Prioritize Creativity by Engaging in Creative Activities: Ep. 5:7

Welcome to Episode 7: Prioritize Creativity!

This is the last episode that goes along with the book, as it is the last section of the book. We are on Chapter 5, Section 7: Prioritize Creativity.

Never fear! I’m not going anywhere. After a short break this summer, I’ll continue recording podcast episodes with tips to help you along your healing journey. I also plan to interview experts on practical steps to help you get rid of anxiety, negative thinking, low self-confidence, depression, and more. In this episode, I

🐇explain why creativity is on this list of happiness habits

🎨 share how important it is

🥘 discuss how creativity pursuits encapsulate all other tips already shared in this book

📝 list reasons why creativity benefits you

🪴give examples of creative activities from my life (That’ll be a long list, and it’s not near complete because there are unlimited ways to engage in creativity.)

This episode will inspire you to get your hands dirty in some creative endeavor. And doing so will make you happier, more confident, healthier, and more connected to yourself and your loved ones. Enjoy!

“When you robust-ify your mammalian brain, it’ll be more available for you when you need it. Your brain is like a muscle. Keep it strong by practicing, adapting, building skills, having a growth mindset, expanding what you can do, and trying hard things. That’ll contribute to a happier life. You’ll feel more comfortable and confident and have less anxiety and depression. And you’ll need fewer vices, too. When we’re upset, we all too often turn to things to make us feel better that make us feel more out of control, like addiction, violence, eating problems, and dangerous behavior, to name a few. You won’t need to do that when you robust-ify that mammalian brain.” – Dr. Jodi Aman

Listen to the Prioritize Creativity Episode

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Transcription of the Prioritize Creativity Episode:

Hey, you’re here with Dr. Jodi, and this is Season 5 of the “Anxiety, I’m So Done With You” podcast. This podcast is a teen and young adult guide to Ditching Toxic Stress and Hardwiring Your Brain for Happiness. If you’re new here, grab a copy of my book, Anxiety, I’m So Done With You! because this series is going section by section through it, going a little bit deeper, giving more examples, and telling more stories. This season follows Chapter 5, “Self-Care is the New Health Care.” This book promises to ‘hardwire your brain for happiness.’ This season I deliver on that promise. We focus on seven essential happiness-generating habits, contexts, activities, and practices for you to incorporate into your life to stay healthy, positive, and resilient to whatever life throws your way.

There’s a myth at play if you’ve been feeling bad for a long time. You might think that happy people are lucky and that you are not; that you are different. While context matters to your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health, your context is only partially determined by privilege, genetic expression, and random luck. The rest is determined by you. In this season, I show you how to harness that “you percent,” decolonize your self-care, and let your highest potential shine through all of the gook in your life.

Thank you for listening, subscribing, and leaving me five stars on Apple Podcasts. Also, come hang out with me on YouTube and TikTok @DOCTORJODI where I give you practical tips for your brain, body, and spirit. Please spread the word about this book and series because mental health problems are skyrocketing, and I need you to help me turn the tide.

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Welcome to Chapter 5, Section 7: “Prioritize Creativity”

This is the last episode that go along with the book, as it is the last section of the book. We are on Chapter 5, Section 7: Prioritize Creativity.

🐇explain why creativity is on this list of happiness habits

🎨 share how important it is

🥘 discuss how creativity pursuits encapsulate all other tips already shared in this book

📝 list reasons why creativity benefits you

🪴give examples of creative activities from my life (That’ll be a long list, and it’s not near complete because there are unlimited ways to engage in creativity. But before we start, I just wanted to check in with you to see how you’re doing.

How is your anxiety? I hope it is less, and you are still listening to this podcast for these happiness habits. (Obviously, if you hear me saying these words, you are still listening!)

I’m curious about what makes people listen after they’re feeling better. I hope you see value for you, knowing that because I helped you feel better, my happiness habits are on par. They are! They are from 25 years of working with people. And they work!

Maintaining Happiness

This is the thing: Even when your anxiety is gone, or if it is much decreased, or if your depression is better, you still need to work at maintaining happiness. People don’t get better, and then that’s it; they stay better forever. They have to continue each and every day generating their wellness, to keep things in their life that help sustain that wellness. And they need to continue to remove things that harm.

This is the thing: We’re living in this world where bad things happen all the time. There are negative energies out there, you might get picked on, or people are mean to you. You don’t clear yourself and you’re clean and now you could go on to life, and it’s better now. No, we are always processing back out, what we have taken in that doesn’t serve us.

Hopefully, you can prevent some of the things you don’t want from coming all the way in. Here’s a way to think about it. If you tasted something new and weren’t sure how it would taste, you just took a little bit on your tongue. If you didn’t like it, you’d spit it out, if it was gross or you didn’t like it at all, you’d think, “Ugh!” and spit it out, not even taking it into your whole body and system. That’s what would be great if you did that because it is easier not to have to get rid of it. Sometimes people are mean and we don’t even want to take that past our outer energy limit. We could say, Is this for me? No, I’m not taking it into my heart.

However, many experiences, especially intense ones, are overwhelming and affect us, so we have to learn how to release them.

The Happiness Formula Review

Remember the Happiness Formula: Get rid of things that make you suffer. And those are constantly coming. We have to constantly clear them out! Then, bring into your life what makes you happy, what brings you joy. And then, practice every day.

So you’re never done; you have to keep practicing. Not being done doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. None of us are done. We will always continue to grow, and expand our knowledge, consciousness, skills, and ideas. When we stop developing, we feel stagnant. And that doesn’t feel very good.

Humans are made for this expansion and development. We were made to grow, learn, adapt, be creative, and figure things out. Our brain biologically was made to do that. So that feels really good. Even when it’s a challenge, it feels good. Even when you’re being creative and you’re trying to figure something out and it’s hard, or heavy and you want to know how to lift it, and you’re trying to figure out how to lift it––when you’re solving problems like that, it feels good because we’re made to face challenges like that.

Will Smith tells a story about building a wall with his brother. His father made him and his brother build a wall when he was young. And it’s a great illustration of this point. Having a challenge and figuring it out and having to learn how to do it and decide what to do and make those decisions is so valuable. Unfortunately, due to modern conveniences, young people don’t have that opportunity as much as they had in other generations, even my generation. And I’m over 50. Even in my generation, we’ve had so many modern conveniences; I haven’t done really heavy chores. I’ve never built a wall, for example.

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So what’s creativity doing on this list?

All right, let’s get into this episode. In the 5th chapter of the book, we are prioritizing happiness habits. I encourage you to prioritize relationships, surroundings, movement, nourishment, rest, purpose, and now, creativity. So what’s creativity doing on this list? Creativity and imagination exercise the mammalian brain. You want your mammalian brain to be powerful and robust because it’s our best friend in overriding anything that doesn’t serve us. That fight or flight reaction is the sympathetic nervous system reaction. Sometimes it triggers when we are not literally in physical danger, so we don’t need it.

We don’t want to get rid of the sympathetic nervous system altogether. When we need it to survive, we want it online. So we’re not trying to get rid of that. When it gets triggered, yet we discern that we don’t need it, we need the mammalian brain to override it so we don’t get lost in the anxiety.

Remember what I said at the beginning of this series? Anxiety is a leftover fear response when you’re not in physical danger. We want that fear response online, but we don’t want that leftover fear response when we’ve decided we’re not in danger. Your mammalian brain can say, “Okay, everything looks okay. We don’t need you. Thank you so much, amygdala, but we don’t need you right now.”

Your Mammalian Brain

When you robustify your mammalian brain, it’ll be more available for you when you need it. Your brain is like a muscle. Keep it strong by practicing, adapting, building skills, having a growth mindset, expanding what you can do, and trying hard things. That’ll contribute to a happier life. You’ll feel more comfortable and confident and have less anxiety and depression.

And you’ll need fewer vices, too. When we’re upset, we all too often turn to things to make us feel better that make us feel more out of control, like addiction, violence, eating problems, and dangerous behavior, to name a few. You won’t need to do that when you robust-ify that mammalian brain.

Instead, turn to activities that make you feel better and stay better, like creative activities. Everything episode in this season talks about actions you can turn to when you need help. When going through a hard time, you can turn to relationships, rest, movement, comfortable and beautiful surroundings, nourishing your body, purposeful acts, to give some meaning, and creative endeavors. (Creativity is included in all of those if you think about it.)

The human brain was made to problem solve.

Solving problems keeps us growing mentally and emotionally strong. Creativity is another way to say problem-solving. When you’re designing something, you’re making decisions all the time. Like, How am I going to do this so it works this way? You’re problem-solving. You didn’t have an answer, and you have to get the answer.

An example

For example, if you were woodworking and were going to make a box, you would have to figure out if it’ll have a lid. You’d have to decide if the lid is just going to sit on there or if it will be hinged so it opens and closes. Will it lock? If there are hinges, will they be on the inside or on the outside and part of the design? You need to decide what color and how big it will be. All of those things are problem-solving. You begin without an answer; then, you have to think about all the options and decide.

Problem-solving is asking: How can I do this? Or, how else can I do this? You are essentially brainstorming, thinking about how many different ways you could do something. Brainstorming is what helps your prefrontal cortex develop.

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Brainstorming

Brainstorming is underrated. People rarely consider how powerfully helpful it is and how good it is for our emotional well-being and for relationships. Sometimes parents lecture their kids, or they give advice when they haven’t been asked for advice. It could be more helpful if they offered to have a brainstorming session together. The two of you can go over the scenario and list a bunch of different responses. Then, you’d discuss the possibility of those responses, giving you conscious time and information to choose a path forward. Also, it teaches you what to do the next time you are in a predicament.

Brainstorming is excellent. Rather than giving unsolicited advice, which can come across as judgmental, it’s co-creating options. This is the same skill that we use when we’re making meaning. When something we never experienced happens to us, we immediately start to make meaning because we want to make sense of it. We want order, and that comes from understanding it. And we make meaning according to things that have happened to us in the past or beliefs that we have. If you have negative thoughts about yourself, you could take that someone didn’t text you back as they don’t like you. You make meaning according to what you believe or experiences that you’ve had in the past.

When an event happens, there are many different ways you can think about what happened. So if someone doesn’t text you back, they could

have gotten their phone taken away,
been in the shower,
had a meeting,
written their text in the text window and forgot to push send,
they’re burnt out, exhausted, or withdrawing from social situations,
they thought they’d get some information before they texted back, and maybe they forgot for a little while.

Many ways to be creative

here are so many reasons why people don’t text back right away. Their not liking you is only one of many, many possible reasons. When you build your skills in brainstorming, it could help you think of all those reasons and then not just conclude that they must be that they hate you. So creativity is you figuring out an answer to what you want to do.

t could be gardening, crafting, painting, painting and decorating a room or painting a scene on paper. There are tons of mediums that you could use in your art.

Organizing, like organizing a closet, is being creative. You have to decide where everything goes and how to make it more organized. Making videos, writing, writing stories or poems, photography, decorating cakes or baking, selling things, cleaning, learning something, sculpting, planning parties, acting, dancing, giving gifts, woodworking, as I said, model building, drone flying, and even sports are creative. You’re problem-solving the best decisions at the moment. There are unlimited ways that you could be creative in the world.

Benefits of Creativity

So let’s look at the benefits of creativity. Creativity

strengthens the mind
helps you learn, expand, and grow
encourages a growth mindset
connects you with others (especially when you give things that you make to them)
makes you feel appreciated
reflects off who you are back to you
enhances your relationship with yourself and your sense of yourself
gives you a purpose
feeds your soul because it is what we want to do to survive
Creativity fulfills the brain, which is made to do this. When we are creative, our soul feels like we’re doing what we’re supposed to do. That goes along with your purpose. It builds confidence because you start to see yourself as skilled and able to figure out complex things, find the loophole or the unique thing that no one else has seen before, and create something unique.

It makes you feel good about yourself. It’s fun to find that piece that you’ve been looking for in an antique shop and then make it what you want to make it. You feel productive when you’re creative. And then, as a result, you have cool things that you’ve made, really cool experiences that you’ve had. There are endless, endless, endless benefits here.

You crave creativity. You crave it. It’s the most natural thing. So again, challenging tasks charge us up because we are built for them. Not big problems, not injustices, betrayals, or devasting events. We’re not made to do that. We have the skills to handle them when they come to us because this world is unfair, and these things happen. We don’t want them to happen. They don’t happen for a reason, but bad things happen, and we can decide how to go forward after those things happen.

We are almost done

I’m sad. I’m sad that this part of the series is over, but I feel confident that you have everything that you need to create the life that you want to create. And now you just have to practice. But listen, if you’re still feeling bad, if you still have some anxiety and depression, guess what? You’re human. You may still have a little bit. There’s going to be some bad days and some good days. I don’t want you to suffer, though; if you have anxiety to the level you’re suffering, we can eliminate that, too. You don’t have to stay here.

Why do you still have anxiety?

It might be that you’re still afraid of it. Some people have gone through my five steps to healing anxiety, and yet, they still have a little bit of anxiety left. At those times, I notice it is most often because they’re upset about that little bit of anxiety. So if you got rid of 90% of your anxiety and you still have 10% left, but it bothers you. If you are like, “No, I don’t want to have any; I don’t want it.” That’s probably why you still have it. That little bit of upsetness is what is keeping it. Get rid of that by being comfortable with yourself having anxiety. If you are 100% comfortable with yourself having anxiety, then and only then will you let it go and you won’t have it any longer.

If anxiety comes back, don’t say, “Oh no, I didn’t really get rid of it, I can’t believe it came back. This is going to be awful. I’m going to be suffering for months and months.” Don’t say that! If anxiety comes back, know what caused it. I’ve taught you that. Expect that anxiety is going to come back sometimes because we still have the sympathetic nervous system.

So there will be stress and situations and perfect storms where you might feel anxiety one day, and it could bring terror to you that it’s coming back, but that fear will only perpetuate it. If you expected it and you say, “Oh, I get it, I’m hungry, it’s really hot today, I’m away from home for the whole day at this sporting event, and I understand why it’s happening, it’ll be gone by tomorrow.” It will be gone by tomorrow.

Consciously addressing anxiety

If you knew what it was and you said, “Wow, my adrenaline is up, I’m going to eat something good, I’m going to go to sleep tonight, I’m going to be fine tomorrow,” it will not mess up your life for months and months and months. It will only be today, and that’s it.

But if you had anxiety in that kind of situation and you were like, “Oh my gosh, that’s it, I didn’t do it, the book didn’t help me, the podcast didn’t help me, and now I’m going to suffer for a really long time and my whole life I’m going to have anxiety.” What’s going to happen? You’re going to have it for a lot longer. Use this podcast and book as touchstones to reset you into your confidence again in case anxiety comes back. Remember, if you got rid of it before you can again. When you’re not afraid of it at all, it won’t last more than that day.

Thanks so much for reading

How are you doing? Are you ready for this? Are you ready for this life? It could be amazing. You could bring joy into your life. You could bring good people into your life.

Yes, there’ll be bumpy and hard days, but you can go through them. I so appreciate your attention, your sharing, your commenting on my blog posts, and especially, as you know, I need those five stars on Apple Podcasts. In this episode, we discussed creativity and talked about why it is essential to your happiness. We brainstormed ways that you could be creative and listed some of the benefits of creativity. Not all of them, because we’d be here all day, but we listed some of those benefits to you, your family, your friends, your community, and the entire world.

This has been such a sweet journey that you and I have had together. Life is a journey of sustaining your wellness. You’re not different. Happy people generate happiness, and you could do that, too. I know there are injustices, and we must commit to doing something about them. But in the meantime, keep working on finding your abilities within the limits so that you can expand those limits and feel free to spite them. Keep practicing, and remember to hang out with me on YouTube and TikTok at Doctor Jodi, where I give more practical tips for your brain, body, and spirit. See you next season, and until then, let the you, that you want to be, shine through.