested (and this level is different for everybody, of course). But also not enough to keep you so stressed that you're basically, to use an ornyism, a waste product.

Over the past several years, I've had a huge creative boom, which has been really great. For me, much of the process of "filling the creativity well" I think comes from suspending judgement very early on in the process. I think that's just a skill, like so many others, to practice and learn. I really enjoy the process of brainstorming, and will often come up with random fun ideas both for my coaching practice and for my artwork and jewelry at odd times. I've found it helpful to just jot things down, and then re-read them when I have the time and emotional space to act on them.

For you, I think giving yourself permission to some some judgement-free brainstorming would be a huge bonus for enhancing creativity. Then, of course, comes the discipline of actually doing something, but that process is a little different.

Curious to see what you think about this.

[somervillian.livejournal.com]

I think momentum is a key concept for me related to this topic. I think that creativity begets more creativity. Same with idleness, stress, etc. As iniren pointed out, you need a balanced mind (and a rested mind). Often the stressful lifestyle doesn't provide that.

On the few occasions where I've felt my work really challenged me creatively, I've found lots of energy for other creative pursuits.

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I hadn't really thought of that, but perhaps it makes sense. I think I had some of that momentum during art school. And I think my writing career has also been of that streaky nature. I'll think about that one some more.

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Well, that's why I posted it. If I were just whining about not having the time or energy, that wouldn't be a very interesting post. But the idea that creativity is just your brain's expression of "nervous energy" is at least thoughtful, if not exactly the formula for world peace.

I think the word "relaxed" is key in your "relaxed balance" statement. Perhaps that's the part I'm missing. Although I'm a very laid-back person, I'm not very "relaxed" when it comes to writing or any art, because I'm so judgmental about it, always comparing myself.

Perhaps that's part of the problem. I have a well-educated, critic's eye, but I don't have the skill to create something that pleases that eye, to execute a project to the rules that I know chapter and verse as an observer.

Certainly the advice to suspend judgment is valid, and something I hear over and over again. But I don't think that's my only issue. The lifestyle certainly doesn't help, and that's what I'm struggling with now more than anything, but it's also just the way my brain works. I can't make up a bedtime story on the spot. My creativity is always something produced by struggling through a tortuous process. Unless it's a journal entry spurred by idle thoughts, or my Ornyesque brand of preformance art that is mostly just the result of random neurons firing.

Dunno. But thanks for contributing to the thread!

[hyzathra.livejournal.com]

If you feel weak and drained and exhausted all the time, unmotivated to engage in imaginative pursuits, then perhaps you suffer from the bite of the Creativity Vampire!

But really, I'd say that if you had a creative project that you were truly excited or passionate about, you'd look forward to coming home and working on it, even a little bit. I would submit that you're just as creative as you always were, but that the well of your imagination has run dry. You must refresh it with the blood of tyrants and patriots ... or is that the Tree of Liberty? :-)

Anyway, if you feel off-track, then seek out new sources of inspiration. Actively keep your mind open for ideas. It's much easier to be creative if you're doing something you want to, less so if you have to!

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I've got a couple stories that I'd dearly love to see written, but it just doesn't happen. But then the same is true of photography, or a book project (not writing) I'm working on, or redesigns of the DZ or Ornoth web sites... There's a lot of stuff that I really want to do, but the energy doesn't come. I'm by nature a laid-back, restful person, I think, and I don't seem to get enough of that, with my insanely stressful career, so the personal life kind of never materializes. (And, ironically, it's the career that gives me access to the technical and creative skills and tools I need to so many of those things.)

Maybe I just need to wait for retirement or something. Or give up cycling. Humph.