You’ve lost that lovin’ creative feeling. Sing it with me in your best Righteous Brothers impersonation. But in all seriousness, have you ever felt you lost ALL of your creativity? It’s as if you suddenly went from being a person whose creative juices were flowing, a super creator bursting with ideas, a Lola Dutch type of person. And then…you’re stuck. Ugh. Gut punch. I’ve been there often, and most recently spent the bulk of this past spring and early summer immersed in a creative slump. I’m finally coming out of it and am sharing ALL the strategies and ideas for how to get your creativity back.
My Creativity Block Story
In early spring, I started to feel that familiar feeling. Stress was seeping in, and my creativity was diminishing. Ugh. I’ve been here so many times, you would think I would have a playbook by now to pull me out of it. Checks notes. No, no playbook but in my defense, each instance is different.
Most of my creative side revolves around renovating and decorating our home. It’s where I feel most creative and free. Thrifting, repurposing, painting this or that, or designing the just right for us furniture piece to build. Fortunately/unfortunately, I’ve made a career of sharing that passion as a content creator and writer. So when I felt my creativity slipping through my fingers, I also felt an avalanche of stress, pressure, mental health problems, and my overall health tanking.
The moment I knew I was neck deep in the creative slump muck was during the kitchen pantry shelves project. Specifically, when I couldn’t decide on a stain for the new kitchen bookcase and felt no motivation to style the new open shelves, I knew I was in trouble. I’ve never met a shelf I didn’t immediately want to style (or restyle). Where did my creativity go?
How To Get Your Creativity Back
My first steps, always, when I feel this way, are to take a break and check in with my mental health. Hence, why they are strategies number one and two below. If you do nothing else to exercise and restore your creative skills, do these two. Then work your way through some of the other strategies.
1. Take A Break
Sometimes you just need a break from your creative ideas. Step away and let everything breathe, and don’t be afraid to go cold turkey for a while. It’s amazing what happens when we give our brains and our bodies the space to rest, relax, and recharge. Sometimes, this is all it takes to get new ideas flowing in freely.
Daily life can get intense. The to-dos, responsibilities, and roles we all play in our lives. That’s why, for me, the best way to set aside things is to schedule dedicated time to rest. Seriously, write it down, put it in your planner, and make sure you do it. It’s ridiculous how the act of scheduling rest makes it feel okay to do, or like we have permission to do so.
Creativity can sometimes feel like a chore. Set it down for a bit, grab a book, and see what happens.
2. Assess Your Mental Health
And get help if you need it. This is a significant obstacle and can be one of the biggest hurdles to the creative process.
While there is a stigma of the tortured artist, I find, along with many of my other self-proclaimed creative types, that the opposite is true. It’s hard to be creative when we’re going through a tough time. Human brains aren’t designed to be in high cortisol, panic attack mode, and creative mode at the same time. Many mental health issues go hand in hand with narrow, inward thinking. Show of hands, whose inner critic is strong when they’re feeling down? It’s me, hi.
Shortly after seeking the help of a therapist for my mental health challenges, I slowly started to listen to my inner knowing, I learned tricks to silence the inner critic, and I embraced the creative person that I am. When I tame the critic, those “I should be using my degrees and not pursuing creative work” voices in my head quiet down, and creativity flows.
3. Go Outside The Box
Sometimes creatives are put in boxes, by society in general or even by themselves. For example, where I’m most creative is in how I renovate and decorate our home. It’s my favorite creative outlet. But sometimes, it no longer feels fun, and the creativity is gone. So I set my niche aside and looked to another creative medium for a bit, and created for the sake of creating.
I’ll pick up painting or work on crocheting a scarf. Sometimes I’ll just draw with the kids or make clay art and see what happens. It doesn’t have to be good, (for the record, my children are much more talented than I in clay figure creation), and it doesn’t have to be shared with anyone. But it just has to be outside your normal creative field.
If you’re a writer of fiction, try crafting some poems. Jewelry maker? Try painting. Just choose something you’re drawn to and don’t overthink it. There’s no such thing as the wrong direction for the new experiences we explore.
4. Or Just Go Outside
Nature and sunshine can be restorative. So go outside, take a walk in the woods, or just soak up a little vitamin D.
I am the kind of person who taps into my creative potential during a solo walk in the woods (or just down our road). Some of my best ideas have come during those walks while admiring a sunset or watching a loon duck under the water for a fish. Many a bathroom layout ideas have been conceived while sitting on a rock next to a lake. And for that, I’m forever grateful for living that rural, country life.
Picture from our most recent outdoor excursion, a trip to York, Maine and a walk over the wiggly bridge.
5. Take Your Hand Off The Pressure Valve
Nothing kills a creative spark quite like pressure. And yet, we are soooo good at heaping on the pressure.
This may have been the main reason for hitting the wall this year. Let me paint a picture. At the time of my creative demise, I was also experiencing a significant decline in website traffic due to a search engine core update. This led to a significant loss of income, which just so happens to be what fuels our creative projects. On came the pressure to post more, create more, do things more perfectly, find new marketing avenues, and fix what I thought was broken on my site.
It wasn’t much fun. As soon as I took a break and released the pressure valve, suddenly I was generating ideas for how to do projects on a lower budget. I now have oodles of ideas and energy to pull from.
7. Try A Creative Daily Practice
This might be the most enjoyable strategy for overcoming your blocks: develop a creative daily routine. Perhaps it’s exploring a new hobby, trying different creative writing prompts, or doing a doodle a day (which, I must admit, does not keep the doctor away… I tried… sigh).
As a writer and content creator, a daily writing practice outside of your niche can be SO helpful. I tried working on daily writing prompts using my Promptly Journals (sponsored), resurrecting my daily gratitude journaling practice, and also writing stories in the kids’ memory journals. It was so restorative to write more freely, yet guided, on something that wasn’t about our home. Writing felt fun once again.
Whatever you do, be consistent and work it into your daily habits. The goal is a little bit of creativity every day.
This summer, we’ve been working away on the girls’ playhouse. Another of the creative daily habits I tried was coming up with a color combination for the playhouse each day. It was so much fun to just play with color and come up with wild, bold color combos. None of the combos are ones we plan to use, but it was a fun exploration of color. Spoiler, here’s the playhouse color combo we landed on.
8. Ditch Social Media For A Bit
What is the famous quote? Comparison is the thief of joy, or something along those lines? Social media can be like that. I find social media the thief of my creative joy. If I spend a long time there, I’ll find myself in the pit of creative despair.
There are just so many ideas and inspirations out there on the socials. Which is great until it either starts making me feel like I’m not creative enough, or I’ll see someone else pulling off an idea I had, and their results are just so much better.
For a lot of people, scrolling through their social media accounts also makes them a consumer, NOT a creator. I would rather create than consume.
Consider this your gentle nudge to take a break from social media if you need to resuscitate your creativity.
9. Find Some Alone Time
Moms of young children, this one is for you. It’s also for everyone who is perpetually around others or in caregiver mode. Find some time to be alone.
You know what makes my creative output take a nosedive? Constant interruptions. And did you know that when you’re a stay-at-home mom, the children need to be fed multiple times of day? Who knew?! Note the sarcasm.
I like saving my most creative projects for when I can be alone or for when I know I’ll have some quiet space to create. I’m so grateful for a village around me to help make space for my creativity. It’s not alot of time, but it’s enough.
Carve out some alone time and create. Even if it’s just spending a little time immersed in an adult coloring book from your home state of Maine.
10. Meet Up With Like-Minded Individuals
Blessed are the creatives who have a close friend or a group of creative-thinking friends for a get-together to bounce ideas off of. It’s the one thing I miss about working in an office with a team of people. We always got better outcomes when we brainstormed and worked out creative issues together. I’ve tried to replace it with ChatGPT, but an AI bot is just not the same as your creative village.
So call up your creatives, meet up to talk about your ideas, or even just create a group text to help you work through that creative block. Sometimes, just hearing about the projects others are working on is enough to spark your creativity.
11. Go Thrifting
This strategy is strangely specific to the niche I work in, but thrifting will bring me out of my creative slump almost every time. Even scrolling through Facebook Marketplace will do it.
Here’s how it works. See a twenty-five-cent ceramic jar at the thrift store that’s not my style, but has a great shape. Pick it up and envision it as bathroom storage. Explore the options in your head for how to refinish it to look like something off the Anthropologie Home site. Creative juices are instantly flowing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Just wait until you see how I refinish said jar! And that $2 lamp from my latest thrift haul is begging for a Rub ‘N Buff refinish.
Your Creativity Will Come Back
When I think of creative blocks, all I can think of is that annoying phrase, “if you love something, let it go, if it comes back, it was meant to be.” I hate that quote, but it has legs (although one might be a pirate peg leg) to stand on when it comes to bringing back creativity.
Give it some space and have faith that it will come back to you. It will. Your creativity isn’t dead in the water; it just needs a little recharge.
I’ve found my creativity returns from the most unexpected places when I give it a break. Often the shower, sometimes while sitting still watching the kids play, letting my mind wander where it will, or while performing the most mundane tasks.
Now that mine has returned, it’s back to making this house our home, my favorite! In the words of Lola Dutch, I am just bursting with ideas. Now to enlist Bear (my husband Colby) to help make them a reality.
Pssst…How do you restore your creativity? Do you have a tried and true strategy you use? Feel free to share in the comments below.
