Emotional Health & Creative People

"The demons that Cory Monteith had battled for years did ultimately win in the end. The 31-year-old Glee star died of an overdose, officially referred to as mixed drug toxicity, with heroin and alcohol being among the substances found in his body..."

Demi Lovato's father, Patrick, died last weekend after battling cancer for many years.

Lovato said her father suffered from mental illness in a way that hindered his ability to function well in society. The brave 20-year-old also mentioned that she herself had struggled with mental illness (she had been in rehab in the past) and announced the launch of "The Lovato Treatment Scholarship Program."

Her fourth album, Red, had opening sales of 1.21 million – the highest recorded in a decade, and Taylor Swift has had two million-plus opening weeks.

In a taping in front of a college audience for the tv show “VH1 Storytellers”, she responded to a question from a college student: “I doubt myself 400,000 times per 10-minute interval. I have a terrifying long list of fears."

Although traditionally classified as a learning disability, dyslexia can also lead to advantages in thinking and behaving that enhance creativity.

The researchers “found that dyslexic individuals were significantly faster at recognizing impossible figures as impossible, and their faster speed didn’t sacrifice accuracy. This suggests one upside of poor reading skills: rapid and accurate ‘holistic inspection.’”

“I never wanted to be Marilyn – it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.”

“I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‘There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of being a movie star.’ But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.”

- See more at: http://talentdevelop.com/5756/#sthash.K6veEkG7.dpuf

“I never wanted to be Marilyn – it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.”

“I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‘There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of being a movie star.’ But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.”

Feeling sad, mad, critical or otherwise awful? Surprise: negative emotions are essential for mental health

"Although positive emotions are worth cultivating, problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time."

Carrie Underwood: “At the beginning of my career, I used to have panic attacks. People were touching me, screaming—it made me really nervous. In public, I just get nervous. It’s a physical reaction, feeling like the walls are closing in.” [The Week magazine May 22, 2013, about Marie Claire cover article] //

Read more quotes about and by well-known creative people in article: Celebrities with anxiety and panic attacks (including Helena Bonham Carter; Colin Firth; Edie Falco, and others): http://anxietyreliefsolutions.com/celebrities-with-anxiety-and-panic-attacks/

"No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” - Martha Graham

For many gifted and creative people, this “blessed unrest” may also help maintain the kind of chronic arousal that leads to harmful stress reactions.

Imaginational and cognitive intensities may be key elements for solving problems and doing creative thinking, but can sometimes get in our way.

Writer Stephen King has said: “I’ve taken off two months, three months at a time, and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed. It’s as though something in there is running all the time.”

"I’ve suffered enough. When does my artwork improve?" - Refrigerator magnet

Actor Maggie Gyllenhaal said “I’m not someone who believes ‘The more tempestuous the better; if we have a really horrible time, that will somehow lead to great work.’ I don’t think that. I would much rather have a collaborative, trusting, good relationship with the people I’m working with.”  

Musician Sting said, "I only know that people who are getting into this archetype of the tortured poet end up really torturing themselves to death."

Eric Maisel: “When we fear that we do not matter or that our efforts do not matter, we get depressed.

“Similarly, the places where we make large investments of meaning, for instance in our performances, paintings, or books, are places of great anxiety, because there is more than our ego on the line, there is our very sense of the meaningfulness of our life.

“If the world is not interested in our paintings, for instance, we will be hard-pressed to maintain meaning there; so, when we come to the blank canvas, we can already be a little (or a lot) frightened that a negative reaction to this as-yet-unborn painting will precipitate a meaning crisis.”

Although traditionally classified as a learning disability, dyslexia can also lead to advantages in thinking and behaving that enhance creativity.

“There were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me…I think I came into an appreciation of all those qualities of language…” Novelist Richard Ford

Philip Seymour Hoffman entered an East Coast-based detox center earlier this month after he realized he needed to kick abuse of prescription pills and, more recently, heroin, The Hollywood Reporter confirms.

Hoffman, 45, has had issues with substance abuse in the past but had been sober some two decades until relapsing more than a year ago...

Living the artist’s life can be very stressful, but not if you shift from feeling your work is a demand, to an opportunity that feels enjoyable.

There's little doubt that trauma can be immensely painful, often leaving deep emotional and psychological scars long after the stressful experience has passed. But can there be a silver lining for creativity?

"The intensity of certain emotions, the rawness of certain experiences and the profundity of certain thoughts touch those aspects of our being that lie beyond the realms of expression in words. Certain situations are so intense and deep seated that it becomes difficult to simply explain them. They are to be felt, experienced and acknowledged in their own form.

"That is what a blank canvas can help establish and bolster."