How To Boost Your Creativity with 5 New Self Care Techniques

Taking care our ourselves as artists is something we often overlook. We expect to instantly be able to create great masterpieces from nothing, after having not created a thing for weeks, or we think every idea should blossom into something perfect, and chide ourselves for making the slightest “mistake”.

Being with ourselves 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, makes it all the more easy to neglect ourselves, take these kind of things for granted and have impossibly high expectations.

By learning to look after ourselves and nurture our creativity, we can naturally boost our creativity much more easily than we might think.

It all starts by respecting yourself, and valuing your creativity. If you were supporting a good friend of yours through a new creative project, would you chastise every mistake? Would you expect every moment of creativity to be perfect and flow without hiccup? Would you keep questioning his worth as an artist, and the validity of what he was creating?

No, no, and no, not if you were any kind of supportive friend. Yet you’ll happily do these kind of things, and even worse, to yourself.

Here then are 5 techniques to help you take better care of yourself and your creativity:

1. Nurture a regular creative habit. By forming habits, we can achieve great progress almost without thinking, because the habits become embedded in our daily behaviour. You already have some daily habits, but maybe they’re not the most helpful to your creativity. By simply creating for 15 minutes each day, you begin to tap into your natural underlying creative flow, instead of expecting to go without creating anything for weeks or months then suddenly be able to come up with a work of creative genius. Steady and often is the key, allowing creativity to seep into your life and take its rightful place.
   
2. Reduce negative thinking. Talking of habits, something we all do is engage in negative thinking or self talk. If we want to give this an identity, it’s the inner critic. Because it’s a habit, you do it without realising most of the time, so the crucial first step here is to become more aware of when you causally throw in a destructive or critical remark to yourself. When you do, simply replace it with its positive opposite. For example: “You have no creative talent anyway” could become: “You are a uniquely talented creative artist.”
3. Acknowledge and encourage. Imagine a friend of yours was training for a marathon run. They don’t just decide to do the marathon and then turn up on the day with no training. They’ll begin months beforehand and commit to a regular regime. Their achievement is not just about running the marathon, it’s everything leading up to it to. In creating, we tend to only consider an achievement as being something huge like finishing a novel or holding an art exhibition. Your creative life contains many acts each day. Acknowledge how creative you are in ALL you do, and it will naturally encourage you to be more and more creative.
   
4. Take care of yourself physically. Feeling good physically goes a long way to helping you feel more creative. There’s more than a little truth in the saying “a healthy body is a healthy mind.” What habits do you have now that have a detrimental effect on your creativity? How energised do you feel about life generally? If you always feel drained and lethargic, it’s only going to make it harder for you to be creative. I’m not suggesting you can’t be creative unless you spend 3 hours a day pounding the treadmill in a gym. Personally, I can’t think of many more unpleasant and boring activities! So find something active that you enjoy, whether it’s walking, dancing, cycling, tai chi, yoga or something else. Improving your physical health can have dramatic positive effects on your creativity levels.
5. Be your own best friend. In a way, this technique is the only technique you need to take care of yourself and your creativity. We all know how to be a good friend because 1. We have friends who we support and encourage, and 2. We have friends who support and encourage us. Think of all the things you do for yourself that you consider as things a good friend would do. Do more of these. Then look at all the things you do to yourself that you’d never dream of doing to a friend. Like being critical, dismissive, derogatory and so on. Start to cut these out and replace them instead with a best friend kind of love.

Follow these 5 self-care techniques and you’ll quickly notice a boost in your creativity.

Remember the most important person in your creative life is you. If you don’t look after yourself, how can you even begin to be as creative as you know you can be?