creativity as self care
and a balm for burnout
Earlier in the year, I finished Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and the other day someone asked me what I got out of it overall. My eyes looked up at the ceiling while thinking up an answer before saying, “It showed me that creativity shouldn’t be optional like it’s often perceived and that it’s important for well-being.”
Even though art therapy has been around for years, I once shrugged it off as a feeble modality. But during The Artist’s Way, I had this sense that this was something fundamental I’d lost connection to. I don’t think it’s needed in therapy rooms as much as in our day-to-day life to keep that more ‘yin’ side of the brain active.
Similar to this idea of reconnecting with nature—which Atmos Editor Willow Defebaugh and Seth Hughes communicate so eloquently—I feel that there’s a smaller, slightly adjacent groundswell of recognition happening for our lost connection to creativity.
Maybe it resurfaced with Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic in 2015, picking up where Julia Cameron left off in the ’90s—followed by Rick Ruben’s recent The Creative Act in 2023. I came across a creative scientist the other day on TikTok who shares the connections she made during her PhD between creativity and well-being. Two other books on my “to-read” list I recently became aware of are from a scientist whose work I adore, Dr. Ellen Langer who wrote On Becoming an Artist and Alain de Botton’s Art as Therapy. But these ideas haven’t yet captured the mainstream imagination.
Could it be, that by steeping for so long in ideals of productivity, most of us have lost our connection—not only to nature—but to our inherent creative nature? It’s a part of us that, as Flow State theory suggests, can’t be accessed in the same way we approach most things. You can’t will yourself into it with hard work. You can only create the conditions for creative flow to visit you. As Gilbert describes; writing is a routine you partake in with hope, but no guarantee that creative flow will pay a visit.
This is inconvenient for a culture that loves a clear financial forecast because it takes time, space, rest and experimentation to incubate creative ideas. When they do arrive, they don’t guarantee success. This is why we have so many live-action re-runs of Disney movies. Ironically, Walt Disney famously said, “We never do the same thing twice around here, we’re always opening up new doors.” The world is hungry for new material, judging by the millions of dislikes the Snow White trailer received on YouTube.
As I worked through the 12-week artistic pilgrimage, I felt like I was receiving a permission slip from Julia to a) view my creative side as important and b) prioritise it in my daily life again, whatever that looks like. I learnt that creativity is more of a body thing than a mind thing. It works best when we loosen the limitations of logic. In the creative realm, clocks can melt off trees and we can invent words like “thneed.” Its rule-free nature is one reason why creativity is so therapeutic.
My approach to creativity has been haphazard and non-linear. There’s no cohesive body of work or agenda for my creative time. Rather, it’s just a place I visit, similar to my yoga mat. An alternate paradigm, where the tendency to control and hustle aren’t relevant and where play and process are more important than productivity, exploration is more effective than expectation and curiosity leads to better results than control.
Each time I hang out in that space, I feel I become less of the things that turn me into a productivity machine and more of the things that allow me to become a channel for creativity to move freely. It asks for an entirely different approach to life and in this way, it’s been an amazing teacher with an almost Taoistic attitude. The more I flex my creative muscle, the more well-rounded I become in all areas of life, including my work.
My only aim is to create more stuff more often. I don’t make things for hours on end. I steal whatever time I have. Sometimes it’s a scrappy 5-minute poem in the morning or 20 minutes spent sketching something before bed.
These small creative moments are grounding and I’m so grateful to Julia Cameron for showing me how important it is to prioritise them. Emerging science on nervous system regulation is now recognising various forms of artistic expression as toning for the vagus nerve. Science aside, creative play feels like time well spent and a much-needed guide on how to slow down and reconnect.
I’ll leave this essay with a little visual tour of some of the creative play I’ve been up to since I did The Artist’s Way earlier in the year
Morning poetry with coffee
Wire weaving
Mosaic made from op shop plates
Messy oil pastel drawings on the couch
Making childhood favourite foods
Painting splotches in my art diary
Tinkering with riffs + lyrics on the guitar
Crochet a patch for a hole in my jeans
