Episode 48 of the Creative Work Hour podcast explores strategies for staying creative when your mind or body won't cooperate. Insights from the crew include distraction therapy, creative rituals, and embracing mental breaks.

Greg
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Creative Work Hour podcast. Today is April the 12th, 2025. Where's the time going? I don't know. Today is episode 48. And in the room today we have Bubba, we have myself, we have Alessandra, we've got Andy, Ellie, Adrian and Shadows Pub. And today's question for the crew is, how do you manage to stay creative when your mind or body won't cooperate? And this is a great topic. Alessandro, we were talking about this briefly before today's recording. And yeah, what a great idea. What a great topic, right?

Alessandra
Well, I think that it is because if you've got a creative bone in your body, you've had this delusion of grandeur. Picture this. I'm a great fill-in-the-blank novelist, musician, and composer. If only I had an idyllic cabin in the mountains. to go and let my, get these kids away from me, get these partners away from me, get these so-called friends away from me, get these chores away from me, let me have this idyllic place, and I am going to be in creative nirvana or some such crazy talk like that. So I was lucky enough from the end of, well, the beginning of February all the way through March to have a couple of months just like that.

Alessandra
And how did that go? Oh, it was great! Until I made myself freaking crazy. Like, because I didn't have the privilege to blame my state on anything or anybody, it was just me. I rode myself so hard right past the boundary that's called mentally healthy into mentally, well, not so. And I was literally making myself mentally sick. because I got what I thought that I wanted, the lack of interference from other human beings. And actually what that took with it was my checks and balances. Nobody looked me in the eye and went, you're kind of going off crazier than usual.

Alessandra
02:09 - 02:41
So yeah, I've spent the last couple of weeks with Bubba over here, just kind of coming back to myself and realizing that perfect is not better. Perfect for me, can actually be outright dangerous. I was just making myself mentally ill, and it could have just been as easy as becoming physically ill, because the same kind of thoughts and behaviors can take to your body or your mind. So that begs the question, doesn't it, Greg? What do you have for us today?

Greg
For me, you know, when your mind and body won't cooperate, when you have chronic pain, Sometimes it can be hard to stay motivated and you can forget what you set out to do. Pain can rob your pleasure, it can rob your life if you let it. But you know, trying to stay creative when you've got pain is paramount. Distraction therapy is a wonderful thing. If you can distract yourself in some way, it's very healthy for you. Trying to be kind and do acts of kindness. A lot of science that backs that up. You can lay down new neural pathways.

Greg
Oxytocin is released, which is the feel-good hormone when you're kind to people. So I try to distract myself a lot. and stay creative but there's those days where your body doesn't want to cooperate or your mind and they can play into one another but enough about me what do you guys think how do you guys stay creative if your mind and body doesn't want you to i'll go to andy andy what do you got for us

Andy
Well, I'm lucky enough to have a little house I can go to every other week. This is the house I'm in now. To be creative and spend my time as I wish, without interference, if I want. All right, I can have dogs here and I can have grandchildren and my daughter over sometimes. They own the house that way, so it's a good thing. I'm lucky enough to have little of that situation because my creative mind is constantly spinning, you know, like this. So I need to stop at times. And I do that when I'm on the other island with my wife. I try to wind down, paint a little, and go for walks and hang with the kittens and go to fire practice and, you know, have a weekly latte with my wife. So that's my point of view here. Over to Ellie, maybe.

Ellie
Thanks, Andy. The thing for me when it comes to creativity is getting really clear the difference between creative opportunity and when I have to get something done. Because the second that I start to mix those and I start trying to make my creativity happen, then I'm not creative anymore and I'm actually annoyed with it. And so by not telling myself I have to do something, and actually tracking what the impulse is because sometimes the creative impulse is more about taking something in and reading something. Other times it's about self-expression or even just about seeing something outside and that's beautiful.

Ellie
But by tracking what my impulses are and following those, I can really get the most out of my creativity. And then knowing when I must do something and recognizing that's not truly meant to be a creative opportunity. That is meant to be something else. And in that way, I don't start resenting having to be creative because I keep them very clear and separate.

Adrienne
Adrienne?  Oh, thank you. I was thinking about this, this question, and I have a problem with my high anxiety that I have a lot going up here. Especially if I'm pacing, I'll pace like I'll sit like 20,000 steps because I'll pace so much, but I can't actually focus to even be creative. So some of the ways that I help with that, and these are not mine alone. These are like with my therapist and this book called Seeing Up Your Mental Mess, which is like a really good book. I've developed three different kinds of ways that I can help myself with this.

Adrienne
One is just zoning out. So I just look at the computer, off somewhere else, anywhere, and just zone out for like five, 10 minutes. Don't think about anything. Just kind of be in a daze. And then that helps me to kind of clear out the mind. So it's not so cluttered inside my mind. That's helpful. Another that's helpful for me is to tidy up the space that I want to do creative work. So what I do is I tidy it up. And then I started laying out all my stuff that I wanted to work on.

Adrienne
So I'll have my markers and I'll have all my stuff and I will place it on the table. So now I've created the space. I like set a good intention with it. And then it's like, okay, now this is like, you know, when you're a kid, right? This is what they did in elementary school. They clean up the space and then you set down your paints and you get yourself ready. and then you knew that this was like your entire space. And the third one is, I actually got it from my therapist, which is really cool, is I draw a circle on a piece of paper and you just spend time by yourself.

Adrienne
You can do a little timer for like two to five minutes and you just write all the nonsense that's in your head. You just get it all on paper and only inside this circle. So then once you're done with the circle, I throw it away and it's gone. And that really does help. Those are like ones that I think have really, really helped me because I, my anxiety is so high sometimes and my brain is like nonstop that I can't even focus on anything. Like it's just, I feel like there's just so much pressure and so much going on in between there.

Adrienne
And those are kind of the ways that helps me to kind of get it out of my, of my mental head, my mental mental madness, as we can say.

Greg
Thank you, Adrian. Shadows, how do you manage to stay creative if your mind and body won't cooperate? How about yourself?

Shadows Pub
Short answer is I don't. Several years ago, I had a situation where I had bronchitis that had my lungs full of fluid. Doctor says, go home and lay down. And I'm like, yeah, screw you. I'm going home and do some work on the computer. And I soon learned that no, I was going to have to lay down before I fell down because I damn near fell down. And it kind of taught me that when the mind and body says stop, it's a whole lot quicker to stop, take the break, and then resume. So I don't.

Shadows Pub
If mind and body says you're not being creative, then I F off and do something else.

Greg
Fair comment. Thank you, Shadows. Bubba, how about you? What are your thoughts? 

Bubba
Well, one of my creative challenges is that I have too many squirrels in my squirrel cage. And so it's hard to keep up with them all. It's hard to feel like I'm making progress creatively on all these interests that I have. And so it's one of the things that I often used to beat myself up with because the sort of the Western watchers focus just pick one, like, don't try to do all these things, pick one and do that really hard all the time. And, you know, that doesn't that doesn't work for me. And especially so if I'm having a bad mental or physical day, the best way out for me is to just wait and see which of those squirrels decides to be the muse of the day.

Bubba
I mean, there's always, there's almost always a way out. Like there are some bad days when just finding, choosing, crafting a gift to send to someone because I know they need it or they might find it funny and it would, you know, make their day. That could be the start of a creative process that I just find myself doing. And so that comes out of somewhere Whereas if I had said I'm going to write for an hour and my brain is like, no, you're not. But I may chase the gift squirrel all over the house and be perfectly happy and creative doing that.

Bubba
And maybe that could be a gateway creative act to something else. But usually, the squirrel I need is the

Greg
squirrel I get when I'm having rough days. Thank you, Devin. You know, this is absolutely some great conversation. You know, and something Ellie said earlier that kind of made a light bulb go off inside my head, I don't remember exactly what it was, but what I got from it is when you can't be creative, consume something. And I don't mean mindless consumption, right? But creativity could be watching something, it could be watching a video, it could be drawing, it could be doing that circle that Adrian said, any one of those things, because you can't start the engine if there's no gas in the tank, right?

Greg
got to have some fuel and that consumption could be the fuel that you need to get you to the next level and like Devin said which one is gonna you know which we're all gonna win but Alessandra some great conversation.

Alessandra
Oh my gosh I know I probably say this too often but I think this is my favorite episode because each person has given something that is so valuable to me that I'm over here like, I need another suitcase so I can pack this and take it with me. But let's just listen to the question again. Read us the question one more time, Greg, because I have just something that I'd like to leave everyone with, with this question.

Greg
Today's question was, how do you manage to stay creative when your mind or body won't cooperate?

Alessandra
So what if we just consider for a moment, maybe it's not the mind and the body's job to cooperate. What if the mind and the body's job is to inform? Then, Greg, how do we finish? What time is it, Greg?

Greg
It's that time again. You've wasted some perfectly good time listening to the Creative Work Hour podcast when you could have been doing something else but you didn't. How about you? How do you manage to stay creative when your mind and body won't cooperate? Let us know because we would love to hear your thoughts. If there's a question you would like the team to discuss, the crew of the Creative Work Hour podcast, let us know. Visit our website creativeworkhour.com and come back next week.

Thank you.