E134 - Anatomy of a healthy creative
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Speaker 2: [00:00:00]
Hello
We've been told that we need eight hours of sleep, that we need to exercise more, and we need to eat our fruits and vegetables. But did you know that we have a fourth pillar of health that no one ever really talks about? One that we've been told is just a hobby, a nice-to-have, something that you can do after everything else on your to-do list is done.
So what is that fourth pillar? It's creativity. Yes. And today we are going to talk about your personal creative fitness. And here's what you should know. Science is revealing that making things, creating with your hands, like painting and sculpting and sewing and gardening and making spreadsheets or baking, making soap or candles, I mean, whatever your [00:01:00] creative medium is, well, making something, it produces real measurable changes in your brain and in your nervous system.
Being creative lowers stress hormones, and this provides a calmer mind and body that has better clarity and sharper focus. And science shows that creativity measurably produces some pretty wonderful results for your whole body. These are the kind of changes that we typically only expect through better exercise or sleep or nutrition.
So today I want to show you the anatomy of a healthy creative, and we're going to talk about what's actually happening to your heart, your mind, your body, and your soul when you are creative. And stick with me because you're going to discover exactly [00:02:00] how you can be creatively fit, no matter your age, no matter your creative talent, your experience, or your skills.
And this all happens when you use a framework that I've been building called Going FourWords With Your Creativity. Welcome, my friend. I'm Beth Buffington, and this is Create Today. If this is your first time here, this is a creative space where you'll learn how to use your creativity to be happier and healthier in heart, mind, body, and soul.
Inside Create Today, we explore the benefits of being creative through my Going FourWords framework. These are four words: revive, realize, refine, and release. Going FourWords is a creative practice that explains, guides, and equips you with the [00:03:00] ideas, the tips, and the tools to make you a stronger and more confident creative.
And my friend, you do not need to be a crazy talented artist to see the benefits of creativity blossom in your life. And if you are a talented artist, you'll find that when you practice Going FourWords, it will help you monitor and maintain the creative energy that you need to be your creative best.
And today, we're going to do something a little different with these four words. We're gonna use the four words to map out what the anatomy of a healthy creative looks like. Because creativity isn't just something you make, it's a whole body event. And my friend, science says so. So first, let's explore what happens when we [00:04:00] don't or when we stop creating.
You see, we don't just lose out on a fun hobby if we're not creating. No, We lose our edge. We get foggy. We let stress and anxiety run wild in our imaginations. And our inner critic, it feels like the boss of us. We get disconnected from ourselves in a way that is kind of hard to name, which is why when so many of us stop creating, we don't realize what is happening to us because we're not creating.
And I hear the same story over and over from the creatives and students that I work with. They tell me they often only allow themselves to do their own creative work when they have free time. The creative professionals that I work with often realize that they're only being creative when their creativity is being produced for a [00:05:00] project for someone else, and this has a deadline attached to it.
And if there's no client, no reason, no one wanting it, it must not be a priority, and they feel guilty doing something that isn't on their to-do list. And they tell themselves, "I'll do my own creative work when I've got free time." Oh, and for people who are busy with families, or careers, or dealing with medical issues, or finance, personally, or with friends and family, well, creativity often feels like something that's frivolous, that can only be enjoyed when all the pressures of responsibility are done.
And you know how that goes. Responsibilities and your to-do list, they're never done. So free time, it doesn't just show up on your schedule. And when free time unexpectedly [00:06:00] happens, you are just too exhausted to put your whole heart into the thing that you have been longing to do.
not creating your own creativity, that is creative malnutrition, and this can be just as hazardous to your happiness and to your health as a poor diet or not exercising or not getting enough sleep. This is your brain missing out on something it actually needs to function properly.
So let's take a look at how you can be creatively fit instead of malnourished. Let's see what a healthy creative anatomy looks like, and we'll do this by using my FourWords framework. The four words, remember, are revive, realize, refine, and release. Our first word is revive.
Now, revive is all about [00:07:00] monitoring your energy and your nervous system. Revive is rest, and this is refueling for your mind and for your body. Most importantly, it is knowing when your energy levels are low and you need to refuel before you experience burnout.
Now, when you allow yourself time to create, even for just a few minutes, your body shifts out of fight or flight and into rest and repair.
In one study, a single 45-minute session of creativity was enough to measurably lower cortisol, and that's your main stress hormone. But here's what I really love about this. You don't actually need a full 45-minute session to start building your creative fitness.
In the past, I've talked about the value of tiny moments of creativity, and I shared about how you can microdose [00:08:00] your creativity in just moments. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there.
Those small, snackable moments, they add up to calm your nervous system too. And I will share this episode about those tiny moments of creativity in the show notes. Now, when you start building or rebuilding your creative fitness, the amount of time spent, that is less important than the showing up to do something creative consistently.
When you revive, that's allowing time to monitor and refuel your energy, and that happens only if you can stay consistent with checking in on yourself and refueling what has become empty. It's interesting, right? Now, let me share how you can make this revive word actionable in your life,
especially if your [00:09:00] creativity, and I mean creating for yourself, not for others, especially if your creativity has been on the back burner lately. Here's an easy way to ramp up your creative fitness by using the word revive in your life right now.
So I want you to set a timer for five minutes, and I want you to sit somewhere
where there is natural light and do nothing but doodle or scribble or color or write. There will be no goal, no finished product required, no messing around to reach perfection. You're just going to mindlessly let your brain and your creativity flow.
And when the timer ends, I want you to stop, even if you're mid-sentence or mid-doodle. And let me tell you why this helps you revive your creativity. The [00:10:00] actions you're doing here aren't about making something good or meeting a deadline. It's about giving your nervous system a short, structured break from the fight or flight mode.
That five-minute timer makes the doing easy. It's easy to do, it's easy to find the time to do it, and it's easy to allow yourself the permission to do it without guilt. I mean, it's only five minutes, right? the quick five minutes removes that pressure to finish something, which, my friend, is often what keeps a lot of people from even starting.
But also, the key here is consistency. And I'm gonna say that again.
the key to making your creative fitness either get built or rebuilt isn't the time, it's the consistency. It's coming back to it, and coming back to it [00:11:00] day after day. So I want you to aim to do this five-minute task of just creative fun every day for a week, and see how you feel.
And don't be surprised if you're compelled to add even a little more creativity to your day. Our second word is realize.Realize, well, that's your eyes seeing your world, and your brain waking up to the world and seeing its goodness all around you again.
This is getting out of the robotic motions of a daily routine and realizing the beauty in the world around you. You notice, you gather, you get inspired, and the part of you that gets busy noticing, well, this is the part of you that's been running on autopilot, and it's waking back up.
My friend, [00:12:00] when you allow yourself time to be in the realize stage, it will feel amazing. Now, here is an easy way to add this realize phase to your life and ramp up your creative fitness by using the seeing and noticing abilities from realize in your life right now. So I want you to plan on taking a five-minute walk.
So you're gonna put your phone away, and it's gonna be in your pocket or a backpack or if you're really brave, just leave it at home. But I don't want it in your hand, and preferably nothing, and preferably nothing in your ear, okay? So before you begin your walk, I want you to choose a thing to concentrate on.
A shape, a color, or sounds, a texture. Concentrate on your chosen thing [00:13:00] with all of the senses
that are needed to recognize and appreciate whatever your chosen thing is. So look for a color that you wouldn't have noticed, a texture that you can stop and feel with your hands or your feet, or seek out a shape like a circle, a square, a triangle, or something strangely organic that you'll discover in rocks or clouds or other objects that you'll see on your walk.
When you find whatever it is you've chosen to concentrate on, I want you to say whatever you've noticed out loud, or jot it down in a notebook. Or if you do bring your phone with you, just pull your phone out long enough to take a picture, and then put that phone away again. And here is why the realize phase works so well to build your creative fitness.
You see, realize is about waking up your noticing system [00:14:00] again. When we run our days stressed out or fried from anxiety, or we're sleepwalking through our day on autopilot, we tend to miss out on the now in our world. and so much of the beauty in our world is in the now.
When you take these five-minute walks, it forces your eyes and your brain to actively scan instead of passively doom scroll or to let your mind just fog out on autopilot. These are the exact things that cause atrophy in our brain when we are stuck in stress or anxiety or autopilot
Our third word is refine. The anatomy that I want you to realize in the word refine is in your hands and in the motor centers of your [00:15:00] brain. You see, refine, it's the doing, the actual making. The painting, the stitching, the building, the baking, the whittling, the gardening, whatever your creative activity is.
When you're working with your hands, you're engaging your motor cortex and the part of your brain that processes touch, and this is all happening hand in glove at the same time. That's a genuine brain, muscle, nervous system workout, and it's how you build new neural pathways over time. So what refine, the doing of the work, is doing inside your brain, well, it changes depending on what you choose to make.
for a painter, this means time at the easel or at a mural. For someone who quilts or sculpts or gardens or bakes, well, it's an entirely different set of muscles, but it's always a full body, mind workout. [00:16:00] So here's an easy way to ramp up your creative fitness by using the word refine in your life right now.
So I want you to pick up whatever creative tool you need to use to do whatever creativity you've chosen to create. Is it a paintbrush? Is it a needle? Is it pen, clay, a digital pencil? What is it? And then I want you to work on one small specific piece of a project for about 15 minutes. I don't want you to consider the entire project.
I don't want you to think about perfection or how you need to finish something. I don't want you to focus on problems. I just want you to choose a section. One stitch pattern, one portion of a garden, and I want you to set that timer so you have permission to stop. Remember, we're working this time with 15 minutes.
Just [00:17:00] 15. so let's look at why refine is going to help build or rebuild your creative fitness. Refine is an actual brain workout. It's firing up your motor cortex and your touch processing, and it's all working together building neural pathways.
So 15 minutes of focused hands-on work, it's not a lot of time, but it counts. It doesn't require that mythical free afternoon to be a real refine or do the work time. The timer again, this is important because it's giving you that permission to do your creativity for this short amount of time.
This is keeping you feeling less guilty because you're not wasting an afternoon doing something that wasn't on your to-do list, right? The hardest part about giving yourself permission to work [00:18:00] is usually just getting started. And when you're only granting yourself 15 minutes, well, that's an easy wish to grant.
But then I want you to notice that if after the timer goes off in 15 minutes, if you discover you're in a groove, by all means, continue
Our fourth word is release, and I want you to understand how the anatomy of a healthy creative fits into the word release by understanding that release is found in your heart. It's about building creative fitness for this emotional muscle. this is the stage where you build the strength and the confidence to let stuff go.
You practice building bravery in the release stage so that you can call a project done, and let someone else see it, or use it, or buy it. [00:19:00] It's also where you learn how to let go of other things that are no longer useful for you, things like old versions of yourself that are holding you back from your dreams and your goals.
It's where you learn to let go of the grip that your inner critic has on your mind. It's where you build the confidence to say, "My creative voice has something worthy to share." And there's real science here, too. The same brain chemistry tied to trust and bonding is also tied to creative flexibility and the courage to be vulnerable with your own work.
So releasing isn't only finishing something. It's trusting your work and yourself enough to send it out into the world to do what it was meant to do. This is where you will blossom as a creative. You stop almost finishing your work, [00:20:00] or you stop hoarding your finished work in some back closet to release someday.
And so that you can practice how you can release, here is an easy way to ramp up your creative fitness by using the word release in your life right now.
So I want you to find one unfinished or finished piece of your work to share with one person today. This could be a photo that you text to a person, or a post that you make to a small group, or simply saying out loud to someone that you know, "I made this. Look." And I want you to stop yourself from over-explaining or pointing out your flaws that you think you see on what you have either finished or almost finished. So no captioning or explaining why it's not perfect, or what still needs to be done to make it better, [00:21:00] or what was happening in your life that kept you from making it better.
No excuses. And here is why the release stage works to build your creative fitness. You see, release, it's the courage stage. When you let someone else see your work without over-explaining or apologizing for it, it is what builds the trust and vulnerability chemistry that we talked about earlier. Release is a way to practice those small shifts in little steps that will help you strengthen a larger muscle, which is your tender, vulnerable heart.
Practicing how to release is going to build the belief that your creative work is important and should be shared with the world. Release is going to build your confidence. And confidence that's in your heart is a muscle that needs repetitive exercise, [00:22:00] and it starts with something small, like sharing one creative idea with a friend today.
Now, I hope that you can see how these four words, revive, realize, refine, and release, are crucial for building your creative fitness.
You see, when you use these four words combined together, they help form the anatomy of a healthy creative. And my friend, if you're someone who is thinking, "Well, I'm not creative, Beth.
I can't even draw a stick figure."And if you're thinking, "I doubt any of this matters to me because I probably will never sell a single piece of art," I want you to understand this.
Going forwards to build your creative fitness, it has nothing to do with gorgeous finished products, with talent or skills, or even [00:23:00] getting better at whatever your creative passion is. Going forwards with your creativity is just about the being creative that creates the fitness, you see? When you take time to be creative, that's the magic.
When your heart, your mind, your body, and your soul, when they are creatively fit, you'll discover that your creativity is going to benefit other areas in your life. It's going to help with your relationships with family and friends.
It's going to increase your happiness. It's going to build your confidence even more. And your career, even if your career is not considered creative, it's going to help you find better solutions to problems, communicate easier with the people you need to work with, and so much more.
When you're using these four words, [00:24:00] revive, realize, refine, and release on a regular basis,
you're training your whole system to problem solve, to stay calm under pressure, to become more resilient, and to find that ever elusive creative flow that we all dream about
Now let's take a quick pause for a word from our sponsor, and that sponsor would be me.
If anything that we're talking about today has you thinking, "Oh, I need more of this in my life," I want you to know something is coming in July that's built entirely around Going FourWordsโข.
This is a space to actually practice going forwards with your own creativity. It's guided by me, it's taught by me, but you'll enjoy learning to go forwards with a community of like-minded people. So you're not alone in your head trying to figure it all out by [00:25:00] yourself. Now, I'm just finishing up all the details but it's gonna happen very, very soon.
This month, this July. And if you're listening to this in August, then it has already started. Come and join the fun. But if you are wanting to know more, you need to be on my email list so that you can be the first to know when new things are happening. So go to www.bdi-create.today and get on my email list.
or you can go to the show notes to find a live link that will take you directly to the Create Today website
My friend, your creative fitness doesn't need to be a finished masterpiece or a published novel. It doesn't need to be shown in an upscale gallery. [00:26:00] It requires you to stop treating your creativity
like it needs special permission, like you can only be creative after all your responsibilities have been completed today.
And creative fitness, that means you understand that your creativity is as vital for your happiness and your health as getting enough exercise or enough sleep or having a healthy diet. So let me give you a creative prescription for your creative fitness. Pick one of the four words, revive, realize, refine, or release, and then do one
of the actionable practices that were given to you today that belongs to the word that you've chosen, and that's it. And you know from what we talked about, none of that is going to take very long, five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and you can begin to rebuild or build [00:27:00] your creative fitness.
And that is how you can create today by going forwards with your creativity. Now, I hope you discovered today that a healthy lifestyle isn't only about what you eat or how much sleep you get or how much you exercise. It's also about how you make creative time a priority in your life. So how will you create today, my friend?
Thank you so much for joining me today. And if this is the first time we met, let me tell you how much I value your time. I would love to have you continue to join me as you explore your creative health.
So hit follow or hit subscribe or whatever you need to do on the platform that you're either listening to or watching on, because we are building something together here. And consistency is the key to your success with your creativity.
and if you know [00:28:00] someone in your life who needs to know more about their creative fitness, please share this episode.
And if you want to be part of what's coming in July, make sure you're on my email list at www.bdi-create.today. I cannot wait to see you there, and I cannot wait to see you next week as we talk more about how you can be creatively fit. So check the show notes for links that will take you exactly where you need to go to learn more about Create Today offerings.
Are you ready to go forwards with your creativity? Where does your creative fitness need the most care right now? I want you to take a moment to consider that, ponder it, and make a decision. And then take a moment out of your day to give yourself the permission to follow your creative passion.
Because when you are going forwards, that is how you become creative, and that [00:29:00] is how, my friend, you stay creative
