Emotional Health & Creative People

Annette Bening notes: "When you're a creative person, whatever your field — writing or painting or singing, acting — there's always a certain amount of insecurity or uncertainty or there's a search going on and, in a way, that never really stops."

The Creative Mind Newspaper -- other articles include: Caffeine & anxiety; Deal With Overwhelm; Drumming & Brainwaves...

"What happens is so many people walk around triggered all day long because we carry these deep-rooted wounds from childhood that we’ve carried with us forever.

"And we walk around and we’re triggered all day long, and we have no idea. So we just think that’s who we are. We just think that we’re just a pain in the ass or we’re just upset all the time."

Gabrielle Bernstein is author of Judgment Detox.

Creative expression can transform our painful reactions to situations, providing a renewed identity and a way to give voice to difficult feelings.

Creative expression can transform our painful reactions to traumatic or difficult experiences, providing a way to give voice to painful feelings.

How can creative expression help us deal with anxiety, depression and other difficult or disrupting emotions?

The Social-Emotional ACES Home Video Program is designed to help creative, intense, sensitive people be skilled experts in the Social-Emotional arena.

As highly sensitive people, we may experience many positive aspects of the trait, but we can also be more reactive and vulnerable to stress and anxiety... that can impact our lives and creative expression.

Mental health issues affect almost I in 5 people each year. Being a creative person can increase our vulnerability to emotional challenges like anxiety.

Anyone can feel overwhelmed from too many demands and challenges, but creative and highly sensitive people may be especially vulnerable.

Judith Orloff, M.D. is a psychiatrist, UCLA professor, and leads workshops on intuition, energy, and medicine.

In her book Emotional Freedom, she writes: "For mild to moderate depression, I often suggest 5-HTP, a natural precursor to serotonin...Another treatment is St. John's wort..."

Follow link to page about ProVanax, which contains both.

Competitions and awards can help encourage developing our talents – but there can also be a dark side to comparing ourselves with others.

How does our emotional and mental health impact our creativity?

* “My personal experience with depression and anxiety fueled my creative drive." - Clara Lieu, a visual artist and professor.

* “Mental illness is not all bad.” Carrie Fisher

* Psychotherapist Cheryl Arutt notes, "Creating art has always been a way to channel emotional intensity."

Over the years of reading biographies and doing interviews with many highly talented and creative people, it has often struck me how many of them talk about being self-critical, and feeling insecure at times.

Psychiatric misdiagnosis and consequent unnecessary or even destructive medication for “troubling” symptoms is an issue that impacts many creative, gifted and talented people.

Your brain is the control center and that is where the change needs to happen to reduce anxiety.

Kristen Stewart directed a short film titled “Come Swim” that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.

She has described the film in an interview as being about “aggrandized pain” and comments:

“You don’t realize when you’re trudging through that water, you feel so alone. We’ve all been there. But when you’re in it, you feel like you can’t participate in life.”

Many talented and creative people use and abuse drugs, substances and activities – often as self-medication. Sometimes we risk addiction.

Part of the value of our teeming brains as creative people is generating many associations and ideas. But we can also generate anxious thoughts all too easily.

"We’re exhausted and overwhelmed — but you can learn to understand and control it." - 

The Global Stress Summit is online and FREE from April 24 - May 1, 2017.

Emotional Health Resources: Programs, books, articles to help improve your emotional balance and enhance your creative life.

Are high ability people more vulnerable to suicide? What are the impacts of high sensitivity, existential dread, pressure to achieve etc?

"No matter what, the first moments of my day are dedicated to breath, meditation, and silence." Musician Bibi McGill goes on to explain why self-care and meditation are important to her:

“I am an artist and I am creative; I am a Scorpio, so I definitely have a tendency to be very emotional and all over the place..."

In their book on creativity research, Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire make a number of references to meditation and creativity.