Unused Creativity Can Make You Sick

How to Spark Your Imagination

Back when I first qualified as a psychologist I heard a colleague trying to explain depression to her nearly 80-year-old dad.

“I don’t understand why people get so down,” he said. “They should go out in the shed and make something.”

He was mystified by the concept of low mood. To him, the cure for all melancholy was to engage physically, to use your hands, to make or build something.

It took me years to understand the truth in his words.

Psychologists have to be careful here. It would be irresponsible to cite “making stuff” as a substitute for the specialist intervention required to treat moderate to severe depression.

But you can’t work with people therapeutically for more than a decade and fail to notice creative expression is vital to robust health — both physical and mental. And to stifle it, is to risk sickness and malaise.

Sickness, really?

I recently listened to author Elizabeth Gilbert’s interview with researcher and storyteller Brene Brown on Gilbert’s podcast Magic Lessons.

“Unused creativity is not benign,” Brown said. “It festers, it metastasizes into…