There’s a thing in our house we refer to as ‘Contractor’s Flu’. Back when my husband was a documentary-maker-person, he would have back-to-back contracts for the twelve months up ‘til Christmas, and then for the two week’s he had off, he’d get the flu. As predictable as clockwork.

A similar thing happens to many students; over the course of a semester or term, internal forces are rallied. You do the work, submit the assignments, possibly party on the weekends, your internal dials set to go, go, go until you slam up against the holidays and find there’s nothing left to draw on any longer.

I mentioned in my post last week that I was making some Creative Prescriptions for willing members of my group, and when outlining the situation for me, one of them suggested they enter a competition for their writing. They wanted to use the deadline as a driver, a reason to push themselves but the push was the self-flagellating kind.

Call me crazy, but I’m rather attached to keeping suffering separate from the creative process. It’s an overdone trope that I’m keen to leave behind.

And in the same breath, I understand how we’ve got ourselves into this weird perspective pickle. And that if we do want to create from a place that is sustainably joyful, we might need to figure out how to extricate ourselves from this pattern of making, creating and working that lurches between acceleration and hard braking.

Where we begin to crave a less adrenalised ‘creative maintenance energy’ as the truly desirous energy kind.

So, what’s the deal with the go, go, go… and then boom, collapse?

At this point, I’m going to do something a bit annoying and link you to another thing I wrote. It goes into the nervous system mechanics in more detail, and also saves me repeating myself, which you’ll find boring. You can find that article here.

In a nutshell:

When we refer to the sympathetic nervous system (conversationally known as fight flight) or the parasympathetic nervous system (the place we operate from when we are creative, conversational and relational) we are talking about systems of movement.

Everything that we do—literally everything—is rooted in one of these two systems. This background understanding is important for what I’m going to attempt to explain right now.

So, play with me for just a moment…

Let’s move forward with the understanding that you put your attention on many different things over the course of your day. And the kind of attention you pay to each of those things is also different, depending on the context.

For instance, how you attend to something related to work will typically be given a different type of focus and attention from something that you feel more curious and playful around, that you consider to be a hobby.

These differences aren’t inherent, but that’s typically what we find.

Our learning styles are much the same. How we’re encouraged to learn, our particular type of brain and nervous system, the environment that we learned in, the person that we learned from all shape our learning experience. And depending on what we’re dominantly exposed to, we develop learning and working behaviours that correlate with those conditions and habits.

Learning and creative habits that are rooted in the fight flight nervous system usually form when early conditions were built around rote learning and repetition — where there was only one acceptable pathway that led to a single, expected outcome. In those environments, the body learns that action is something to “get right,” not something to explore.

Conversely, the creative nervous system develops through play-based learning. That doesn’t mean there was no outcome or intention, but the route to get there remained open. You might have had a starting point and a desired end point, but your brain and body were free to figure out how they wanted to organise themselves along the way.

What does this mean in practice?

Let’s use the student as a working example. Say your learning style is rooted in the flight fight nervous system. You approach a project as though your predator and prey. You focus in on what needs to get done. Your awareness is channeled predominantly towards the object of your attention.

As we move into the fight flight system, our sensory focus narrows. We block out all extraneous information the brains deem superfluous to our mission so we can follow the mechanisms of survival.

Fuelled by a cocktail of fight flight hormones, the body rallies. You become sharper in all ways that correlate with that need; intensely focused on the task at hand, channeling all your resources towards the desired outcome- and all other systems that in this context are considered secondary- digestion, sleep, hormone balance for example- get turned off or down.

The survival nervous system is a system of compromise. The working deal is that your overall wellbeing is negotiated for the greater aim of survival. For short bursts, this is a contract we’ll gladly shake hands on. But when it becomes our dominant way of living, learning and creating, then sooner or later we find our energy has a shelf life. And before we know it, the pendulum has swung over to exhaustion, depletion and collapse.

Put simply: It’s not a way of creating, making or being that is sustaining.

We are taut elastic bands that, under tension, can only hold their shape for so long before they become limp and floppy. Our bodies are really much the same.

Parsing Apart Creative Energy from Adrenalin

A fascination that I discovered early on when working with movement-related-nervous-system stuff, is that when someone shifted out of fight flight and into a more sustainable mode, they described their experience as ‘sleepy’. I heard this repeatedly:

I’m tired, I’m drowsy, I feel kind of foggy headed.

At first, I wondered if they were just really tired but then it became something more. I realized that when a state of fight flight living has become normalized, anything separate to that feels flat, inert, and kind of wrong.

So much so, that the closest association we have with that state of being is often sleep.

I’ve been fortunate to have people stick with me long enough to emerge the other side. Where the ‘un-adrenalised’ state of being is no longer novel.

Where the brain and nervous system start to respond and experience in ways that are associated to sustainability and longevity, not just survival.

But it’s almost like a detox. A willingness to inhabit a different state of being long enough to wind down. And a belief that you won’t lose the parts of yourself that you want to hang onto in the process.

That you’ll still be ‘yourself’ when you come out the other side.

How does this relate to our creating?

In all the many ways. If we approach creative projects from a place of fight flight, then it’s likely that this swing between acceleration and collapse will be familiar.

You’ll tend to find it easier to make and create when there’s a deadline, a fixed outcome or set of objectives for your work, and outside of that, day to day creating can feel absent, uninspiring or illusive.

It’s not that you can’t, don’t or won’t get things done, but there’s a cost. And one that increasingly shows itself over time to the point where (heaven help us) we wonder if we should pack in this whole creating thing altogether.

So, what’s the remedy?

I don’t have a clear and finished answer. After all, the truth of each of our creative lives can’t be condensed and finished off in tidy loops.

It’s also dependent on whether we recognize this accelerator-brake lurch as our dominant way of living, or our dominant way of creating- they aren’t the same thing.

In the case of the former, we need to ease the system out of a place of chronic fight flight (a combination of sensory activation, novel movement, and perspective shifts that might currently support a way of being that’s reactive and unsustainable).

But if we were to consider this solely from the position of creating, I feel like the nudges can afford to be more subtle.

And I suspect a big part of that answer might be joy.

Along that line, I have a question for you:

What do you want to believe about your creative practice?

I’ll go first to get us started:

I want to believe that it’s a vehicle of expression.

I want to believe that it’s collaborative; that I’m in conversation with this vast creative force around me, and that if I just stay in that flow, creative experience is endlessly available to me.

I want to believe my creative self is someone who can be trusted. Whose thoughts I can listen to and act upon.

I want to believe I can create not from a place of urgency or a need to prove, but from a place where I’m in conversation with my insides, an alchemy of sorts, that I share with the wider world.

That it doesn’t have to be hard. That it can be light. That it can be simple.

That I can accept who it is I am and keep on going. That this will always and forevermore be the start point.

That creativity is not a breakthrough, but a series of ever-present openings.

And that as long as I stay faithful to the moment, creativity will always be faithful to me.

Creating from a place that is sustaining requires internal calibration.

…And even if we struggle to understand exactly what it is we are aligning or calibrating with, we can perhaps start to understand it better through what it’s not:

Creating is not urgent.

It’s not a test.

It will not ask you to sacrifice yourself to the process.

And it does not require that you suffer.

And if you believe contrary to the above, consider that what you’re holding onto, your ways of approach are something learned rather than inherent.

It’s a conversation with life moving through you, and life shows up in all manner of varied ways.

There is a tricky part…

Of course. (Re)committing to our creative practice first and foremost as an essential part of our wellness will inevitably make space for all these outdated thoughts and feelings to rise up to the surface. It can even poke and provoke them.

You’ll have to pace yourself, no doubt. To observe the gnarly, pesky thoughts but not invest in them. Perhaps this is the Zen part of creating. To grow your capacity to both hold and shed what’s no longer useful and continue to create along the way.

I have so much more to add to this- the logistics, the fine-tuning, the body bits, but this is where we’ll leave it for today.

It’s all practice, isn’t it? Creating from a different place of being. It seems to me like a worthy thing for us to commit to.

xx Jane

A thing that (might) be of interest to your fabulous self:

This weekend, I’m teaching a workshop where this whole conversation *points to the above* is going to be our focus. It’s going to more practical than theoretical. I’m continually ask myself as I put the bits and pieces together, how does this apply? How is this useful?

If this is interesting to you and you’d like to adventure with me as we explore it together, come join us. You can learn more about it here in Creating Wild.

A week or so back, I pitched to my membership group an offer that I hoped would be appealing. If you’re feeling stuck or you’ve lost your creative mojo, I said, tell me what’s happening, and we’ll find a way forward together. I called them Creative Prescriptions; you answer a series of questions detailing the specifics and constraints, and I send you a short video back outlining some things that I think that might be helpful.

Tell me what’s in your creative heart! Give it to me straight!

I’ve made just over 30 Creative Prescriptions since then, and as you would expect I noticed patterns. Familiar themes that came up repeatedly. And the biggest creative kryptonite (perhaps no surprises here) was a lack of energy and tiredness. A proliferation of I’m just so flat, or I can’t seem to find the motivation, or I have no energy left to give.

The thing is, there’s tiredness and there’s tiredness. Not all tiredness-es are the same. There’s the tiredness that’s almost kind of pleasant. The result of a body well used, of a mind that’s been put through her paces, and where the answer is both welcome and obvious: a night of blissful sleep. A binary equation where I am tired = Sleep is the right and proper answer.

But for the second kind of tiredness; the tired-to-your-bone’s kind, where no matter how high you lift your feet, your toes are still there dragging, is quite a different beast. Because that kind of tired, somewhat confusingly, isn’t remedied by sleep. In fact, you could sleep for two years straight and find that you wake up in the same state that you started.

Call it burn out. Call it exhaustion. Call it whatever you like. It’s epidemic. And what you’re experiencing in this state is a body with completely frazzled edges; a nervous system in a state of collapse, where tiredness and lack of energy is a symptom, but rest is not the total answer.

So, what’s the deal here?

For anything I say to make sense, we need a basic understanding nervous system function. A quick rundown now:

When your nervous system is responsive and adaptive, your sensory system is feeding information to your brain all day long. There you are, going about your business, feeling your way through the world, and your brain is using that information to answer one foundational question your entire existence is based around:

Am I safe?

The answer arrives in three main forms:

Yes.

No.

Maybe.

Yes, you pass Go, collect two hundred dollars.

No or maybe and your brain and nervous system choose for you the reflex survival (or fight flight) response they consider most suited for the situation.

Under the umbrella of active fight flight states we have fight, flight and freeze.

We refer to them as ‘active’ because there’s a lot of available energy that we can draw on to heighten our powers of force and acceleration.

If the brain perceives that one of these defence mechanisms is not available to us, it takes us into the (rather depressingly titled) collapse or conservation of energy mode states. This is where you turn in on yourself. Your sensory dials get turned way down (remember this part). Your metabolic processes and general functions switch to idle.

If we were thinking about the brain giving the body an instruction at this point, it would be ‘don’t move and hold onto your resources’.

It’s basically your brain and body’s attempt to stick around on this earth as long as possible, believing your capacity to move or tend to your base survival needs are limited. So, you hang on to what you’ve got.

The thing is, in true survival situations, this process is both loving and benevolent. These animal bodies of ours are designed to live in a world that is movement oriented and sensually inspiring. Our survival nervous system is our bodies inbuilt protective system, designed first to mobilize for survival purposes, then (should that option not be available) to preserve our hearts and wellbeing by shutting down our senses to potential harm.

At this point, should neither of those options be available, it will lovingly hold our hands as we die and move on to whatever it is we go when we leave this earthly realm.

It’s an elegant and beautiful design.

The glitch in the matrix is not something we’ve had a software update for. Instead of this animal body being part of an animal world dedicated to mutual flourishing, we find the lives we are forced to lead out of sync with our base requirements. A dysfunctional, human-centred world that is resulting in dysfunctional minds and bodies.

Without venturing into the details, the end result is this:

Many of us are finding ourselves in a state of shut down or collapse that’s morphed into a dominant state of being.

And amongst many other things, it’s leaving us in a perpetual state of exhaustion that sleep alone doesn’t seem to fix.

Why doesn’t sleep or rest revive us?

In collapse or conservation of energy mode, our internal processes are turned way down. Remember, everything the body does has functional purpose. The purpose of collapse or conservation of energy mode is exactly what it says on the box; to keep you around for as long as possible with the expectation of limited movement possibility and limited resources.

Whereas in more active fight flight states or the parasympathetic, our pumping, vibrational mechanisms are still high, in conservation of energy mode / collapse, they turn into marshmallows.

From here, we enter this highly ironic situation where we want to sleep all the time, but the sleep that we get is kind of shitty, the paradox being that your internal systems are functioning at such a low frequency, that your own brain will wake you up just to keep your system alive enough to function. A vicious cycle that keeps spinning round and round.

Ok, so what’s the answer?

Two main recaps:

• Sensory information is what the brain uses to understand its place within the world
• Sensory information gets turned way down as part of the sympathetic / fight flight response (and especially so in conservation of energy mode or collapse).

Which means if there’s one thing that becomes a priority, it’s bringing the sensory system back online.

The thing to remember is this:

If collapse has become your dominant state of being, it’s likely for one of the below reasons (there is a lot of nuances of course but for the sake of general discussion):

• That your body is truthfully reflecting an outer reality that needs to change before you can
• That you are stuck in a maladaptive cycle, where at some point, you went into collapse and didn’t have the necessary skills or means to get out of it.

Another thing:

It’s nuts (in my opinion) that we have to work so hard to keep ourselves functional and sane. The fact we even need to talk about ‘nervous system function’ and consider how to have healthy one is ludicrous. It’s shows what a mess we are all swimming in where being able to expect a healthy, vital body has become so effortful.

Frankly, I have many other things I would rather talk about than the nervous system. There are loads of other more fascinating things that my capture my attention. But to get to those- creating, making, the magic of this world around us– we need to be capable of taking it in. So here we are, figuring out this stuff out about our bodies.

Let’s keep going so we can move on to the good stuff.

Easing Your Way Out

One of the more difficult things about navigating your way out of collapse is that you’re often going to have to ignore what your own body is telling you. The action that you take is going to be very specific and but nonetheless, it is going to feel like it requires energy you don’t have available to spend. And in essence, you are right. This is the pickle.

Here are some of the essential principles for us to work to (bearing in mind I’m trying to keep this to essay length when the reality is this could be expanded to an entire thesis):

Movement

Your body needs to move, but only in ways that are functional and gentle (otherwise you’re going to drive yourself deeper into the place you are wanting to emerge from).

Ask yourself (reducing yourself to a brain, a body and a nervous system):

How would a body move if it were taking care of its basic needs?

It would move in the world outside and it most likely walk a lot. It would climb hills occasionally and find itself moving all over different surfaces. It would bend to pick things up. It would seek and gather.

So much of our modern movement is decided by the mind and not the body. We workout to look a certain way, to stay a certain size, to burn a specific number of calories.

Forget that. Think of movement for wellness and joy.

How would a healthy, sensing body want to move?

Now commit to some version of that, as regularly as you can.

Activate Your Sensory System

We think of the senses as the usual five senses, but there are actually nineteen scientifically proven senses that the body integrates to keep your sensory self-online. When we are reawakening the sensory system, the mechanoreceptors are some of the first to flash to back on green. They are the ones responsible for our sense of touch, pressure, and the relationship of our body to the world is it directly a part of via those parameters.

The wonder combination to consider is novel movement (and novelty is anything that requires your focus and awareness) in combination with sensory stimulation of some kind.

This means, if I walk but place my attention to how my feet are landing on the ground, and the changes pressure relationships, I can take something ‘regular’ (like walking) and turn it into something that is both novel and enlivening to the sensory system.

A good practice is to stay with a point of focus for a week or so, and to always think of what you are considering in relationship to something else. I call this a two-point practice: focus on something on the body, and outside the body, and consider them in relationship to each other.

Walk and focus on how your feet make that happen- where and how they land and what that feels like- for a minute or so at a time. Do this for a handful of times a day, for a week or so then switch your focus to a different part of the body.

Activate Your Creative Desires

So much of the reason that we found ourselves in this collapse place is due to abdication of personal, creative desire; our creative selves have been trampled over in deference for what we feel like we should be doing or have to be doing to be active, useful humans in the world- but it’s not without consequences.

These days, I have a robust creative practice. I write and draw daily, and if that doesn’t happen, I really feel it. If my creative energy is not used, it comes at me sideways; I am grumpy, depressed, feel flat. I am unpleasant.

I think of all the years I didn’t tend to my creative wellbeing and the cost of that. All that energy rampaging round my insides without useful or imaginative direction.

I am not isolated in this- I believe this is true for everyone- I just happened to find myself in a place where the work I did remedied by insides (which, believe me were really kinda shaky) to be point where I fell in love with my creative self.

Let yourself feel your own curiosity and learn to trust her. Not as something nice to do but as something essential and important for your wellbeing.

Your Prescription

I know, it really is a kicker and I know that it’s unfair. This IS going to take energy that you feel like you don’t have, so micro-dose things at the start. The awareness of what’s happening is essential.

Write a prescription for yourself (or I will do it for you!) and follow your own instructions. Take the decision making out of it and understand, if you identify with anything that I’ve said above, what is required for your own wellness.

I don’t have a better word for it yet (I’m working on it) but some form of accountability is good. I noticed with the prescription that asking people to check in with me in the group with their creative practice has been helpful.

We need to surround ourselves with people where the thing we want to do (Make art! Write the book! Tinker with pencils! Doodle!) is not only normal but supported and encouraged. I have my membership community and the door is absolutely open to you, but wherever and however it suits, make it your mission to find your people.

If (when!) you have a day where it all falls apart, it’s completely fine. Just pick up the thread as soon as you can. This is not a one-shot wonder; this is your life, and you aren’t something to be fixed. Let’s embrace what we’ve got and revel in as much of the good stuff as we can.

If you have questions, leave them for me below. Happy to chatter if it’s helpful.

Much love to your gentle selves,

xx Jane

xx Jane

If you fancy exploring further with me, you might love Creating Wild. We’ve been exploring the emotional side of creating, and what it means to grow the edges of your skin to contain all the things you love.

You can learn more about it here.

Last week, I wrote an essay about imagination. A lot of my work in the day to day looks at how our nervous system expresses in movement (you can learn more about the creative impact of that here) and I had questions:

How might understanding the relationship between the body, the nervous system and creative expression help us get unstuck?

What can we do to stretch our creative limits?

What does it practically look like to get ourselves to a place where new ideas, new inspiration is free to find us?

The mechanics of last week’s exploration was wordy and involved. This week, I wanted to strip it back to its bones.

Theory aside, what happens when the rubber meets the road? What can we do when we’re at our desk or the easel or *the wherever* to encourage our own creative flow and access to imagination?

Let’s tootle around with a few different ideas, shall we?

Disrupt authorship. Let your materials take over.

Being willing to explore the outer edges of your own imaginative universe requires a readiness to stay in the unknown for as long as you’re able to handle it.

It’s a relinquishing of control, a ‘let’s see what happens’ space, where we surrender to the unfinished, the awkward, and the unsure, or simply the truth of our creative experience as it expresses through us in that moment.

Disrupting authorship- letting go of the idea that you have to be the one to lead the show- is a great way of butting up against your own control patterns and actively stepping into curiosity.

If you’re finding yourself thinking, erm, well, it’s just me, myself and I doing this whole making and creating business, I’m not talking about letting someone else come in and take over the whole story.

It’s more an invitation to actively work with your materials or your subject matter in a way that that is non-conforming, intentionally experimental, and where you allow yourself to be to lead to places you never would usually have ventured.

Some examples include…

Adding water to your ink, smudging the pen or pencil marks you’ve made, draw on wet instead of dry paper.

Layering your materials (pastel upon pencil upon paint! Go wild!) and then drawing lines in them with found objects. Grab whatever you have and can, especially if it seems completely non-obvious or nonsensical. Especially then.

Draw without looking at the page. Let your hand follow sensation rather than image.

If you’re writing, pick a line with a particular cadence and rhythm and let it set the pace of the words that follow.

Pick a phrase and repeat it.

Allow the sounds of the room around you to shape your sentences. I don’t know what that looks like either. Try it.

Be willing to engage with your work and materials is a way that is intentionally disruptive to your usual modus operandi and see where it leads you.

Interrupt your work mid-stream

If you find you’re stuck or things are getting a little formulaic, break things up mid-stride. Interruption prevents pattern completion and forces the brain to re-map rather than repeat.

Stop drawing mid-line and continue on from a completely different angle, or even change your tools.

Rotate the page halfway through a drawing.

Leave a piece intentionally unfinished and begin again some hours later or the next day.

Stop a paragraph mid-sentence and start the next line somewhere unexpected.

Write in curves or shapes instead of straight lines. What does this do for the story, for the process of your thoughts?

Start your essay in the middle, or in mid-sentence conversation.

Begin and end somewhere unexpected.

Work at the edges of perception

I mean this quite literally.

What happens if you work in a room with low light or your eyes half closed?

This is not about trying to force clarity, or straining to see in a room where you feel half blind, but practicing ‘seeing’ in a different way.

What other senses wake up when your visual field is dimmed? What more do you become aware of?

How does changing the light affect your making? How does it change your access to language, to words?

Can you write whilst paying attention to bodily sensation rather than content?

How could softening the focus on your world interrupt your usual pattern of creating and take you somewhere you may not have been before?

Change scale

Changing scale shifts expected patterns and invites us to consider the same work a whole new way.

Zoom obsessively in on one detail.

Use exaggerated gestures (let you whole body be in on the game!), then switch to micro-marks.

Write one sentence ten different ways and ten different sizes.

Compress a long idea into six words.

Expand a single word into a full page.

Delay meaning as long as possible

I know, counterintuitive right? Surely we need to know where things are going and what things mean?!

Attaching meaning to an experience pulls you out of divergent thinking (the type we’re interested in within the imaginative phase) and into convergent thinking, which is not what we want in this particular movement.

As the people on the fancy podcasts say, understanding “closes the loop” on our thoughts, and marks the end of exploration.

Accessing imagination means staying in that open field space for as long as possible. If we can hold our nerve beyond the usual amount of time, we move beyond the obvious connections and understandings and into the Land of Never Before, the place where new and fresh ideas are free to find us.

Some ways to play with this on purpose include…

Working without naming what you’re making.

Banning interpretation or explanation of what you’re doing until you finished exploring and playing.

Letting something remain incoherent on purpose, and see what you take from it the next day.

Let discomfort be informational not directive

Discomfort doesn’t always mean that something’s wrong. It’s more often than not a signal we’re at the edges of our current artistic zone and about to move into something different. Treating discomfort as information rather than instruction helps keeps curiosity online.

Lately, I’ve been switching formats as a way to keep in the flow of what I’m doing without leaving the building (literally and metaphorically).

If I’m writing and get stuck or I’m not sure where an idea is heading, I’ll stay with the experience but switch to drawing or doodling. I keep my hand moving in a different way, let my thoughts move to a different space until I’m ready to return to the original plan.

The same is true for drawing, but in the reverse. If I’m unsure where to go, I’ll sit and write for a while.

Staying on task but mixing up the mediums is really helpful for letting the ideas and understandings roll around the whitewash of your brain so you can stay available to what wants to come next without pushing or forcing things too hard.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

What do you do to help your creative flow? Any fabulous tips or tools to share?

Happy creating!

xx Jane

A thing you might be interested in ✏️

We have a workshop every couple of week’s and the one coming up this weekend is called Creative Windows: Building the capacity to stay.

Here’s the blurb for you:

Why does creating feel possible one moment and unbearable the next? In this session, we’ll explore the emotional and nervous-system conditions that shape our creative availability.

We’ll look at how fear, guilt, perfectionism, and urgency show up in the body, and how to work with them rather than pushing past them. Through body-based practices and reframes, we focused on increasing creative capacity: learning how to stay present, soften resistance, and progress in our creative projects.

If you want to peruse the goodness or come join us, you can do that here. I’d love to have you join us 💛

I’m flat and foggy and devoid of inspiration. I hear my friend Tania’s voice inside my head. ‘What you need,’ she would tell me, ‘is a protocol. I have protocols that I follow when I’m tired. You need to turn your Expectation Dial way down. I would consider setting it to zero.’

Another voice enters the chat:

Problems of output are usually problems of input.

I think it was Austin Kleon who said that. I nod at the wisdom of it, then answer back, even though he cannot hear me.

I know what it is I need. Screens have been occupying too much of my time.

I need to move, I say. I need to get outside.

From a creative viewpoint, it’s easy to think of ‘input’ as artistic inspiration, a Pick’n’Mix version of Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Date.

When we feel flat or uninspired, we tend to diagnose ourselves as not reading enough, not learning enough, not exposing ourselves to the work, colours, and thoughts of others enough, which is lovely and necessary and right.

And while all of that may be true, the deeper lack is often not stimulation, but something much more simple and much more complicated at the same time; the capacity for presence. Our attention is regularly hijacked by urgency and opinion- by headlines, notifications, and the constant pull of what feels most pressing- but far less often encouraged to settle into the textures, rhythms, and details of the world we’re actually living in.

This has consequences for our creative life and our connection to our imagination (surprise!), but before we get to that, let’s talk about how it manifests in the very ordinary, very mundane aspects of our lives.

When our sensory systems are engaged in a broader way, we develop a more global context for our lived experience. This doesn’t mean that the urgent or important fade away, but we are better able to understand (we literally ‘have a better sense of’) events existing within a wider spectrum, allowing us to navigate our life and creative experience with more perspective.

In this way, we begin to orient not just to threat or news-worthy information (and if this is the only thing we’re paying attention to, it can narrow our experience to despair and gloom) but to the reality of where we are right now, which is infinitely more nuanced and varied. Light, sound, temperature, movement, distance, and texture give the nervous system a continuous stream of contextual cues that allows us, as I recently heard my friend Kate say, to bring our thoughts back to where our feet are.

These sensory cues- an active body feeling its way through the world- are what the brain needs in order to understand its place within the environment it’s in. They are what allow our unconscious processes to place us into a fight flight response should that be relevant and necessary, but equally importantly, sensory input is what allows the brain to take us out of a fight flight response when that state of being is no longer required.

Sensory input is the be all and end all of a body that is adaptive and not stuck, the necessary input for our brains to answer the question, are we safe? And respond in a way that is appropriate.

And here’s the catch: our sensory capacity is compromised when we find ourselves operating in fight-or-flight. The reason for this is functional. In survival situations, it doesn’t make sense for our feeling selves to be fully online. If you’re injured or under threat, feeling everything is a distraction that reduce your chances of doing what you need to do to survive.

Consequently, in these moments, the nervous system turns the volume down on sensory input- sensory nerves effectively go offline- and they come back online once safety is perceived again. It’s an elegant system when you’re living in conditions your nervous system is designed for.

The difficulty that many of us now face is that this animal body of ours is living in circumstances it was never built to navigate. Our needs are now met without need for movement or sensory integration- we no longer need to hunt for food, build shelter, or tend to each other the way we once did- and the resulting lack of novel movement and sensory information means that we are no longer stimulated out of survival states when it is necessary and appropriate.

We have, essentially, comforted and convenienced ourselves into unwellness. And as a result, we find that we’re stuck in survival reflex experiences, looping round and round.

This is where the vicious cycle begins. If the brain relies on sensory input to accurately place itself in the world, and that input is reduced for long periods of time, what happens then?

Chronically operating from fight flight, or your sympathetic nervous system, not only changes how we create but changes our experience of the world.

Instead of our reality being shaped by our relationship to the world around us, we become trapped inside our own story. When our feeling selves are dialled down, the most real thing that we have to go on becomes our internal narrative. That inner world starts to act as the primary medium of perception, rather than the wider, living environment we’re actually in.

From a creative perspective, this also results in imagination existing separately to the ecosystem it’s a part of. We forget that imagination is an emergent process at the cross roads of sensing, moving, emotion and memory. We begin to think of ourselves as the generator of ideas, the start and end of the creative process, a state of being that is pressured and exhausting.

When our sensory world is narrow and urgency-driven, the body hovers in a state of vigilance. Attention is then pulled toward what demands a response, and very little else gets through.

In that state, it’s common to feel flat, foggy, or uninspired, and the truth of it is, you are. But the reason is not because you have lost your creative edge, or your imagination has dried up. It’s because your nervous system is too busy managing pressure to take in richer information, and your sensory and movement needs aren’t being met.

Imagination doesn’t go away but we can get ourselves to a place where it doesn’t have the conditions that it needs to emerge.

When attention widens to include the ordinary, physical world beyond the urgent, our nervous system opens up to new sensory experiences. We exist, again, in relationship. Our body becomes conversational, both with itself and the wider systems that it is a part of.

From here, curiosity becomes possible. Imagination has room to return, existing within a physiology that is open and responsive.

In this place, creative work stops feeling like something we have to force, and begins to arise more naturally from being in the world and sensing, rather than thinking, our way through.

Curiosity As A Signal Of Safety

Curiosity sits right at the centre of the relationship between sensory–motor experience (our body in conversation with the world through sensing and movement), emotion, and imagination.

The experience of curiosity is a functional signal that these systems are working together, the good news being that the experience is bi-directional; while curiosity emerges, we experience more open awareness, and likewise, we can encourage this state of being by actively inviting curiosity.

When sensory information, movement, emotion, and memory are integrated, attention can orient toward novelty without immediately tipping into defence. Curiosity then becomes our internal communication system indicating that the nervous system has the capacity to explore and we are no longer operating from reactivity and reflex, or at the very least, are encouraging ourselves in that direction.

Curiosity opens the sensory–motor field by inviting us to move differently, notice more, and stay with our experience a little longer.

That expanded reality gives the imagination more to work with. As imagination widens what we perceive or sense is possible, curiosity is further supported.

Exploration then becomes self-reinforcing and self-supporting. Which is why I frequently reminding myself: when I’m out of ideas of feeling flat, the kind of input I’m likely to need is to get outside and move.

Brain Maps, Movement & Imagination

Our brains are constantly building maps of the world and of ourselves through repeated experiences of sensing, moving, and feeling. Our internal maps are how we relate ourselves to our environment, understand our place within it, and seek to navigate it as easefully as possible.

When our experiences are emotionally meaningful, these maps become more detailed, flexible, and interconnected (they can also become distorted depending on the type of emotional attention we pay them, but that’s a story for another day). Curiosity plays a crucial role here. It encourages variation in movement, sustained attention, and novel sensory input, all of which help refine and elaborate our maps.

When curiosity is offline, and our state of being is dominated by survival, our maps become outdated and distorted. Sensory information narrows, movement patterns reduce to reflex, and imaginative range contracts.

Supporting curiosity, then, isn’t just about feeling more creative. It’s about giving the brain the input it needs to keep our entire beings adaptive and online.

Why Movement & Sensing Matter When You Feel Flat

Novel movement and sensing are one of the most direct ways to interrupt this narrowing of our attentional field. They give the brain information about the place we currently find ourselves in and disrupt the brain’s tendency to predict and repeat what we already know.

When our movement becomes limited and habitual, our sensory system lacks stimulation and as a consequence, our imagination has very little new information to respond to. But when we introduce regular, novel movement — a way of moving that requires attention and cannot be done in an automated way- our entire system is prompted to return to the moment we find ourselves in.

Imagination then emerges as our perception widens.

Importantly, this novelty doesn’t have to be dramatic. Walking barefoot or on uneven terrain is one example. Bringing your attention to changing pressure in as much as your body relates to the world around you.

Take a sensory snapshot in your mind’s eye of the parts of your foot in relationship to the ground.

Presence is organising.

Being present to your bones, your skin, your connection to what it is you are resting on, literally changes how your body arranges itself.

Next week, we’re going to continue the conversation by talking more directly about creative ways to bring your imagination online with consideration to your movement and sensing needs but in the meantime, if you have thoughts or questions, I’d love to hear them!

Leave ‘em below and I’ll report back.

Happy moving!

xx Jane

Things to do next ✨

1. Devote some time to intentional dreaming, as a matter of necessity.
2. If you feel so inclined, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments and please feel free to share. It makes such a difference.
3. If you fancy giving more time to your creative life and want some help to do so, considering playing with me inside Creating Wild. It’s all sorts of magic in there ✨

Much love to you,

xx Jane

I remember hosting art exhibitions in my bedroom. I must have been around 7 or 8, with various drawings of contrasting size displayed on a corkboard, attached with coloured pins, teetering on a small desk near the window. No doubt at inconvenient times, when mum was in the throes of cooking dinner and dad had finally made it home after a long commute, I would corral them in my bedroom and place their eyeballs on my work.

Coins in the jar, please! No one leaves empty handed! Would you like that wrapped? Thanks for coming!

I can’t remember much about the things I made- my memory, when pressed, serves me up a cartoon dog with floppy ears, clearly the standout piece designed to fetch a premium- but what I do know is that at some point I did and then I didn’t. Draw that is. At some point, I just stopped. And it wasn’t until a couple of years back, some forty turns and then some around the sun, that anything close to drawing came back into my life.

Which makes me think, when did I have that conversation? When did I look at something I made and say:

‘That’s no good. I don’t like it. I’m going to stop.’

Perhaps not explicitly, but that was the decision.

This isn’t the end of the story of course- to end here wouldn’t be a story at all- but I have questions before we continue.

Like, when we say something is no good, what exactly do we mean? In relationship to what? What is the measure of our good-ness?

State your terms, the restrained amongst us say.

It’s a pickle we get ourselves into, this quest for good. This quest to make things we always like.

Even now, as I write to you, I find myself thinking, is this any good?

It creates a particular experience on my insides. One that makes me feel concerned. How interesting. I wonder why we do this, what purpose it all serves.

I can’t tell you what exactly changed and when I decided to begin to paint and draw. I suspect it was the convergence of many things, the main one being this:

I think I became ok with myself. Is that a strange thing to say? That I grew tired of being so concerned with “being good” or needing to like what I made to feel as though I should or could continue.

I became bored of my own neuroses. Boredom is great like that. A necessary point to reach before we say, enough of that already.

And ironically, my decision to be ok- with who I was, with getting things wrong, with letting myself have the experience of doing something I wanted that I wasn’t already skilled at- made me better at navigating uncomfortability. Of being annoyed and frustrated and just getting on with it regardless.

So, you’re frustrated? Who cares. Keep going.

(I know uncomfortabilty is not a word, but it is now because I’ve decided it is, and you understand what I mean and that’s enough.)

There’s a strange thing that happens to adults, when we’re asked to pick up on something we once loved and did freely, like make and create.

We can get angry. Afraid. Ashamed. Or even very, very sad. We can refuse and say it’s stupid and we won’t.

This can happen when you’re asked something simple like,

Please draw a bird, or

Write a 200-word story.

You find you start to panic.

Perhaps we internalize this need to be good as part of a quest for acceptance. Of belonging. Of a desire to be held close and understood. To not be left on our own to figure it all out. And then we make a category error; we mangle it up and tangle it together and take it out of one box and put it in the box labelled ‘Our Art’.

What have we confused inside of us to create this kind of reaction? How have we got to the position where the simple delight of putting pen to paper can feel dangerous, even though we might rationally understand our own reaction as ridiculous?

And could simply letting go of having an opinion be a logical way out? Could we just make that choice and not overcomplicate it?

Could we just make and let it be? Or at least withhold our opinion long enough to let the creative trail continue?

Where might a not having an opinion on what you make or create take you?

A story about letting go of stories

A while back, I had a mentor who was kind but uninterested in my stories. Not the magical story kind. But the stories about how we are. The stories that have unfolded that past week. I noticed that although she listened and was nice, she was uninvested in what I had to say. She was simply ready to begin the work. To, well… get on with it.

Now the response to reading this might be to say, ‘she doesn’t sound like a very kind person’, and ‘everyone deserves to be heard’ but stay with me. Because what she taught me through her okay-ness with everything, regardless of which direction they took me in, was where and how my stories got in the way.

And how ultimately, they didn’t matter. In the best possible way. That I was here to do what I was here to do, with or without them, and that was enough.

At first, I found her approach somewhat abrupt. In many ways, we’re expected to let our stories lead. To bond over what was and how we feel about it before we begin. But session after session, I let my stories go. They were still my stories, but I didn’t feel the need to carry them with me.

I put them down, and let me tell you…

… it was a liberation.

Without my stories, without my inferences about who I thought I was based on the day and what had been, I could show up for what is. And what is existed regardless of my opinion about it. What is was present regardless of my stories.

You can get a lot done when you show up for what is and just get on with it.

There is, of course, a difference between judgment and discernment

I suppose when I’m talking about having an opinion, I’m speaking to you of judgement. Judgement doesn’t make any sense at all to your brain, the reason being this:

When we set out to do anything, we have an intention. This is the start.

I want to make this thing, is what we say.

Then, we make that thing. The brain delights! A Thing has been made! Rejoice!

Then a load of busy elves are sent from the part of us concerned with observation and they ask,

How did that go? How far away did the outcome land from our original intention?

This is not a question of judgement. It’s a question of curiosity in its purest form. That information then gets mailed through to our unconscious brain and the elves in that department get busy figuring out how to close the gap. How to bring our original intention and outcome closer together.

Judgement- when we decide something is good or bad, right or wrong- pulls us into our fight flight brain. It pulls us out of the learning process- out of the creative process- and into the Land of Overthinking, which is a dastardly place to live and doesn’t do you any good at all.

Plus, you send a whole host of well-meaning elves into unemployment. Awful.

Discernment, on the other hand, is a decision about what to follow, expand on and allow to flourish. It holds no disdain or bad feeling. It will not make you cry or feel depressed or tell you to give up.

It says things to like,

Well, this part I find fascinating, or

Even though I have no idea why, this thread is a thread I want to follow, or

this part pleases me and so I’ll take that and continue.

Discernment is a process of recognizing your limited capacity for action and attention, and also what delights.

You can’t do all the things you want to do; discernment is the cherry picker that says yes, no and maybe.

Be discerning but not judgmental. Be clear they’re not the same.

What if you could simply let go of having an opinion?

To trust that what appeared was what needed to be made, regardless of your thoughts and if you liked it? And to carry on from there?

I wonder what would happen if you tried it…

Happy creating,

xx Jane

I was determined to write this essay really fast. ‘I’m aware’, I told whatever creative co-conspirators were listening, ‘of the predictable trap of overthinking a piece on overthinking. That is not a stick I will be snaring myself on,’ I said.

But then I got to thinking.

If there’s such a thing as overthinking, there must be underthinking too?

And if overthinking and underthinking sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, what’s the part that sits in the middle?

What’s just the right amount of thinking?

This was obviously something I was going to have to give some thought to. Which, as it turns out, I have plenty of. Thoughts, that is.

Oh god. It’s happening.

The Thing About Thinking

It’s probably a strange thing to say, coming from someone who’s in the business of bodies and how to balance them, but I do love a good think. I’m a very think-ey person. Not all people are think-ey people, but if you are, it’s important that your thinkey-ness gets put to good use. I consider it a Very Valuable Asset.

Because I spend a lot of time involved in brains and bodies and nervous system speak, I’m curious about how intellectual stimulation is never something that is mentioned or included. I believe that us humans, left to our own devices, and not dumbed down by products of our own creation, who convince us they are more efficient and smarter than we, are both infinitely curious and creative.

We wonder. Full stop wonder. At the world. At each other. At our own state of being. And in the ideal circumstances there is space, consideration, exploration for that wonder to be pondered. Our thinkey-ness is satiated by our engagement with the world and the energy it transmits is consumed as an inherent part of that process.

It’s generated, sent out, and then quickly gobbled up as we think, explore and discover. It finds its own balance.

Our thinking becomes weary in the best possible way, because it’s wandered many miles. It’s flexed its muscles climbing trees and wading through rivers. It’s frolicked in rambunctious conversation, occasionally peppered with hearty profanity. Withstood the elements and developed slightly ruddy cheeks. It’s then returned to a warm and comfortable house to eat and drink and sleep.

A good use of thought, wouldn’t you say?

And while this whole bit I just wrote was nothing of what I planned (writing is miraculous like that, isn’t it? You don’t arrive with the answers, you write your way to them. Or something like that) I truly think there’s something in it.

That as a think-ey person, if I spend too much time online or involved in lightweight garbage, letting my eyes and thoughts absorb mental calories full of fillers and sugar and shit, then I short circuit.

That perhaps when my thinking needs are not being met, then they go rogue. A thinking revolt. Revolting Thinking.

‘To hell with her,’ they say. ‘We ride at dawn!’

Next minute, I’ve woken up, making a coffee and I look out to see my thoughts galloping down the mountain without me.

‘Where are you going?!’ I yell, but they’ve disappeared behind a tree.

The more I think about it, the more accurate this all seems.

Overthinking As A Product Of Your Nervous System State

Look, we’re still not at the precise overthinking and underthinking part because it turns out my thoughts have a lot to say and there are other things that are important to mention. Or so I think.

One of them is this:

Overthinking is essentially underdoing. Which can both be a product of being already in a fight flight state or pull you into a fight flight state if you aren’t already there. It’s kind of sucky like that.

For example:

A system stuck in a dominant state of freeze will outsource its thinking.

What do you think? It will ask. Can you tell me what to do? What would you do if you were me?

The constant need for advice, to have someone else tell you what to do is a hallmark of the freeze.

Dissociated thinking—where the thoughts are where the body isn’t—is a form of flee. If you find yourself thinking about anything other than where you are, it could be that you are experiencing a dominant state of flight, or it’s been activated within you in response to the circumstances you find yourself in.

These are only a couple of the more common examples, but I mention them because in these instances, overthinking is symptomatic of the foundational nervous system state.

Change that- the freeze or flee template that your body is operating from- and your overthinking tendencies will start to shift too.

Do nothing to shift the foundation and it’s harder to budge the thinking patterns also.

The Other Thing…

Effective thinking (perhaps we could call this “just the right amount of thinking”. See we fell into that, didn’t we?) is a dance between the conscious and unconscious brain that goes something like this:

You make a decision. You take an action. You observed what happened.

This is the conscious part. This is what the conscious brain is in charge of. That’s it.

Following that flow, your unconscious then does what it needs to do to lay down the myelin to smooth out the neural highways and update the motor patterns, so your outcome better matches your intention next time round.

Very boring in print but this is the prescription for all forward progress. What I just described is essentially how we learn.

The problem?

Never decide and you get trapped up in your head. Your brain doesn’t have the sensory data needed from action to make an informed decision about what to do next.

And consequently, you spin around on yourself, with your thoughts having Thought Babies, and they have more Thought Babies, until it’s basically a zoo in there and you can’t tell Jack from Jill, and you become the thinking equivalent of the Titanic. Seems alright for a moment until the ship starts going down.

If there was only one thing you take from our conversation here, it’s that if you find yourself stuck in your head, unsure what to do, the antidote is to take action of any kind.

Just do something.

Anything.

It’s only by taking action that the path you seek will actually appear (I’m sure there’s a fortune cookie or a Lao Tzu or Rumi quote that says exactly that but, in any case, it’s solid).

Thinking & The Creative Cycle

The challenge of ‘The Right Amount of Thinking’ is that the creative cycle itself holds us in a strange paradox.

We need to think long enough to let ourselves arrive at something we could consider to be new and novel thought; to stretch our thinking and marination time just beyond the point that it is comfortable.

Why’s that?

Well, our early thoughts about a project or idea tend to be the most predictable. They are the ‘you say cat, I say dog’ thoughts. The ones where our brain is working to its most predictable connections.

We need to give ourselves long enough to extend past the anticipated and into something new, which is where the conversation around creative capacity becomes so important.

This whole Swimming In The Sea of the Unknown is the essence of the creative process, but it requires that we can stay with ourselves (literally and metaphorically) to midwife whatever creative idea or possibility is waiting for us out into the world. It can be not all that comfortable.

There does need to be an endpoint; the moment where you make the decision on what your focus or direction will be and move into the next stage, but it’s a delicate balance of giving yourself just enough— just enough time to stretch your limits and not so much that your limit twangs, springs back and hits you in the face.

So, When Does It All Become Overthinking?

In two places:

1. When the thinking phase appears to have no end

If what you’re contemplating and undecided on involves a bigger body of work, and you are unsure of the direction to go in or what exactly to commit to, take your most appealing idea and try it out.

Write five pages. Make a series of thumbnails. Sing a few lines. Make some samples.

Whatever your creative medium of choice, commit to a “taster” of the project.

Once you take action, the process itself will inform what needs to happen. It’s the action not the thinking that will work the whole thing out.

2. When how we are experiencing the thinking and ideation phase creates feelings of concern and contraction, rather than possibility

Where we are in danger of overthinking (or falling into not useful thinking anyway) is when the quality of the thinking process changes. When how we experience the thinking is different.

We typically describe overthinking as angst ridden. As thoughts going out of control and ensnaring us in tendrils of our own making. Overthinking is thinking that’s coupled with concern; concern that we might not get it right. That our decision will be wrong. That the end product won’t match up with our intention.

In this case, a process to follow could be:

• Metabolise the feeling. The energy within you needs to move.
• Choose something to make tangible. It doesn’t have to be the thing you ultimately “do”. It’s more about (re)training yourself to take action and making things real, regardless of the outcome.
• Decide the next best half step from that place. What’s the easiest thing to do next? What feels the most exciting or appealing? Make that the thing you do.

And remember, when in doubt do something. Anything.

It’s the only thing that will make the next thing to do clear to you.

Do you struggle with overthinking?

How to do you deal with it in your creative projects?

I’d love to hear your thoughts (ha! An unintended pun. I do love those).

xx Jane

A few weeks back, I stumbled across a post in a children’s picture book group for budding illustrators. It said something like this:

Help! I just finished a commission for a fine art piece (I have a fine art background) and now I don’t know what to do. I want to make my picture book, but now I wonder if I should focus on my painting?

To be clear, the question was not so much about wanting to do one thing over the other but one of style and artistic voice. They felt they had to make a choice between a specific style of painting on the one hand, and a more illustrative approach on the other.

They were suffering from the idea they had to pick one thing, stay in their lane and be done with it.

To which I say:

(with all due respect).

Don’t get me wrong. I love it when people develop a signature style, and whose brain and body delight in focusing on just one thing.

I love that for them. I just don’t love that for me. Because I’m someone who loves to do different things in different places at different times. Who frolics with multiple voices and approaches and styles and who is unwilling to let go of any one of them.

What I’m looking for consistency is within the work itself. But if different pieces of work I produce have very different styles, then as long as each project as an entity is cohesive, that’s quite ok with me.

The types of questions I might ask include:

What is the essence or the tone of this project?

What style of voice would best support that?

What aesthetic approach would best bring that vision to life?

For instance: In this newsletter, I’ve developed (or am developing) a particular style that’s more playful and illustrative. It’s arisen out of a desire for something fun and free, but the constraints of “the project” has also shaped it. I realised I didn’t have time for long and detailed drawings. That I would have to find a new way of doing things if I wanted to be able to write and illustrate newsletters like this with the regularity I desired and not have it be my full-time job.

Plus, I love illustrative work with a cartooney edge. So, I set out to make my own (it’s still a work in progress, this style to me is new).

But for my other work, such as a creative non-fiction piece I’m writing about Aotearoa New Zealand’s birds, I practice a more realistic kind of art. I’ve decided that in 2026 I want to improve and understand more about painting, so I can develop my skills in that area and become more accurate in what I produce.

I love both. Both are a part of my creative voice and important to my creative expression, even if they are quite wildly different.

In my writing, I love words of many varied forms. I love to write poetry and flash fiction. I’m currently writing my first book, a non-fiction work. All different styles, all different voices. All still mine.

So if you’re anything like me, with multiple creative loves and passions to attend to, perhaps a better thing to search for instead of a singular voice or style that’s true for you, is finding a voice or style that’s true for the project. For the particular thing you’re working on.

Because it may just be that many things are true for you. And that’s what makes this whole creating business all so interesting.

Happy creating!

xx Jane