Impactful Stress: Creativity under Duress

We always talk about how healing, calming, centering, beautiful, creativity can be as an outlet, a tool, a practice. However, we tend to shy away from engaging in discourse about the very real way that being under duress, chronic stress, acute panic, can stifle, stopper, and completely shut down every creative impulse. Today, or rather, as a backlog from January, I’d like to discuss the merits of creativity as a way to help alleviate and process stress, as well as the very real way being under duress can kill creativity in our lives, and how to find our way back to it. 

An Outlet for Stress

Creativity of any and all kinds have always been outlets for stress in all its forms; quite all encompassing. Whether it be writing fiction or in a journal, painting, colouring inside or outside of the lines, cooking to calm the nerves, baking to indulge in joy, dancing the blues away, or a myriad of other activities, creativity can be both a channel for stress to work its way out of the body and a source of solace to reinvigorate a sense of joy and let go of the worry of the day. It is important to note that utilizing creativity as an outlet for stress is not the same as engaging in escapism; though it may have its place among daily stressors, using anything, including creativity as a long term escapist strategy is not a healthy coping mechanism for stress. 

• Creative Processing - Creativity can be a useful tool in helping us process stress in our daily lives. At times it may be used as a form of therapy, a vessel of exp[loration, a mirror to reflect our truth, or simply, a way to navigate whatever we find ourselves going through. Engaging with our stress though creative avenues can bring clarity to our situation. It can also afford us some distance from it, offering a little breathing room in which we might process the stress more effectively. 

• Creative Play - Different from processing, creative play is a short term strategy mimicking escapism, Sometimes stepping away from stressors, leaving it at the door of our practice, and turning our focus outward to a pleasurable pursuit, with the intent to delight in this moment of joy is enough to allow our minds to rest and let go of the stress we’ve collected throughout the day. Play does not require we channel that stress, or use our creativity as a tool to safely examine and fetter out solutions to the tangled ball of stress and anxiety we’ve built up. 

A Symptom of Duress

Whether you are under duress from outside pressures, sources, yourself, or your creativity is being threatened in some way, duress is not something we simply cope with alone. Being under chronic stress or more severe duress is significant and impacts all aspects of one’s well being. Creativity is one such piece to our well being practices that I find in my own life is one of the first areas to come under siege. It isn’t something that happens bit by bit, it’s a complete and total loss, a shutdown of essential creative function. Simply put, being under duress in any way puts one into a survival mode. Survival mode leaves no room for joys like creativity, however essential it may feel to us, it does not contribute to our ability to fight, flee, or survive in the most basic of ways, thus creativity ceases.

• Creative Hiatus - Often this looks like a cessation of creation. It abruptly ends our creative output momentum and seals off the well of creative motivation and inspiration. It is not a single missed session or a week of low output; it is weeks, months, years of hiatus, of not knowing if it will resume or what form it may take if it resumes. It is imperative that we give ourselves what grace we can if we feel this hiatus as a failure, if we feel it at all. Know that you will come back to it one day when the danger, the fatigue, the duress itself has passed. 

• Creative Blindspot - Not only does a hiatus take place, but often it isn't even felt. Creativity that was once so essential to our very being doesn’t become an afterthought, it ceases to exist as an experience in our lives. It goes numb. Our capacity to create is severely impacted by duress because creating is hopeful, and when under duress or chronic stress, that goes away. 

Journeying Home

Eventually, whether through healing or the passing of a storm we find our way back to our creative home; that nest of life and love we so carefully curated before the chaos. We need to be prepared for our creative life, practice, pursuit, to look different - perhaps indefinitely. We may need to build up tolerance again, we may need to change the way we engage with it, or we may jump back in full force without looking back. However it happens we will always journey home to and through our creativity. 

• Creative Calling - We are creatives because we feel the call to create, to make, to do with our own two hands. That calling will always be there, we just need to be in a condition to hear it and respond to it again. It is a pull we feel in our bones, it lives in our chests. Our calling to create is powerful and it knows how to heal, how to care, how to soothe, how to give us back to ourselves and allow us to transform. It can bring us peace, and so it calls to us. 

• Creative Rediscovery - Much like creative play, rediscovery is joyful and fun and hopefully is taken on with a sense of graceful ease. We need to give ourselves permission to explore again, to get back into the groove, or carve a new path forward in our creative journey. Creativity as we know is always evolving in and with our lives. Rediscovery after time away creates space to experiment’ a natural pushing of the comfort zone, a redefining of what our creativity gets to be. 

What is your experience with creativity and stress or upheaval in your life?