Why the heck are artists so anxious?
Nearly every creative person I know struggles with anxiety. I’m not only talking about my friends who work in creative fields, where your bills are paid (inconsistently) by how other people perceive the value of your life’s work. I’m talking about my fellow crafters, my creative hobbyists, fanfic writers, bloggers, painters, and everyone else living a creative life under the sun.
So, why are artists so anxious? If you ask me (and we’ll pretend that you did), it’s because anxiety is its own form of creative work, coming naturally to creative people. For myself and many others, this comes in the form of an anxious fantasy. If you are a creative person with anxiety, you almost certainly know what the term “anxious fantasy” means: You finally have a moment alone, scrubbing the dishes, and suddenly you find yourself picturing one of your loved ones dying in a terrible accident. You lie in bed at night and imagine what would happen if you were on the Titanic, and you had to say goodbye to the love of your life as you move to take your place on one of the scarce lifeboats. You also imagine your own failures: you finally start doing that thing you’ve been thinking about doing, and you’re mocked, or you fail, or you bankrupt yourself on the investment, your partner resents you, everyone leaves you, and you wind up dead in a ditch. Sound familiar?
By definition, creative people are able to envision something that doesn’t exist yet. We can think of this as an innovative design for a new handbag or a ceramic frog wearing a wizard’s cap, but another side of this is creating worlds in which the bad things happen that we fear the most. Pema Chodron once called worries “imagined realities” because the situations we worry about are ones that don’t exist yet. I’m not saying that means our worries are within our control, or totally fruitless–worrying something might happen can help us envision preventative measures to ensure our safety. It’s only human to build these worlds, in some cases reflexively because of the trauma we’ve experienced, or protectively, because we feel imagining something painful will mean we’ll be prepared just in case it happens to us.
I will say, however, that once we reframe anxious fantasy as creative work, we can begin to feel some autonomy over how we use this creative energy. You can think of doing creative work as working out your creative muscles. When we’re building creative skills like woodworking or sculpture or painting, we can see some tangible manifestation of these workouts succeeding. Our technique becomes more refined, our work looks more polished, and we’re able to zone out more as muscle memory kicks in. When we’re engaged in anxious fantasy however, we’re also working out creative muscles. We become better and better at picturing the worst case scenario.
Whatever you do, that’s what you’re getting better at. The more you picture the horrors of the world busting down your door, the better you’re going to get at conjuring those images, and the more powerful they will become. During an argument you pictured with your best friend, you imagine them saying something terrible to you, and you feel so hurt you cry real tears. You begin to resent them for the ways you’ve imagined they feel about you, obsessing over things they’ve said to you that now feel like clues indicating their “true feelings”. In the meantime, your friend is just sitting at home, eating granola bars and watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It may not feel like it in the moment, but you’re hanging out in your imagination.
In this way, the muscles we build in our imagination turn into ways we relate to the world. You’ve imagined your best friend being secretly angry with you enough times that it feels extremely real. Maybe this kicks in people-pleasing behaviors that lead to resentment. Maybe this means keeping your emotions and personal struggles to yourself, not wanting to feel burdensome. Maybe this leads to feeling as if no one knows the “real” you, making you feel like an imposter, or someone who wouldn’t be loved if people knew the “truth” about you.
Living this way is exhausting. We turn to a lot of solutions to work through it. Cognitive behavioral therapy, SSRIs, mood stabilizers, affirmations and exercises–these things are all helpful tools in the journey to controlling anxiety. Here, I propose another tool for our toolbox: we start finding ways to redirect the creative energy away from our anxieties and toward positive creative work. For me, my goal is taking 1% of the creative energy I spend on anxious fantasies, and trying to reroute it into something else. There’s no deadline for this redirection. It’s a goal which I move at my own pace to reach. Sometimes this looks like picturing a world in which my friends love and care about me, but that isn’t always easy. CBT for the extremely anxious can only do so much. Instead it usually looks like crafting, writing, or throwing on the pottery wheel.
How did I use my creativity to battle my anxiety?
This year, I read a lot of romance books and learned the tropes involved. As a sort of joke, I suggested to my sister-in-law that anyone could put those tropes into a hat, pick out three, and use that to build a story. She countered with, “Why don’t you try it?” Even though it was a simple suggestion, it really made me ask myself the question. So, when I got COVID the next month and suddenly had some time on my hands, I decided to answer it.
I’ll preface this by saying my COVID journey was extremely stressful. I first got tested not because I had cold and flu symptoms, but because I had a seizure for the first time in my life while driving my kid home from school. I spent hours grieving myself and wondering what life would be like for my friends and partners without my help, or in the absence of me altogether. It was a bad time.
Writing this romance quickly became a pleasant escape where instead of picturing my own death a thousand times, I could imagine what the lowly housemaid would say to the wealthy baron she was falling in love with during their fake-dating scheme. I could feel myself in real-time rerouting my creative energy away from imagining the worst case scenario to imagining something that brought me great joy.
Within 15 days I had reached 54,000 words. It started with having low expectations. I figured this was just for fun, so I didn’t need to have too much regard for the quality. I never envisioned it being anything but a fun little joke. The more I worked on it, the more fun that I had, and the more invested I became in my characters. It started to get too long to be a short story, so I said, why not keep going? Eventually I googled how long something had to be to technically be a novel, and said screw it, I’m halfway there, why not go the whole way?
I got through COVID this way, envisioning a different future and letting myself enjoy playing in my imagination. I felt like a kid again, and this childlike fantasy brought me immense emotional relief. Eventually I started editing the book and inviting others to read it. I even took a class on publishing to consider sharing it with the world.
This magical transformation isn’t always going to be possible. Anxiety takes deep roots in the brain, and thinking that you can simply stop giving it the time of day and it will walk away ne’er to return is wishful thinking at best, harmful to your self worth at worst. But I do believe that using our creative energy to create something fun, imaginative, tangible, instead of using it solely to create the worlds in which our worst fears play out, is a valid solution to a pervasive issue.
How can you try using creativity to combat anxiety?
If you’re a creative person struggling with anxiety, I welcome you to join me on my journey to redirect 1% of my creative energy away from anxious fantasy and toward something different. Start off by picking a creative pursuit that feels fun for you. It could be planning your dream garden, making a paper mache mask, or writing a story. You could sign up for a class if you’re struggling to get the motivation to try something on your own. Whatever it is, it should be something that’s not directed toward recognition or money. This way, you can enjoy the journey without getting hung up on what other people might think about it.
Once you start your new creative pursuit, you’ll probably encounter your inner critic. Maybe you’ll think, “I’m not actually very good at writing” or “I feel insecure about my grammar during this story.” You can counter this with, “But who cares? This is just for fun.” Keep on trucking and find the elements of the journey you enjoy the most. Don’t worry about finishing–the end result isn’t the point. Just having fun playing around in your own imagination, and rediscovering the positive avenues it can take you down, is all that matters.
After you’ve managed a few times to work on your new creative pursuit, sit down and think about how it’s felt for you. Take stock of how much time in a day you’re spending playing around in your imagination, and how much time you’ve spent suffering in it. Have you reduced your anxious fantasy time by 1%? Congratulations baby, you did it! Maybe as time goes on this can become 2%, or 5%, or even 30%--but 1% of your time reclaimed for something that makes you feel good is success enough to celebrate.