Step Three to Unblocking Your Creativity is Creative Rest

Rest is critical to Unblocking Creativity, which has been our summer topic for Grow Boldly. Creativity requires tons of energy because it uses up brain power and is generated out of our core body (think gut intuition, heart openness, and other somatic ways we flow).

Workers that use and need creativity - which is pretty much everyone I work with who are professionals, educators, edu-prenuers, and the like - have to have space, time, and energy for creative flow. Creativity fuels our passions, efforts, ideas, problem-solving, you name it, and creativity is the core energy fueling us.

I think so much of this modern life/work has productivity blocking us when we’re talking about creativity. Likely you or your work judges both by clear, measurable output; which, then, it’s no wonder folks are over-worked and exhausted. I first focused on rebuilding from the exhausted back in the winter as a way to help high-achievers reframe their resistance to resting even in the face of their chronic exhaustion. No one feels creative when they are fatigued. Period.

How do you unblock your creativity in light of that? The answer is Creative Rest.

Before we dive into what that even is, I love this reframe of work less, be more creative (and hence get more shit done) from Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s 2016 Rest book:

“I noticed a paradox in the lives of some really creative people: people like Charles Darwin, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, who are obsessed with their work. But when you look at how many hours a day they spent working, it’s a surprisingly small number. Living in Silicon Valley and growing up in an era that assumes overwork is the norm, the idea that you could go in the opposite direction and yet still do really amazing stuff was really compelling.

I started to think that maybe the secret had to do not just with how they work or their innate intelligence but also with the way they rested. What I found is a community of people including scientists and artists and authors who follow this pattern of working very intensively a few hours a day and then resting deliberately in various ways. Rest is something we all know how to do naturally, but it’s also something we can treat as a skill.”

[Resource from Scientific American interview.]

Rest is meant to be restorative rather than solely about sleep or non-movement. I’ve talked a lot about how we stay out of rest because we stay in over-functioning and over-working - general over-ing life as high-achieving, kickass folks. Rest is required part of resilience, which again is how we rebuild not rebound.

Creative rest is the practice of intentionally choosing restorative actions and non-actions. You likely already know all the hows - get out in nature, take a walk without headphones, stare aimlessly out the window, hike, garden or care for plants, weed the yard or someone else’s, exercise/movement, cook or bake for enjoyment, journal….

Here’s my own example of creative rest and my perfection gremlins. I took 4 days off to the wilderness right before the summer Grow Boldly workshop with the intention of creative rest. I had done this same practice last summer when I first launched this topic series. The intention was 4 days of going into the wilderness and being offline (photo taking allowed but no sharing until back which was easy given genuinely no signal).

Nature is my #1 restorative place/being. And if you’re doubtful, this is backed by science with anywhere from 120 minutes a week positively impacts health or the “Three Day Effect” of how many days it takes your brain in Nature to reset or I’ve operated with a 2 day reset guideline from a science podcast years ago that I no longer can remember. Ultimately, our overall wellbeing AND our creativity are greatly improved with exposure or immersion in nature. Read Creativity in the Wild study for more. All in all - nature is good for us. No shock.

Truthfully, both times taking the time away shared the shit out of me. The act of stepping away from wifi connectivity right before my own workshop is so uncomfortable and guilt producing. Instead my brain says I should be over-ing it with last minute emails and general over planning (and over reworking/reediting) something that was already planned. Here’s what I know to be truth for me - I run my workshops with the support of my creative intuition not in spite of it because I have the foundation and knowledge base that my high-achieving self has worked towards. I must give myself that creative rest so that I show up fully connected to the folks I’m there to work with rather than pulled in a hundred shiny-squirrel directions.

Pic by Cam Phillips of me in the Thompson Creek on day 1 of 4 creative rest camping.

Circling back to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s 2016 Rest book, he reframes burnout as training our brains to NOT be able to produce or focus because that creativity comes with negative psychological and physiological consequences. Whoa. Instead, he advocates that creative rest is not the leftover activity at the end of the day you get to do when you’ve done the rest of your to-do list but it is a required partner to our work.

And the activities that stimulate unconscious creative thinking? Pang says are regular exercise, serious hobbies, and vacations - AND bonus is that all those also lead to more quality life, success and satisfaction and happiness. So I’m back on a daily workout plan because I have the other parts in place…

What’s your creative rest?