You can't hack your creative growth
CreativeRx: Just like you can't plan a breakthrough - because our most creatively healthy selves don't work on a schedule.
CreativeRx is your dose of creative thinking - no matter if you’re an artist or not. Every week Creative Health Scientist, Katina Bajaj, shares how to incorporate our most essential survival skills - play, wonder and critical thinking - into everyday life.
CREATIVITY COMES IN SEASONS - YOU CAN’T RUSH WHICH ONE YOU’RE IN 🍓
Everything about our Creative Health goes against what modern life values. But, the biggest offender, in my view, is the speed and volume with which we’re expected to produce.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an active artist or someone who feels completely detached from their creativity - we are all on a never-ending hamster wheel of more. More ideas. Faster responses. Heck, even better vacations. But that mode of operating goes in direct contrast to everything that makes us creatively healthy.
Here’s why: Biologically, emotionally and psychologically, you can’t hack your way into creative growth.
We all know this - inspiration doesn’t come on a timeline. Breakthroughs don’t happen on a schedule. Just because you put “writing time” onto your calendar, doesn’t mean that you’re going to produce an essay.
But - this is the part I don’t want you to miss - that doesn’t mean our Creative Health doesn’t require discipline. Discipline and output are two very different things.
And, I think confusing the two is one of the most damaging things we’ve done to our creative lives.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea, because I’ve been in a different type of creative season myself lately. One that actually requires outward expression, visibility, and output - giving a TED talk, finishing a book proposal, connecting with you all weekly.
On the outside this looks like “peak” creativity. But on the inside, I’ve felt quite removed from so many conditions that allow my Creative Health to thrive: Incubation time. Savoring beauty. The freedom to creatively struggle without a deadline attached.
And coming back to myself after that sprint, I’ve been seeing something about creative discipline more clearly than all my years of studying it. It looks nothing like we’ve been taught.
Real creative discipline - the kind in service of your Creative Health - means showing up for the full spectrum of what creativity actually requires. Not just the expressing, but also the incubating. Noticing. Struggling. Living.
At Daydreamers, we call this creating in “seasons,” because some are generative - where you’re putting things into the world. But others are receptive - when you’re absorbing, wandering and restoring. Others are transformative as all your data points reorganize underneath the surface, even if it feels like nothing is visibly happening.
Every single one of these “count.” And each one of them strengthens a different component of our Creative Health.
Redefining discipline, for our creativity anyway, means that we don’t need to force ourselves into a new season. It’s about staying committed to your Creative Health in all of them.
Next week’s Field Guide goes deep on exactly this - what the science actually tells us about creative discipline, why it looks so different than the kind productivity culture forces onto us, and how to stay committed to your Creative Health no matter what season you’re in.
I’m curious: What creative season do you feel like you’re in right now? 🧠👇🏽
From my brain to yours,
Katina, Creative Health Scientist & Daydreamers’ Co-founder + Chief Science Officer
Tell me what you think: Did this resonate? Comment below or hit reply - I read every response 🫶🏽
A look back at the archives - The Science Behind Creative Breakthroughs: A few months ago I mapped out the science and process behind generating “creative breakthroughs” - and it looks a lot different than we think. Much of it happens during the incubation period, i.e. what looks a lot like “doing nothing.” If you want to dig into the neuroscience behind creative thinking, highly recommend.
I’ve been obsessed with watching Olivia Rodrigo talk about her creative process: I absolutely love the depth she got into in this podcast episode, but every time I hear her talk about the journey to writing her latest album, it is so aligned with Creative Health. To me, her most recent songs reflect the dedication to creating in seasons. She definitely took the anti-optimization path (hello the cure 🎶)
A real look at what producing culture can do to our mental health: I read Burn Rate by Andy Dunn a few years ago when we were in the early days of building Daydreamers, and I recently picked it back up with a completely different perspective. I think Andy’s story illustrates what happens when we turn the hustle dial up to ten (twenty?). It’s an important cultural conversation that I think is just at the earliest stages - what does speed and our obsession with more really cost us?
The big question this month: We’ve went through some really big Creative Health concepts in our Field Guides over the past few months - everything from neuroaesthetics to critical thinking to creativity’s hand-brain connection. We’ve set a strong foundation, but I’m now pulling back and asking myself - what does it mean to live a creatively healthy life? And, what gets in the way of that?
Updates: My TED talk is coming out next week - eek!! Stay tuned! 🤓
What’s coming next: Speaking of not producing and staying true to creative seasons - I put our Lecture Series on hold for a minute. But, it will be coming very soon to our private Creative Health community. The invite email will only go to paid subscribers, so make sure you’re in the loop.
This helped surface something tangential to describe where I am (I mean, "completely detached from [my] creativity" was pretty on the nose). It's a seasonal, but also an agricultural analogy, maybe a combination of the "receptive" and the "transformational; I'll now be describing my career break as a "fallow year"— letting the soil recuperate for whatever comes next
The awareness that it comes in seasons (and sometimes, for me at least, short spurts) was life-changing for me, because it allowed me to embrace it more fully when it comes and do the same for others. I will rearrange my calendar when I'm having a creative burst, knowing it won't last forever. And since realizing this, I also became more patient with others when I see they're in the middle of a creative season, lowering my expectations of the day-to-day, allowing them to focus on the creating.