Anxiety and creativity

[rizo]

I'm a really creative person and love films and film-making in general, but Ive found that my anxiety has leeched itself onto this passion and drained it.

I feel creative for very small periods in the day but its never enough.


The anxiety kind of overwhelms me and kills that creativity. It happens without me even realizing it.
I put myself under pressure every day to write stuff but my creative output since ive suffered from anxiety has been minimal, it really depresses me.

Do any of you creative anxiety suffers suffer this same problem? How do yous deal with it?

[NoPoet]

It's difficult to be creative when you feel like something terrible is going to happen. A significant part of recovery is learning to carry on even though you might feel horrible. Learning to redirect your focus away from worrying and ruminating over the problem is slow, as it's easy to fall back into the cycle of worry.

A good step is to train yourself to think neutrally. You start by spending just a minute or two looking at and listening to what's around you, and describe it in your head without using any emotive words.

Right: The sun is setting. The sky is blue, lighter towards the horizon. There are a couple of clouds. I can see a few stars and a plane is passing overhead. It's flashing red and blue running lights. I can see white glows all down its side - these are windows, and the glow is coming from inside the plane. The air is cold, and there's a slight breeze which I can feel through my jacket. I can hear a couple of leaves scratching as they move in the breeze. The sound is echoing off the fence. The fence is old and dirty, with a couple of gaps in it.

Wrong: It's a beautiful evening, with a sky the colour of lost love. Stars are scattered like frozen silver; I wonder if anyone out there is looking back now and thinking the same things I'm thinking. Wow, there's an aeroplane overhead, I thought it was a UFO at first, but I can see running lights flashing. It looks amazing against the night sky; probably a 737 bringing people back to Sheffield airport to see their families for Christmas. This breeze is bloody freezing, cutting through my clothes, my nipples could cut glass. Leaves are scraping along like a dead man's hand clinging onto the world of the living. I can see into my neighbour's house through gaps in the smelly old fence...

One set of thoughts is calming (if a bit boring), attaching neutral words and offering facts rather than opinion. The other evokes emotions and gets your imagination going, which can be a bad thing if it's going to lead you down the primrose path to blip city. It trains you to notice things about the world, rather than concentrating on what's happening in your head.

[rizo]

Yeah I can see what you are saying. In one example you are being mindful, in the other you are inside your head thinking about stuff.

So do you think that its unsurprising that I'm not feeling creative, because im worrying about other things in my head?
My therapist told me that easing one worry will have a knock on effect on others, this was one of the principles of CBT.
Ive felt like its true to a certain point, but easing worries that ive held onto for months is a very difficult thing to do.