Dealing With Our Anxieties and Stress To Be More Creative
Reframing challenges can help shift their negative impact
We can run into any number of stressors in living a creative life: auditioning for a movie role, presenting a book proposal, agreeing to do a book or music tour.
And just being a creative person, according to a number of studies, likely means being more susceptible to anxiety.
Creativity coach, author and psychologist Eric Maisel, PhD, notes about the stress challenges of artists:
“Some people become doctors, lawyers, accountants, or marketing executives. Some people stay at home and raise a family.
“But millions of people make another sort of choice, maybe only as part-time employment if you count the money they earn but as their full-time identity: they become artists. And they struggle.”
In one of the chapters (“The Stress Key”) of his book “Making Your Creative Mark,” he writes about how the creative life can be an ongoing source of stress – if we interpret or frame it as such.
He explains, “A stressor is anything, positive or negative, that makes a demand on us.
“Stress is our body’s p…
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