30 things to do when you hit a creative block
I’ve been struggling with my creative energy lately...
I’ve been struggling with my creative energy lately.
So as any slightly neurotic personality type does, I decided to express my creativity through a list of creative strategies to revive my creativity.
An unhinged list of strategies
Make a list about anything. I believe the most fundamental creative exercise is making lists. When I was a kid my favourite website (which I’m elated to discover still exists) was listography.com. An oasis for type-A listiclers obsessed with organizing ideas.
When done well, a good list encompasses both sides of the creativity coin: divergent and convergent thinking. Thinking theatrically and thinking thoughtfully.
If you want to defibrillate some creativity into your dormant mind:
find a fun topic (consider using the Explore button in listography to hunt down some ideas)
write down your first 30+ unfiltered ideas
highlight your favourites
then sit with those favourites for a bit. Try to understand why you like them so much. Because if your creativity is hiding anywhere, it’s in your unique tastes.
Make a list of creative strategies for combatting creative blocks. Avoid cliché advice. You’re not just some random background character to someone else’s platitudes. You know that you’re actually a weirdo. Which means that you’re going to need some uniquely weird weapons to conquer your creative antagonists.
Take notice of how you think in different spaces. In a moving vehicle, enveloped in nature, surrounded by people, floating on water, etc. The quality of your thinking is environment-dependent. To unlock new perspectives, feed your field of vision new foods.
Trade your desk in for the floor. Embodied cognition says that our bodies and brains are connected more than we realize. It’s not super surprising when you consider things like muscle memory or how your body reacts under stress. So if we want to change our thinking then we should also consider changing the position of our bodies. For me, I notice I feel more grounded in my thoughts when I’m more grounded to the ground.
Reconnect with your inner child. Fluff a pillow and then slowly and steadily hold it over the smirk of your inner critic while it sleeps. Once that’s done your inner child will feel a lot more free to make the unencumbered observations that your inner critic has been silencing for a while now.
Test out an alter ego. If you haven’t yet suppressed all of your crazy, then open back up the lines of communication with one of your more unpredictable inner voices. Give them the mic for a bit and hear what they have to say.
Shock your system. If your creativity is quiet, maybe it’s suffocating from a lack of oxygen? In the same way a person loses consciousness without air, I think our creativity can suffer the same fate. Breathe quickly and deeply. Do something that gets your heart pumping blood to your brain. Give your creativity some CPR.
Learn easy random skills. You’ve been focusing on the same thing for far too long. It’s like eating the same meal over and over and over again, hoping it’ll satiate the same craving you’ve been chasing since the first time you made it. Feed your mind something new.
Deep dive into a topic with AI. How long can you hold a convo with your favourite AI? Our conversations with AI are mostly comprised of questions and our curiosity to deep dive into topics. Those are the same traits that define any solid interaction with our creativity. So what if we could spark our creativity by picking a topic and aiming for 30+ messages diving into it?
Remind yourself of your values. Creativity can’t exist without constraints. And the most important constraint is always first knowing what we hope to get out of a creative session. Revisit your values to remind yourself about what you care about most.
Fantasize about something fantastical. The creativity you’re looking for doesn’t exist yet. That’s why you’re having such a hard time finding it. So try looking in places that don’t exist either. Daydream about a world that operates under a completely different set of rules. One that exaggerates or eliminates entirely the problem you want to solve.
Read while taking notes. Creativity requires depth of thought. That’s why so much of it happens in our subconscious. Train that skill of deep thought by reading deeply. Take a break to read about something that interests you and take notes while doing it.
Clear your mind. I never understood how people met each other in nightclubs, trying to shout conversations over loud music and distractions at every angle. The same is true for our minds. Sometimes our inner voices get so loud it makes it impossible to have a productive conversation. Not to mention all of the voices outside of our head vying for our attention: from the posts we scroll past, the videos we watch, the books we read, and the people we talk to… silence and solitude are under-explored solutions.
Go analogue. When it comes to writing, common advice tells us to separate writing mode from editing mode. That we should refrain from filtering our ideas at the start. Going analogue is a good way to accomplish that. It’s a lot easier to backspace our ideas on the computer than it is to edit them on paper.
Write a thorough description of your ideal outcome. Without a reminder of your resolve, your creativity is vulnerable to any of your changing interests or whims. You’re likely multifaceted and desperate to achieve your goals. Which means that you are susceptible to doubting your decided approach. But having a reminder of what you’re working toward is one more weapon in your arsenal against that doubt.
Talk to yourself out loud. The protégé effect tells us that we learn better when we teach others what we’re learning. I’d assume the same thing works for creativity. Have a detailed talk to yourself about what you’re trying to achieve and just maybe you’ll learn something along the way.
Set a timer. Time is a tricky constraint. It can either paralyze your creativity or accelerate it. Try setting up some time blocks. Set a timer for a 10-minute creative session, followed by a 10-minute break to do something else. Then repeat that sequence with 15 minutes each, then 20, then 30, and so on. Make time your tool, not your tyrant.
Tempt yourself with a reward. If the intrinsic value of your creative goal isn’t enough to seduce you, try fixating on something else. Keep it in mind and just out of reach until you’re able to achieve at least an MVP version of what you want.
Make a list of your potential blockers. Getting to the root cause of your creative block is essential for coming up with a reusable strategy for when it will inevitably happen again. Use systems thinking for this one. Consider every variable that could be affecting you.
Work with your hands. Sometimes it’s easier to find the flow state when we’re working with our hands: crafting, chores, etc. And since the flow state is so often tied to our creativity, giving ourselves a taste of it might help revive it.
Reconnect with a creative space unique to you. There were times in your life when your creative energy was at an all-time high. Think back to those moments. Where were you? What were you working on? Try to recreate those moments as much as possible.
Make noise. Oftentimes, our creative process is a solo practice. We coop ourselves up somewhere relatively calm and quiet and try to work our way through our challenge. But when our minds start to fall asleep, sometimes we just have to say it out loud loudly: WAKE UP!
Turn it into play. Whatever creative task you’re doing, there’s almost always a way to make it more fun. Figure out a way to turn it into play. Make a game out of it. Use movement, use scoring, use rewards. Have fun.
Ease the pressure. There’s a lot of pressure involved in trying to come up with unique ideas. That pressure often manifests as paralysis, and critiquing and judging your ideas before you’ve even written them down. To ease the pressure, try to make it a rule that you’re only allowed to come up with bad ideas first.
Play dress-up. Think about when you were a kid and you dressed up for Halloween. Once you put on that vampire costume, you became a vampire. You felt your fangs, you felt powerful, you felt like you were invincible. What we wear has a huge effect on how we feel and how we think. If your current outfit isn’t doing your thinking any favours, then maybe try putting on a suit or a bow tie and a wig. Just switch it up and wear something that puts you in a different frame of mind.
Have a conversation with someone. Some of the best ideas are a result of social emergence: when two or more people with different ideas come together to generate a completely new idea that neither of them would have come up with on their own. Find a good convo partner and chat them up.
Switch to an active channel. Action movies energize me. So do some of my favourite shows. So perhaps a way to activate our creative energy is to recreate the energy of the channels that make us feel activated. Try to tune into the soundtrack of your favourite energizing flick. Maybe even watch a clip from it. Use your favourite media as a method for your madness.
Connect the dots. While lists are, in my opinion, the quintessential creative act, mind maps are just as powerful. Pick a topic, maybe the one you’re working on, and think about as many related ideas as you can. It’s a game of word association and that’s what creativity is largely about: connecting dots where others don’t see them.
Hype yourself up. What does your creative energy feel like? Mine is a little bit chaotic, a little bit devious. It feels like it’s about to do something diabolical. Knowing what yours feels like can be one of your first steps to forcing that energy out of yourself.
Be weird. Unless you’ve undergone full adultification, you still have weird qualities that make you uniquely you. Pick one and think of it as your superpower. Find a way to use it to your advantage. Find a way to intertwine it with what you’re working on.
Conclusion
If you’re also a creative carnivore gluttonous for good ideas, please feel free to offer up your own bizarre battle strategies for bypassing creative blocks, because I’d love to try them out!
And if this post fit your fancy, you might also like:
→ How to be the most creative person you know (even if you are not creative)
→ How to become a genius level thinker (the map of thinking styles)
I’m Lamar Elimbo, a designer and developer synthesizing digital minimalism, practical psychology, and experience design to help us reclaim our mental clarity from a world designed to co-opt our attention and agency.