Creativity Fitness
We all know that regular exercise, even as little as 20 minutes a day, will have lasting benefits, in terms of health, fitness and well being.
But what about Creativity?
Most people understand the importance of maintaining physical fitness, whether you are physically active or not.
What isn’t as widely understood is that maintaining a level of creativity fitness is just as important.
Creativity is like a muscle.
To get the most benefit out of it, creativity needs to be exercised regularly.
Maintaining a regular creativity fitness routine will have lasting benefits on your mental health and wellbeing, just like a physical fitness routine does.
You already know that you can’t run a marathon after spending 6 months on the couch. Without any pre-training, your muscles aren’t prepared for the strain you’re about to put them through. Chances are, you’ll have an unpleasant experience, you might not finish the race, you may even injure yourself and it will probably be a demoralising experience you will never attempt again.
Whether you’re an experienced athlete, or attempting the race for the first time, if your muscles are not conditioned, you won’t perform at your peak, no matter how enthusiastic you are.
Creativity works in exactly the same way. If you’re not actively creative, don’t expect to perform at your best when you are in a situation requiring an intense burst of creativity, such as renovating your kitchen, planning a wedding, launching a new business, or coming up with six weeks of holiday activities for the kids. If your creativity muscle has been on the couch for six months, just like the unprepared marathon runner, your creativity muscles will be out of condition and chances are, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, you’ll probably find the whole process tiring and stressful. If you don’t give up all together, without a certain level of creativity fitness, most people achieve less than their initial enthusiasm promised.
Unfortunately, the most devastating outcome from this type of experience is that many people come to the conclusion that they’re “just not creative enough” or that they are surrounded by difficult people, situations, and lack of resources which prevent them from being creative. When in reality, they just don’t have the level of creativity fitness required to perform at their best.
As a child, we are all “creative”. We paint and draw and tell stories and play games for hours a day. Guess what we are doing? Building up creativity fitness. We don’t need to be told, or shown how to do it and we don’t need expensive resources, we just “play”. The Christmas stories we all tell about the toddler preferring the box it came in rather than the present illustrate this.
As we get older, the opportunities for “play” become less, to make time for school, work, family responsibilities and the pressures of life. We don’t become “less creative”, we simply allow our creativity muscles to atrophy. They are still there, as “flabby” and out of condition as they might be, but they didn’t go anywhere. They are waiting for you to exercise them again.
Creativity fitness is not just useful for artists, writers and musicians.
Creativity is a useful skill when it comes to problem solving and resourcefulness in everyday life.
