Sage Bray Varon

I’ve long been a proponent of a “feeling well = working well” mindset as part of a fulfilling and balanced creative life. Your health supports not only getting work done but feeling motivated and fulfilled by the work you do. That includes mental as well as physical health.

Taking care of my health as part of a well-balanced creative life first came up, for me, when I became strangely sick in 2008. I was working as a full-time artist and then, rather suddenly, started having issues with brain fog, dyslexia, hives, eczema, insulin resistance, abdominal pain, all kinds of allergies, and fainting, not to mention that I started sleeping 12 to 16 hours a day. It took two years to figure out what was going on with me because it wasn’t just one thing.

After seeing gastrointestinal, heart, metabolic, and sleep specialists, it was, unexpectedly, an allergist who figured it out. I was suffering from environmental toxin poisoning. In other words, I was being exposed to too many toxins through my art materials, personal products, medication, the city air, etc. and had a system that didn’t detox well which resulted in an unsustainable body burden, also referred to, in this case, as an excessive toxic load.

Body burden is the key phrase there. The term refers to how much our body is, overall, dealing with at any given time. This encompasses not just toxins but stress, diet, emotions, injuries, disease, and physical exertion. You could be dealing with minor issues in each of these areas, but collectively it could be just too much resulting in a strange array of symptoms, depression, exhaustion, or other catchall diagnoses.

The concept of lots of little issues overburdening our system is also true when it comes to our mental system. Just think of how many things you mentally juggle each day. Or each hour. If you have multiple things going on without respite, you may be draining your mind of necessary creative energy, not to mention that it adds to stress and, therefore, your body burden as well.

Some of the biggest creativity energy drainers are outside problems and tasks. Creativity itself is nothing if not problem-solving. So, if you’re spending a lot of time solving, or attempting to solve, other issues, your batteries might be depleted by the time you sit down to do your own creative work.

Sometimes our creative space is where we escape our problems or we use our creative work to delay having to deal with them. That’s not always a bad thing. Giving yourself a mental break from a difficult problem allows your mind to work on it in the background, which can help you solve it later. However, if you have too many unresolved problems hanging over you, even if they’re all small things, you may find yourself stumped creatively. With your brain still be working on those unresolved problems, you may have little energy left to fire up the imagination.

So, before you sit down to have a creative session, you may want to see what problems or tasks you can resolve (especially the ones you dread — getting those done will make you feel lighter) or, find ways to leave them outside the creative space:

• Make a point of completing/resolving any pressing tasks or problems. If you can’t do this because they will eat up too much of your day, at least schedule a time to do it. Knowing when they will get done will help reduce your anxiety and dread and allow you to let go of them for the moment.
• If you’re dealing with something that you haven’t figured out yet, write it down on paper. Not electronically, unless you can print it out. Putting things down on paper creates a tangible version, something you can put away and retrieve later. And you do exactly that, putting it somewhere safe, knowing you can get back to it when you have the time to focus on it. Then, most likely, your mind will set it aside as well, leaving you mental room and energy to create.
• Meditate, specifically focusing on clearing your mind of everything but the creative tasks ahead.
• Delegate. If there’s anyone else that can take care of the problem or task for you, hand it off. I know it’s not often possible, but I think you might surprise yourself at just how many times you can come up with a way to take it off your plate and get to your creative work.

There is a caveat to these things that you need to keep in mind — don’t use dealing with other tasks or problems as an excuse to keep you from creating., Yes, creative work is better done when other things are not hanging over your head, but you want to be sure that they aren’t used as a sneaky method of procrastination. That’s where writing things down and delegating can really come in handy.

So, next time you’re feeling stumped or your work seems lackluster, consider whether there are outside problems or tasks that are keeping you from being completely present in your work and open to your imagination. This is not always going to be the issue but, when it is, we are often unaware of it so it’s definitely worth a little contemplation.

Over the next few posts, I’ll talk more about ways to deal with feeling less creative or less motivated than you believe you should be. With the distraction of the holidays and what is, for most of us, the busiest time of the year coming up, this could be an important subject for many of us. I’ll have tips, tricks, and general advice on mental burden, body burden, and energy drains with some really simple things that can be done in a matter of minutes to give you a needed creative pick me up. So, keep an eye out for these posts.

Speaking of being busy… I was going to post just every other week through the end of the year because of my own packed schedule these next two months. However, I am quite excited about this series of posts so I’m going to try to do it every week. If I miss one, which I’ve been doing about once a month for various reasons, just know the next one will come the week after.

Ok, now… off to our creative corners, all of us. And remember to make space in your life and your mind for your creative genius to come out and flourish!

 

Photo by Walid Ahmad