In the U.S., anxiety disorders affect about one-third of the population. So it’s no surprise that a great variety of artists and writers also suffer from anxiety and depression.
But whereas some critics see Vincent Van Gogh’s striking paintings and Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry because the direct results of their psychosis and depressionI are inclined to be less romantic about this subject. I see their good output as having happened despite – reasonably than due to – their mental anguish.
In my latest book, “Afraid,” I explore the interaction between fear, anxiety and artistic work.
They’re more intertwined than you may think: Depending on the situation, fear and anxiety can either encourage or impede. But when anxiety becomes overwhelming, creative work often stalls.
Anxiety as a roadblock
The most elementary way anxiety can hinder creative work is by shifting attention away from that work and toward fears and worries.
If a author is anxious about losing her day job, it’s harder for her to give attention to her writing. Excessive anxiety bypasses all nonthreat-related tasks, and folks regress to basic survival mode. Most attention, pondering and emotions will probably be focused on coping with the source of the danger, whether it’s real or imagined. And creative minds are especially adept on the latter.
Because fears center on survival, people change into less flexible and more wary after they’re scared and anxious. At that time, happening a known path is much more appealing than taking risks and venturing into the unknown. Suffice to say, an aversion to the unknown won’t often result in creative breakthroughs.
Another way fear can hinder creativity has to do with fear of rejection.
Friends, family, colleagues and critics often resist unusual ideas or people who stray from established artistic norms. Aside from arising out of envy and competition, these reflexive reactions also make sense from an evolutionary perspective: Norms and agreed-upon ways of pondering cultivate group harmony. History is stuffed with the rejection, mockery and oppression of novel ideas and styles deemed too “on the market” – painters Claude Monet and Frida Kahlo and writer Herman Melville were all harshly criticized, dismissed or persecuted by their contemporaries.
To create something truly original, an artist must often break from the establishment.
So it’s only natural that any creative endeavor will result in fear of criticism, rejection or failure. The road less traveled could be more dangerous. It might even be fruitless. And sometimes the fee is one’s life: Socrates was executed on charges that his probing questions were corrupting young people, while Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned to death, partly, for his heretical claims that the Earth was not the middle of the universe.
Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images
When anxiety inspires
This isn’t to say that being cool as a cucumber is a requisite for nice art. Some level of tension can serve a purpose.
While being truly terrified can paralyze you, being bored and feeling languid can grind your motivation to a halt.
There’s a sweet spot of tension that truly harnesses motivation and cognition and directs all attention to the duty at hand.
With the deadline for “Afraid” fast approaching, I felt a pang of tension that propelled me to the finish line: I made a decision to tuck myself away in a resort next to the mountains in Tucson for 2 weeks and work 12-hour days to wrap up the book. The anxiety of not meeting the deadline was enough to encourage me to buckle down and get the job done.
Then there’s the specter of death.
No one is spared. Yet, at the same time as geniuses like Michelangelo and Charles Dickens met the identical fate as their peers, their brushstrokes and words became everlasting.
Creative work is a strategy to achieve a certain level of immortality – art and books and articles that survive past your expiration date.
American anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that fear of death motivated humans to compose stories, myth and legends in regards to the afterlife and immortality, and it inspired great works of architecture just like the Egyptian pyramids.
This existential dread has also motivated authors and artists to hunt a type of immortality through their work. I find it somewhat comforting that after I’m dead, a few of my scientific discoveries and writings might proceed to pass though others.
In fact, you could be reading this piece long after I’m gone.
What you may and may’t control
Creative work entails traversing a mental landscape that may be treacherous, whether you’re mining your imagination, plotting your next steps or plumbing your memories. Failure all the time looms.
This uncertainty can elicit fear and doubt.
Interestingly, fear is solely focused on survival, while creativity operates at its best when basic survival needs are met. Furthermore, fear is a primitive emotion, whereas art, science and culture are amongst humankind’s most evolved abilities.
But fear and creativity are also similar in that each possess automatic and intuitive processes. The best artworks will not be the only real results of logical pondering. Like a fetus, art grows contained in the artist autonomously while the artist keeps feeding it; when the time comes, delivery happens. Fear can be mostly autonomous: When you notice a automotive barreling toward you, you leap out of the road before excited about the driving force’s intentions.
In that sense, people don’t fully control their fear and creativity. For each to work productively, a balanced harmony must exist between the unconscious and the conscious mind.
Cultivating your creativity
Still, there are elements of your consciousness that you could influence.
If you should create something but feel inhibited by author’s block, hesitancy or insecurity, take into consideration which sort of fear could be holding you back.
Is it fear of failure or judgment? Fear of your individual inner critic? Or is there a unique day-to-day challenge or responsibility that’s absorbing most of your attention?
Once you’ve identified the source of the anxiety, see if you happen to can reframe the fear in an objective way that liberates you from its shackles. Maybe you may recognize failure as a possibility but ultimately something that won’t kill you: You can all the time just try again.
Another option is to have interaction your brain’s reward circuitry – say, pondering of the possible positive outcomes of your work, including immortality. Or you might use the fear network to your advantage, remembering a deadline, a promotion that may hinge on the work or the crummy feeling of not completing a task. Breaking the work into pieces may also make it seem more doable and fewer scary.
Sometimes, shaking things up with a change of scenery might help. When I went away to complete “Afraid,” I selected the desert not only because I find the landscape inspiring. There’s also something in regards to the starkly different and empty geography that clears my head from all the clutter of each day life back in Michigan.
Just as there are numerous paths to take as you pursue a creative endeavor, there are a number of strategies to combat or use all the little fears that crop up along the best way.
