E120 - Your creativity is starving for real light
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Hello.
Hello, my creative friend. Welcome back to Create Today with Beth Buffington. Hello, my creative friend. Welcome back to Create Today. I'm Beth Buffington, and I've been sitting with something that I heard the other day that I just cannot stop thinking about. I was listening to the podcast, the Daily Creative with Todd Henry, and the guest on his podcast used two phrases that stopped me in my tracks.
the phrases were. Digital obesity and ultra processed light. And I thought, oh my goodness, this [00:01:00] is exactly what is happening to so many of us. We are already dealing with, obesity through our bodies, and we're dealing with ultra processed foods that are making us obese, and here we are looking at it through technology.
This is something we all need to continue talking about. So stay with me because
what I wanna talk about today isn't about technology being bad or screens being the enemy far from it.
'cause you know, I spend a lot of time on my computer and my tablets and my phone, but that's not the conversation today. What is the conversation is about what happens to your creative mind when you get out of sync about where you spend. A bulk of your time. So what is happening to your creative mind?
That [00:02:00] beautiful idea generating creative mind when it is fed a steady diet of pixels and artificial light and almost nothing else. for an extreme example, imagine if you ate a steady diet of. Potato chips. Now. I love potato chips. I know I could easily eat an entire bag all by myself, and I'm pretty sure I actually could nibble through a large bag of potato chips every day, but it would be costly to my health and to my waistline to eat that many chips, right?
Yeah. So I, I severely limit my potato chip intake. and. A complete aside, here's my secret about limiting potato chips. When I do eat potato chips, I only eat folded chips because, one it takes time to find the folded chips. And two, there aren't as many of them in the bag.[00:03:00]
I also think they actually kinda taste better 'cause their crunch is more satisfying. But I digress. Let's get back to our conversation. I am making a comparison about too many potato chips, too much time in front of screens.
Do you see the metaphor? Because here's what the research is telling us about. Too much screen time, and I am here to say I am with you in understanding this because I've experienced this personally. Our brains were not designed to live indoors in front of a screen, but that is what we do.
We live in front of screens for a good part of our day. And that's a fact, and that is sad, but it is true. And when we spend a vast majority of our day in front of a screen, something quietly starts to fade. Our [00:04:00] curiosity dims. Our ideas begin to dry up and our creative spark, you know that gorgeous instinctive, YOU shaped energy that makes you unique?
Well, that starts to actually suffocate and most of us don't even realize it's happening until we feel utterly stuck and foggy, and burned out, and even depressed. So today we are going to talk about what is actually going on inside your brain when you are constantly indoors and overexposed to screens.
We're gonna talk about what nature, yes, the actual outdoors, what it does for your creative mind that no device on earth can replicate. And we're gonna talk about simple. Practical ways to bring back the energy that you're missing by understanding how to nourish [00:05:00] what is currently starving in your life.
Because my friend. All y'all are creative, right? All people are creative, and you deserve to create at full capacity. The world is messy and it is crying out for your full creativity to blossom. So let's talk about how to get you there. So let me tell you why I am so fascinated with this idea of digital obesity.
Because when I heard that phrase, I felt a literal zing of understanding and I thought, whoa. This is something I need to be aware of for myself in my life, especially during winter and bad weather. We all know what happens to our physical body when we consume too much processed food and not enough good nourishment.
I mean, we love our [00:06:00] chips and our fast food and our ice cream, but it plays havoc on our mind, body, and spirit. When we have too much of it, our energy drops. Our thinking gets foggy. Our mood gets harder to manage. Now you can think of digital obesity in the same way, but instead of artificial food making us obese.
It's artificial light. It's what happens when we consume far more screen-based blue light stimulation more than our brains were ever built to handle. And we can't process that because our brains were never built to handle screens. Our brains were built for natural light. Stimulation received from the sun and from moving outdoors, and the results from research about this topic are genuinely startling.
Research tells us that the average [00:07:00] person now spends over 90% of their waking hours indoors, 90% of waking hours. That's not including the time we are sleeping. A huge portion of that time is spent staring at a screen, a phone, a tablet, a computer, a television. We reach for our phones first thing in the morning.
We check our email before we've even had breakfast, and many of us work all day in front of a computer. And then we reach for our phones for entertainment during breaks at work and for lunch during our day.
And sadly, many of us fall asleep to the glow of something that is a screen In the middle of all this, we're trying to care for families, work a job, run a business, solve creative problems, and bring something meaningful into the world. And [00:08:00] I know for a fact how easy it is to exist solely indoors because in the winter when the weather is crazy cold here in Chicagoland,
I, the creative entrepreneur who has a studio and a workout room in the house, and a husband who stops for groceries on his way home from work.
Well, it has always been easy for me not to leave the house during the winter for days and days. Yikes. See why this triggered something in me? So. I'm thinking if it's true for me, it's gotta be true for a lot of you. So let's, let's look at the concept of ultra processed light.
Ultra process light goes hand in glove with digital obesity. Think about what ultra processed food does to the body. It is engineered to be stimulating and immediately satisfying, but essentially empty of real nutrition, [00:09:00] and it leaves you craving more of the same bad stuff. It hijacks and artificially fills you up without actually feeding you.
Anything nourishing the light from screens works on your brain in a scary and remarkably similar way. Light from screens, while they are constantly stimulating your nervous system, notifications, movement, color, sound, but like artificial foods, this artificial light is not giving your brain the deep restorative.
Genuinely nourishing input that your brain needs to generate. Creative thought. Your brain is being fed all day, but it's actually starving. Starving for something that's nourishing and real. Now I want to talk about what is actually happening inside your brain during all of this screen time.
Because [00:10:00] understanding this genuinely changed the way I think about my own creative habits and my screen time.
There's a part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. This is your creative command center. This part of your brain handles your sophisticated thinking. It handles problem solving, and it houses your imagination, and it helps you make unexpected connections between ideas and emotional nuance.
It is the part of your brain that makes you, you. And here's the thing about the prefrontal cortex. It is exquisitely sensitive to overstimulation. So when you are in front of a screen for long stretches, your brain is in a constant state of reactive attention. You are responding and scrolling and clicking and processing, and while that feels productive.
It can even feel [00:11:00] exciting. What is actually happening is your creative brain is being held hostage by a loop of start, stop, start, stop, start, stop reactions. It never gets the quiet space it needs to actually work to daydream, to wander, to wonder, and to make those unexpected leaps that great creative work requires.
Now let's talk about another function of your brain called the default mode network.
This is the network of brain activity that activates when your mind is not focused on a specific task. This happens when you are daydreaming or looking out a window For no particular reason what scientists have discovered about the default mode network is extraordinary.
This network is not idle. It's enormously, active during those moments of [00:12:00] apparent rest. When you think you're being lazy, when you are idle, when you're wandering, when you're daydreaming, your default mode network is making creative connections.
During this time, it is consolidating experiences into insight.
and it's doing that deep background work that leads to your best ideas. But screen time suppresses the default mode network. When we are always stimulated, always reacting, always scrolling. We never give our brains that incredible network space, that empty time to do its work.
My friend, when your default mode network has time to mull over stuff, that is where your ideas become alive. And we are crowding out this time with doom scrolling and cute cat videos.[00:13:00]
And here is another nugget that I think is so important, especially for leading a creative life. And remember. All of us are creative. Even those who say, I can't even draw a stick figure. Everyone is creative. So this nugget is important to everyone. Prolonged screen exposure disrupts your neuroplasticity with.
This is your brain's gorgeous, remarkable ability to form new connections, to realize you can take new paths in life, that you can adapt to new ideas, and you can always learn something new. When you're stuck in your screens, you get rigid in your ideas and you're less likely to be able to understand other people's opinions, and you're less likely to learn new things.
Our world needs to be adaptable, needs to understand other [00:14:00] people's opinions. We all need to learn new things.
So neuroplasticity
that is the very thing that is most affected by digital overload. Let's say that again. Your capacity to be a creative thinker and learn new things. That is the thing that is most affected by digital overload, the thing that is most affected by digital overload.
So we talked about neuroplasticity in our last episode in the context of choosing food and color in our diet so that we can be healthier and happier. And here it's again because my friend, creativity is a whole life practice, not just what happens in your studio or when you have time for crafting.
Creativity is everywhere. This is why the podcast is so [00:15:00] important. So, okay. Here is where I want you to take a deep breath with me because, ooh, everything I've just described sounds ominous and does feel really depressing because we are all kind of addicted to our phones, our screens, our televisions. But here is the beautiful thing that we need to think about today.
Digital overload is reversible. It is beautifully and surprisingly quickly reversible. And the solution is not a new app. It's not another productivity system. The solution is outside your front door. The research on nature and the creative brain is some of the most hopeful research I have come across.
I want to share some of it with you today because I think once you hear this, you'll never look at a walk around the block the same way again. So let's [00:16:00] start with something called Attention Restoration Theory. I've actually talked about this before in the podcast, but this comes from the researchers Rachel and Steven Kaplan.
Their work showed that natural environments restore our ability to focus and generate ideas in a way that. No other environment can. They discovered that nature engages what they called involuntary attention. This is a gentle, effortless noticing that happens when you go outside, when you see light moving through the trees, or hear the water from a lake or the ocean, or feel the texture of bark under your hand or walk on the grass with bare feet.
Your brain is engaged, but it's not pushed hard, and you feel happily refreshed and you just don't exactly know why. This is very different from [00:17:00] the un- blinking start, stop, start, stop stimulation. That screens require when you are outside, your brain gets to wander and it is allowed to breathe. And here's something that I find extraordinary.
Researchers have found that spending just 20 minutes in a natural setting measurably reduces cortisol, which is that stress hormone that we all worry about 20 minutes outside reduces cortisol. So that's a, a short walk.
That can be sitting on your back step with some coffee that is standing in your garden picking tomatoes or laying in the grass at the park. And in that brief window, the fog begins to lift. Anxiety softens and the creative mind begins to open. Now, it's not a magic bullet, it's not gonna fix everything in your life immediate yet, [00:18:00] Lee.
But. The fog begins to lift, the anxiety will soften and your creative mind will begin to reopen.
Every time you step outside, you are quite literally rebuilding and strengthening the creative architecture in your brain.
There is also a phenomenon that researchers call the awe response. Awe is what you feel when you encounter or something that is larger than yourself. I have a distinct memory of feeling this when I was at Niagara Falls, a moment where I just felt my entire soul expand from the power I felt as I watched that waterfall in front of me.
This can happen in simpler areas when you encounter a wide open sky, when you feel the the waves from an ocean, when you [00:19:00] observe a thunderstorm, when you are in a field of wild flowers. And what science shows us is that awe as a measurable effect on creative thinking. It expands our sense of time.
It quiets that busy worried monologue that is constantly on loop from our inner critic
Now I want to, Hmm. Now let's pause for just a moment, because everything we've been talking about today is at the heart of something I care deeply about and I want to share with you.
This work understanding,
understanding how your environment, your body, and your daily choices shape your creativity and your wellbeing. This is the foundation of what we do. At all of the [00:20:00] Sylva experiences that I create with my dear friend and health coach Lisa Murphy,
I want to invite you personally to the Sylva Synergy Retreat this May in Atchison, Kansas. Now we designed a Sylva synergy as an immersive experience where you step away from the screens, the noise, and the daily digital flood, and you spend real unhurried time reconnecting with your inner creative.
In a setting that is beautiful and nourishing and genuinely restorative. We go outside. We talk about what real creative wellness looks like and feels like, and we do the work together in community with other people who get it.
Happier. If something in you today is leaning forward right now and thinking, tell me more, trust that feeling, and come and join [00:21:00] us at a retreat. Spots are genuinely limited because we like to keep things intimate so we can get to know everyone and guide you in the direction that you need. So don't wait and register today.
I would love to have you there with us, and there's also Sylva Sessions, our monthly membership, and if you're looking for ongoing community and guidance as you build creative wellness into your everyday life, Lisa and I meet you each month with a community of like-minded spirits to help you tend to your creative wellbeing together.
All the details are in the show notes, or you can visit me at. Www dot BDI create today. Okay, let's keep going because I have some practical things I want to leave you with today. I wanna address something that might be going [00:22:00] through your mind right now and that might be Beth. I'm busy. I do not have time to go wander about in nature.
I have deadlines and clients, A family to take care of and a full life. I am not sure a walk in the park is really gonna fix my creative block. I hear you and I see you and I really get what you might be thinking about right now. But my friend, I live what I talk about and here is what I have found to be deeply true in my life.
The time you spend outside is not time away from your creative work. It is your creative work. Some of the most important thinking you will ever do is going to happen when you are idly, wandering through a park or sitting on your porch or walking barefoot in the grass, or just looking out a window when you are somewhere green or [00:23:00] blue, and you are quiet and you're not trying to accomplish anything at all.
When you allow your mind time to wander without an agenda, this unstructured time, oof. Powerful. And I want to emphasize the word unstructured here because that is important.
A walk in silence or with just the sounds of nature around you gives your brain something that. A walk with content simply cannot. So taking your phone with you, sending texts, checking your email, that kind of walk is still screen time.
So walking with just nature that gives your default mode network, the permission slip it's been waiting for. I want you to think of unstructured outdoor time the way we talked about sleep with health coach Lisa Murphy in episode [00:24:00] 114. Going outdoors is not a reward that you earn after you finished everything on your to-do list.
After you have served everyone who needs something from you know, this time outdoors. It is a requirement for your self care. It is a requirement for doing your best work. It is how you take care of that most important creative tool you have, which my friend is your mind. Even 10 or 15 minutes makes a measurable difference.
researchers have found that brief regular exposure to natural light and outdoor environments as little as a few times a week if that's all you can do that has a cumulative effect on creative output, mood stability, and cognitive resilience. We always talk about how little bits of creative time, [00:25:00] those creative acts, those compound over time.
Same thing is happening here when you can get yourself outdoors and you do not need a grand adventure or a long hike up a steep mountain. You just need your neighborhood or a bench in a park, or a porch, or a deck or patio. You need a few minutes with your face turned towards the sky.
Start small, my friend, that is enough to start and then build up to, can you do 15 to 20 minutes in a day? That's a good goal to reach. Alright my friend, let's talk about what this actually looks like in real life, because you still might be going, okay, great, but how do I do this, Beth? How do I actually figure out how to make this a goal that I can reach?
So let's. Find some ways that a real creative person who has a lot going on can [00:26:00] actually make this happen. And you know, I love a good list. So here are five simple ways to stop feeding your brain artificial light, and start nourishing your brain with natural light. And you can choose one, two, or more of these ideas to begin feeding and nourishing your brain with real light.
Number one, start your morning outside instead of online. Now, stay with me here. This can be one of the hardest things you do when you first get up in the morning because it's a kneejerk reaction to grab your phone sometimes right after your head lifts off the pillow.
Even if just for a tiny while before you look at your phone, step outside or stand in front of a window and let actual daylight hit your eyes before your screens light. Touches your [00:27:00] eyes, feel the temperature of the outdoors. Breathe in the fresh air and notice the sights and sounds around you.
This one small shift, first thing in the morning begins to reset your nervous system before the digital flood begins, and it signals to your brain that the real world comes first. Number two. Create a screen free creative window. Oh, what do I mean by this? What I mean is I want you to choose a block of time during your day, maybe put this in your calendar, and even if this is just 10 to 15 minutes to begin, block it in,
Make it a thing. And this is a time when you are going to. Create a way from your screen. So you're going to spend this time sketching in a sketchbook or journaling, and that's writing on a piece of paper. Or you're [00:28:00] going to make lists, even if it's uh, groceries that you need to buy. Put it down on paper.
Think about or write about on paper future plans or your daydreams. Or maybe you're just gonna sit and doodle, but do it away from your screen. This is especially important if you are completely incapable of getting outside during your workday. Just getting away from the bright lights of those blue screens is going to help you.
and this is where some of your most original ideas will begin to surface if you make this a practice. I promise this. Number three,
take your creative problems outside when you are stuck, and we all get there. We have that creative block. When you get there, resist the [00:29:00] instinct to go back to the screen and grinding through to find inspiration. And don't just run a GPT to solve all your problems instead. Take the problem outside with you and walk with it
Let your mind circle loosely around the concept while your senses are engaged with the world around you, so you're not thinking deeply on the thing that is bothering you. You're allowing your brain to breathe. While you are breathing and allowing yourself to be distracted by birds and flowers and trees and other people's puppies, your brain is in the background just chugging away on that idea, that problem, and the solution that you've been searching for.
While it has a remarkable way of appearing, when you stop forcing it to happen, give it a try. So number four. Practice one minute of [00:30:00] awe each day. That sounds small, but it's powerful. So I want you to go out and just look up. The sky is amazing. Actually. Look up at the sky.
And you can do this morning, midday, evening. It doesn't matter. Just let this moment be more important than your to-do list for just a moment. Research shows that when you practice moments of awe consistently, it expands your sense of possibility and
softens a tendency towards anxiety. Try for one minute, lay in the grass for one minute to begin. You can do it for one minute, you can, but really concentrate for that one minute on the awesomeness of the sky. Be devoted to that minute with that thought of awe.
Number five, [00:31:00] audit your screen time this week with curiosity, not judgment. So here I want you to look at your screen time numbers on your phone. We all get sent those notifications. You've spent this much time on your screen this past week. I don't want you to feel bad about that.
I want you to think about it. Simply see the data. 'cause the data's gonna tell you what you're actually doing, and then you can decide how you need to change that slightly or dramatically. Because awareness is where change begins. It's when you can think about what you're thinking, that you realize what you need to do.
And then I want you to ask yourself, can I take even a fraction of this time I've spent on screens? And change thattime to be devoted to real light instead of artificial light so that I can feed and nourish my [00:32:00] brain. Can I make that shift this week? And if so, how much?
And then can you shift a bit more time each week? And here's the thing, my friend. You don't have to overhaul your entire life immediately to see and feel a shift towards positivity, towards the goodness we're talking about here. You just have to start small and make intentional choices that say, I know what my creative mind needs, and I'm going to give it more of that.
Now, here's what I want to leave you with today. You are a creative being living in a world right now that is designed to pull your attention towards a screen at every single possible moment.
That is what? The big companies want you to do, [00:33:00] look at this, look at this, look at this. And that's not your fault, but it is your responsibility, your creative responsibility to push back and say no. And you can start it gently, but consistently and with intention, the world outside your door is not a distraction from your creative work.
The world outside your door is a resource. It is sustenance, it is nourishment, it is fuel. It is the nutrition. Your brain is missing when you feel foggy and disconnected or burned out. So this week I encourage one small challenge for you, just this one before you get in front of artificial light of any screen, first thing in the morning.
I want you to go outside first, even if it's just for a few minutes, leave your [00:34:00] phone. The world's not gonna fall apart. So leave your phone inside and go outside and look around and just breathe and let your eyes adjust to the light that is real. Look up
And then come back to your work, your phone, your screens. As you begin to add more real light to your day, I want you to look for those shifts in how you are feeling.
See, this is where you need to think about what you're thinking, so you can pull in that data, and I think you're going to be surprised that you'll feel better. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who has been living behind a screen and wondering why they're feeling blue or burned out.
Sometimes the most generous thing we can do for the people we love is to share the treasures that we find [00:35:00] interesting, that have elevated our lives and made them better. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. I appreciate you so much. I'll be back with you next week, and I'll have something truly wonderful coming your way.
Again. until then, go outside, look up. I'm Beth Buffington. This is Create Today, and my wish for you as always is. Stay creative my friend.
