Relaxation and Creativity

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If you’re a creative type, you’ve probably heard people say this before: “How lucky you are!  I wish I could be creative, too–I’d have it so easy!”  To anyone who’s ever found themselves up at three in the morning trying to find a first sentence to a novel, or who struggles to fit regular piano lessons into a schedule packed with work, family obligations and personal errands, this isn’t an entirely pleasant thing to hear.  There’s stress and anxiety in creative work just as much as there is with “real” work, and in some cases even greater stress overall.  And chief among this stress is the hard work of just being creative.

When we’re anxious, we find it difficult to free our minds of workaday concerns and worries to the point where we can actually put ourselves into a mental space where we can freely create.  Ultimately creation is nothing more than sitting back in front of a blank computer screen, a blank canvas, or a blank needlepoint pattern and filling up the space, true.  But it takes a great deal of mental effort to sort out exactly how best to fill up that space, and if our minds are full of concerns and more mundane thoughts, a blank page becomes that much more difficult to turn into a piece of art.  Creativity, to be effective, needs an outward peace of mind.

The relaxation response is an excellent way to achieve that peace of mind and to allow creative people to freely create.  Most obviously, relaxation techniques can rid the mind of the anxiety and stress that clutters up thinking and prevents real creative work from being done.  By taking just fifteen or twenty minutes out of the day to recharge, to meditate, and to relax, the harmful mental effects of anxiety can be exchanged for the confidence and calm necessary to really get into the mental process of creation.  

Additionally, since the mind and the body are linked in several important ways, relaxation techniques can also help to prevent bodily illness and feelings of chronic pain and fatigue that can stop even the most dedicated creative person in his or her tracks for days or even weeks.  Some traditional workers think that for creative people, every day is like a sick day, but creative people have their sick days too, and there’s nothing more frustrating than having a brilliant idea for a song and being too crippled by back pain to get out of bed and write it down.  With the regular use of relaxation techniques, time spent away from creative pursuits due to illness or pain can be kept to a happy minimum.

But beyond these, there are a number of benefits for creative people to take advantage of when using the relaxation response.  To understand why that is, it’s necessary to look a little bit at the theory behind the relaxation response.  The response works because of associations built into the brain: when we think about one thing, physical connections in the brain cause us to instantly think of another.  Because of this, the relaxation response as developed by Herbert Benson, M.D. includes a “faith factor”.  This means that when attempting to induce the relaxation response, an individual should meditate on a phrase or thought that corresponds to a strongly-felt religious, philosophical or personal belief.  The idea is that by thinking about ideas which naturally bring feelings of confidence or comfort, the mind will automatically start feeling that same confidence and comfort, and the relaxation response becomes much easier to induce.

A side benefit of this process, however, is that by focusing on only one idea and set of associations, the mind becomes cleared of all else.  What this means for a creative person is that mental associations and connections between ideas can become disconnected and must be put back together.  This sounds troubling, but in fact it’s one of the best ways to refresh positive creative thinking.  Besides looking at creation as the simple act of filling up blank space, we can also look at it as the act of finding and recreating new connections between ideas: Leonardo, for example, found connections between psychology and portraiture, Sophocles found connections between traditional mythology and human intellectual experience, and Beethoven found connections between powerful emotions and formalistic music.  By using the relaxation response, a creative person is freed from artistic clichés, “junk” connections, and pre-packaged ideas.  Instead, that person is forced to find novel connections of his or her own: that person is forced, through use of the relaxation response, to be original, to create.

So not only is the relaxation response a way to remove obstacles to free creation; it’s a way to actually push your creative impulses forward, even when you already feel confident enough to work.  People who think that creative work is easy are wrong; there’s a great deal of difficulty built in to the act of creation.  But through regular use of practiced relaxation techniques, one of the most difficult jobs in the world becomes that much easier.

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