How to get out of a creative rut?
You don’t necessarily need to be an artist who makes a living out of his creativity to experience a creative blockage. Maybe you’re simply a student with a task to write a very important essay on a topic of your choice. Or a high school senior with just a couple of painting art pieces left to submit before you graduate. You took a pottery class with your significant other and you just have no idea what to do. It definitely makes the situation worse if you make a living by being creative, but worry not. Strangers on the internet are here to help.
Leave whatever you’re doing for a while. Clean it up, put it away and as hard as it may be, try not thinking about it for a minute. Even if everything you do and see reminds you of a potentially good sentence that you could use in that essay, try to create a short funny song out of those words instead. Or a poem. Little poem for nobody to evaluate, a poem only for your entertainment, to pin it on your fridge and to remind yourself that your brain can do such things.
It is easy to get frustrated in these situations. Frustration arrives almost unconsciously and separates you from your creativity even further. Don’t try to fight it vigorously. Allow yourself to be frustrated for a moment, these are just your emotions trying to teach you something about yourself. Maybe you need to heal in places where you’re still holding judgments on others and yourself. Or you haven’t been paying attention to what is happening right now because you have been given an opportunity to change or to do something different to what you typically do.
Your boundaries could have changed as a simple result of your envolvement as a person and what you believe about the world needs to be changed. This one is particularly stressful. Maybe you’re internalizing other people’s beliefs about who you should be and who you are, and you need to reconnect with yourself. It could be a million other things and whatever it is, it can’t make you snap out of it and burst with creativity to do your assignment.
Creative ruts are often related to over-tiredness and being overloaded.
Change your bed sheets to a fresh set, take a bath or a shower with your favorite bath scent or essential oil and go to sleep.
Be aware of the fact that you’re breathing. This also helps if you have anxiety. This simple, yet so complicated everyday body function is so easy to forget about and to take for granted. You know this when you get a cold in the winter and you can’t breathe through your nose properly and remember how relieved you feel when it finally goes away. Focus on the sole fact that you’re breathing and how actually creative it is from your body to do such a thing in so many different variations to keep your lungs full of oxygen.
Go for a walk. Look for ants on the ground in case you forgot such hardworking little animals still exist. They don’t care about creativity and are doing just fine with building their underground many room-ed house. Notice the trees, plants and the leaves that are actually making that oxygen we were talking about a minute ago. That is a good gratefulness triggering moment right there. The Earth never rushes, yet always gets the job done and grows everyone and everything.
It’s not always possible to go for a vacation. At least go somewhere you don’t usually go to and try to sketch and draw people and things surrounding you. Go to a Hotel lobby so that you feel like you have traveled somewhere and sketch people. So, what if you can’t draw, draw people like a child would and notice the humor in the situation. What is special about each person you’re looking at? Notice and appreciate their creativity in dressing themselves, doing their hair and makeup, notice the color of the tiles on the floor.
Think about the hair salon at your local market. There’s probably some cute old hairdresser lady working there for many years and even though you would absolutely hesitate to go in there to get your hair done, places like that (at least in my experience) seem to make the best hair styles from the sole practice for over 15 years on many different customers. They don’t care about balayage, but they will cheaply make you absolutely beautiful. Grab some fresh fruit for yourself on your way home since you’re already at the market.
Most importantly, read. Even if you’re not a reader kind of person, it’s so important to read at least every once in a while. Take your friend on a trip to an antique store with hand me down books and look for the weirdest title. Or maybe there is a classic literature piece that you’ve been wanting to read forever but never caught the time to. Personally, Kafka get’s me going every time. Look for an easy teenage drama read, just to see what the kids are up to these days. Buy newspapers just to laugh at how ridiculously not funny the jokes in the entertainment section are.
Reading activates your imagination, productivity and boosts your ability to think since you’re reading a piece of text from a white paper allowing you to create a completely personalized world out of these words. Like author Lisa See once said: “Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.”
It is also very important to look through cookbooks. Notice that creativity is practically everything. And then take your assignment and go on about your life.
