Is Creative Anxiety Limiting your Success and Happiness?

By John Bowe, Journalist and Public Speaking Expert.

From an evolutionary standpoint, humanity has been well served by the sweaty palms, stomach cramps, and racing thoughts associated with anxiety. In a world of woolly mastodons and warring tribes, the auto-release of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol provoked the dramatic, flight-or-flight response that enabled our survival.

In modern times, however, anxiety and its physical manifestations are rightly considered detrimental to the successful execution of everyday tasks like planning, decision-making, and creative problem-solving. 

Most of us recognize the idea of "creative anxiety" when we see it depicted in books and movies about tortured artistic luminaries: the neurotic fashion designer, Halston, for example, freaking out in countdown to Paris Fashion Week; Sir Isaac Newton, who formulated the laws of gravity was prone to bouts of depression and once suffered a mental breakdown; Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park lean into panic as part of the creative process. They always wait until the last minute, leading to more spontaneous brainstorming and the inability to second guess themselves and rewrite episodes.

But we seldom pause to consider our own reaction to the creative challenges of everyday life.

Regardless of our profession or proscribed realm of expertise, most of us are called upon to guess, to improvise, to lend our subjective opinions in service of creative problem-solving. Insurance company administrators (like the rest of us) labor over the proper wording of every email. Salespeople and managers of every stripe compose slides, charts, and other visual aids to support sales presentations and technical updates. What occupation doesn't occasionally require employees to assess marketing efforts and training initiatives, help plan holiday parties, or otherwise contribute to group discussions comprised of subjective judgments? 

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Creative activities, large and small, require us to be authentic, take a risk, and expose ourselves. Do the feelings of vulnerability, self-doubt, and fear of rejection or ridicule they cause to trigger the physical manifestations of anxiety? Does the fight-or-flight response to fear cause you to avoid and run from challenges you can and must solve for everyday success? 

In 2019, Georgetown University cognitive researcher Richard Daker set out to explore the impact of creative anxiety on everyday people. As Daker explained, in all fields, but especially areas like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, "It's common to find individuals who recoil when they're asked to generate a new idea of their own." With the growth of artificial intelligence outpacing and quickly replacing traditional forms of cognitive labor, he theorized, creative tasks like original thinking and improvisation will soon be the most valuable skills of all. "In the modern innovation economy, avoidance of creative endeavors will become an increasing impediment to advancement."

Daker's insight – to isolate creative anxiety from general or social anxiety -- stemmed from an earlier effort led by Georgetown colleague Ian Lyons to study students' fear of numbers, specifically those of other academic subjects. The result of his study, the Math Anxiety Scale has become a useful tool allowing researchers to determine how math anxiety, separately from intelligence and ability, affects students' mathematical performance. 

Daker wondered what could be learned in a similar vein by separating and measuring the anxiety generated specifically by creative thinking and problem-solving? The result: The Creative Anxiety Scale.

Daker began by asking subjects to assign a rating ranging from zero (for low anxiety) to four (for high anxiety) to a series of situations representing tasks they had to imagine performing. A set of creative situations included:

• Having to come up with a creative solution to a problem

• Having to come up with a unique way of doing something

• Having to think about something from a novel perspective

• Having to improvise

The tasks above were mixed on a list with specifically non-creative problem-solving situations, including:

• Having to solve a problem in the exact way you were taught to do so

• Having to precisely follow an established method of doing something

• Having to think about something according to a fixed system

• Having to carefully follow instructions

The results allowed Dakar to separate subjects suffering from general anxiety from those specifically aroused by anxiety about creative tasks. The first surprise was how little the type of creative task seemed to matter: subjects fearful of original thinking, for example, reflected similar levels of anxiety about improvisation. Creativity overall posed a consistent threat. 

However, more surprising for Daker was the degree to which the survey's findings correlated with specific outcomes about the lives of his participants. "Even controlling for other forms of anxiety," he commented, "creativity anxiety was predictive of people's real-world creative achievements." As one might expect, high degrees of creative anxiety steered subjects away from overtly creative fields like writing, comedy, culinary arts, and music. But they also limited subjects' ability, despite overall intelligence, to solve problems requiring innovation and originality. 

Daker's study, published in 2020, has already inspired researchers eager to further understand the effects of creative anxiety. During the spring of 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as schools nationwide began to shut down, Ross Anderson, a senior researcher with Inflexion, a nonprofit educational consultancy, applied the Creative Anxiety Scale to a cohort of teachers coping with the onset of online teaching. Not surprisingly, given the swift need to improvise and re-tool original lesson plans, Anderson found that teachers with higher creative anxiety levels reported higher stress levels as they struggled during this period compared to teachers with lower levels of creative anxiety. 

Anderson's and Daker's subsequent research indicate that creative anxiety is hardly a fixed commodity. Regardless of profession or background, most of us can reduce our creative anxiety and unleash higher levels of innovative thinking and original ideas. 

Daker, probing potential therapies based on his colleague's success in treating sufferers of math anxiety, is currently exploring several promising avenues. Cognitive reappraisal, for example, guides sufferers of speech anxiety to reassociate the sweaty palms and stomach knots of anxiety with feelings of excitement, adventure, and motivation. Through expressive writing, individuals learn to describe their feelings in anticipation of stressful events, calming their nerves and getting emotional distance from anxious thoughts. 

The most hopeful solution for overcoming creative anxiety is to practice-- by exercising one's creative thinking skills in low-stakes environments. "If you give people practice being creative over time," Dakar explains, "and increase their comfort with that process, it's likely that the creativity anxiety itself will go down." 

In the words of author Elizabeth Gilbert, "Creative living is a path for the brave." But whether you're Picasso, Adele, or just… you, there's no way around it: life requires creativity. Stressful or not, it's time to start supporting, rather than shunning, the creative genius within you. There's no sin in feeling anxious. By learning to live with your feelings of fear, you may be surprised by what you can achieve.