Are you feeling creative?

And how this feeling can be misleading

I have been working on an emotion diary app How We Feel for a while. It helps people describe their emotions, provides words for those times when we just cannot find the right term to pinpoint what is going on in our lives, builds our emotion vocabulary, and provides tools to expand our repertoire of strategies to more effectively manage our emotions. You can check it out here if curious; it is free to use.

Part of working on this app is to learn from customer feedback. The app has 144 pre-built feelings, but much of the feedback ends up expressing a desire or a need for additional emotion words. And that is what got me thinking of the word creative as a feeling.

Of course, I heard people talking about feeling or not feeling creative. I just never before paused to consider what is behind it and whether it is really helpful to talk about creativity as a feeling.

Well, I don’t think it is.

Let’s start with what is behind this statement and then see why it is not helpful.

When we say we feel creative we imply that:

1. Creativity depends on a particular kind of feeling or emotion

2. People associate feeling creative with positive and energized moods that broaden thinking and make us playful and daring.

3. By implication, what we do when we do not feel this way, well, is not creative.

Creativity is indeed influenced by our feelings. We can be inspired by seeing someone suffer, for instance. This is how Doug Dietz, design and development lead at General Electric, created an MRI experience tailored to children who were terrified of going through the diagnostic machine (He made it into a pirate adventure, making previously scary noises and crammed space into a meaningful and fun experience). Or we can draw on our own emotions and those of people around us in writing (e.g., Amanda Groman’s poem The Hill We Climb expresses hope) and art (from Edward Hopper drawing from disconnection in his early years as a struggling artist to Ansel Adams’ profound reverence for the vast landscapes of the American West).

These examples show that creativity we can see and experience in works of art or design or products that impact our lives comes from a broad range of feelings. There isn’t one kind of feeling that is uniquely associated with creativity.

Yet, we say we feel creative when we feel buoyant. Energized. Enthusiastic.

How do we square this?

The problem is that we consider creativity to be an act of unrestrained idea generation. It is true that in pleasant energized moods our thinking is more expansive. If you had to think of new ideas for topics to cover in a newsletter or a series of essays, feeling happy is truly helpful. We can indeed come up with more ideas and more original ideas in a short period of time and we feel more confident in our abilities when we are happy.

But this is not the only kind of mood that can lead to creative ideas. When we are activated in an unpleasant way, we can also come up with creative ideas, such as thinking of how to redesign something we find frustrating or ideas for making a technology more accessible.

Another issue in saying that we feel (or do not feel) creative at any given time is the implication that what we do in different mental and emotional states is not creative. We think that it is not creative when we sit to review and revise what we have drafted before – whether that be something we are writing, a design prototype, or a new work process.

And that is where the problem lies. If you accept that creativity ends with something tangible, it is not just an idea for an essay, but an essay written. It is not just a thought, “That could be a great song lyric”, but completed lyrics to a song. It is not something shared with a colleague about how work can be improved, but actual design of a new work process. To get from a thought in our heads to something in the world, we need not only to think in broad ways – something we call creative thinking in everyday life – but we also need to test these ideas, revise them when we discover they don’t work in reality like we imagined them in our minds, and generally improve them. This is all part of the creative process, although it does not ‘feel’ creative and we do not do it when ‘feeling’ creative.

What we mean by feeling creative is just a very narrow slice of the creative process. One that we unfortunately idealize and even fetishize. But not the hardest one. Not only one kind of feeling will help creativity, but many – enthusiasm that broadens thinking, downcast moods that narrow it and enable us to evaluate and critically think about what we drafted, determination to push us on, curiosity to keep us asking questions, frustration to make us volunteer to solve those problems we see.

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There is much more about emotions and creativity in The Creativity Choice: how to use them (Chapter 6), how to manage them (Chapter 7), and how to cope with them when they get overwhelming in times of creative block (Chapter 8).