Creative Block Survival Kit: Habits to Foster Inspiration & Growth

Blocked creativity is a big challenge I hear a lot of artists face in their work. Writer’s block, artist’s block, whatever you may call it, we all know that we’ve felt it at one point or another.

But honestly, creative blocks are a whole lot more complex than people might think. In fact, I think the phrase “creative block” is actually a straight-up fallacy.

I don’t think we’re having a creative block at all. I think we’re having physical, mental, or emotional tensions that are making us unable to access the truthful, open parts of ourselves.

So instead of addressing trying to “be more creative” when battling that creativity slump, I think we need to address the three main elements that I talk about all across the blog:

✹ 1. Your space

✹ 2. Your body

✹ 3. Your creative career (systems & manifestations)

What is a Creative Block?

A creative block is not actually a lack of creativity, but rather a state of physical, mental, or emotional tension that prevents an artist from accessing the truthful, open parts of themselves necessary for authentic creative expression.

It’s a symptom of underlying issues related to one’s space, body, or creative career systems, which hinder the natural flow of inspiration and artistic output.

The 3 Causes of Blocked Creativity (& How to Fix Them): How to Overcome “Creative Block”

Spatial/Environmental Tension (Home)

Our living space plays such a big role in fostering or hindering our creativity.

Spatial/environmental tension happens when our home doesn’t have the 3 Cs that make it into the much more ideal home studio:

✹ Coziness — your space needs to feel like you can be physically comfortable. You can sink into the couch, cuddle in bed, or comfortably work in your creative zone for hours (if you want).

✹ Curated — your space needs to be well-designed in your design style! If you love Scandinavian, Boho, Japanese, Minimalist, Cottagecore, or likely a combination of multiple to create your own style, your home needs to be consistent with what sparks joy for you.

✹ Conducive — your space needs to be conducive enough for you to create with ease. You need your recording set-up, or your art supplies out, or your pottery-making easily ready for you to create. Minimal set-up, maximum creativity.

The solve to releasing spatial and environmental tension and creativity blocks: ✨ turn your home into a home studio. ✨

Bodily Tension (Body)

At the risk of sounding cliche, our bodies are our temples! We can’t do anything without having as much freedom in our bodies as possible.

That means when our body is filled with tension, we can’t do a lot of things. We can’t access our most open and honest selves, we can’t be physically comfortable, we can’t access our instrument to the best of our ability so we can create.

There are a lot of regular rituals and practices you can follow to nurture your instrument so you can alleviate bodily tension and therefore artist’s block.

And while some of them did require me to purchase things, you can do a lot of these things for free!:

✹ Going on afternoon walks to break up sitting

✹ Infrared light therapy

✹ Eating a plant-based lifestyle

✹ Keeping your air clean

✹ Roller skating

✹ Sweating (hot yoga, sauna, or outside on a hot day!)

✹ Take free dance classes from YouTube

✹ Deep stretching

✹ Dry brushing

✹ Acupressure mat

✹ Acupuncture

✹ Massages

✹ Facials

The solve to releasing bodily tension and thus unblocking creativity: ✨holistic and sustainable tools and rituals. ✨

Productivity/Systems Tension (Creative Career)

I bet you can immediately tell where there’s tension in your career right now.

Maybe you’re working overtime in the career separate from your creativity, and when you try to get to your art, you don’t have the artistic motivation and instead feel creative burnout.

Maybe it’s feeling the growing pains of your newly born creative career.

I know the feeling when there isn’t any organization to the madness, and it makes you feel absolutely crazy.

I know things aren’t always as easy as “get another job!” or “Just quit!” Either way, there are two main saving graces from career tension: SYSTEMS & MANIFESTATIONS.

Here are some ways I’ve implemented ✨SYSTEMS ✨to alleviate career tension:

✹ Use Asana as a project management tool. I use Asana in so many ways and I know there are still a lot of ways I can use it even more.

You can get the free version and simply start out by creating tasks for yourself in the “My Tasks” section and put it in Calendar view to visualize your entire week.

✹ Use Zapier to connect tools together to eliminate clicking on my computer. I.e., instead of creating Google Docs manually all the time, I create a Zap that creates a Google Doc whenever I add a tag to a task. So easy!

✹ Create restraints. I know I could find a way to spend all day working. But when I challenge myself to get as much work done in an hour as possible, I am so much more productive!

I schedule as many hang-outs, appointments, yoga classes, exercise breaks, throughout the week as possible so I can force myself to get up and get s&$# done!

✹ Batch batch batch. Why write just one blog article when I can write two simultaneously? I open up two blog articles in two tabs and duplicate the tasks I need to do (write the description, outline the article) one after the other so I can complete two in one sitting.

The brain will go much faster when it can context switch as little as possible. *I get blog articles done at least 3x faster this way. (How do you think I’m writing right now? 😉)

✹ Add joy to less-than-fun tasks. There are a lot of things I do not like doing. So, I make it a point to turn on a podcast for things I don’t need full concentration for, and turn on music for things I do to make it more enjoyable. I light candles, incense, and vibe out my home studio so I can feel in the zone.

This is a light cousin of James Clear’s concept of habit-stacking, where you create a habit by pairing it onto the next one. I.e, hate doing dishes but love watching TV every night at 5pm? Do dishes while you watch TV.

Here are some ways I’ve implemented ✨ MANIFESTATION ✨to alleviate career tension:

✹ Create a manifestation lock screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if we look at our phone backgrounds more than 100 times a day. So why not have something as your phone background that will actually help your career? Currently, I have three affirmations that I desperately need to remind myself of, but you can also have your goals listed on it, too.

I go more into detail about that in this video:

✹ Create a vision board. According to the Law of Attraction, your mind does not know the difference between seeing something in-person vs. visualizing something. And naturally, it’s going to want to fill the gap between something you visualize so you get more and more of it.

You can create a manifestation dream board one via creating a collage from a magazine (I love using Magnolia) or through a digital tool like Pinterest and then Canva to edit it all together. Put this in a place you see multiple times per day, like your lock screen, desktop wallpaper, bathroom mirror, right in front of your bed, etc.

✹ Dream with no limits. There are so many people who will limit their dreams because it doesn’t sound practical, but that’s literally not how dreams work! In order to create this vision board, you need to dream beyond what is practical. Practicality has a place in the systems section, not in here.

You’d be surprised what is actually possible and how the things you’re dreaming of it’s actually that difficult to achieve with the right plan. But even so, you need to have big big big dreams and then work backwards with your systems to create them.

If you limit yourself to being strategic and practical in this section, you will not be fulfilling what you want to be!

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