We all know the importance of self-care habits like diet and exercise. While these are wellness fundamentals, they shouldn’t be prioritized over emotional self-care. Emotional wellness practices are crucial if you want to sustain and even boost the creativity, inspiration and motivation you bring to your business.
It seems like our lives are becoming more and more stressful. Everything is noisy, and everything is immediate. This means that we’re always reacting and adapting to change coming from external demands. We let ourselves and our way of life be dictated to, which detracts from our self-thinking ability.
This perceived chaos around us takes away from what we were really put on this Earth to do, which is self-express. As a result, we spend most of our time in a fairly regular state of fight-or-flight.
Understanding the Human Nervous System
Our physical bodies have been equipped with what’s called our autonomic nervous system (ANS). This is the intelligent life force that allows our physical bodies to unconsciously regulate vital functions like breathing and digestion.
The ANS is extremely complex but its two broad parts are the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.
Sympathetic Nervous System = Fight-or-Flight
Parasympathetic Nervous System = Rest-and-Digest
When fight-or-flight mode dominates, we’re stressed. Our heart rate accelerates. Our breathing shallows. And our muscles contract. In this state, we’re certainly not thinking about being creative or solution-oriented.
We’re in survival mode and all other parts of our body and brain shut down to keep us there. That’s why we say things we don’t mean, do things that we know better than, and we just don’t feel like we’re making any progress.
Enter the parasympathetic nervous system. When this system is in the forefront, it’s the All-Good. This is the state of rest-and-digest. It’s a place of relaxation and present-mindedness. It’s where we can connect with our higher-self, think clearly and feel inspired. In this state, there are no expectations, demands or attacks.
No one is saying that we need to only be in rest-and-digest mode 100% of the time. Physiologically, that isn’t healthy either. We need bursts of fight-or-flight to burn energy and many other physiologically enhancing functions.
The problem is the constant feeling of being on-edge. The constant nervous anxiety and muscular contraction. The slow drip of cortisol that’s killing our bodies and killing our creativity.
Creativity as the Lifeblood of Business
To be really successful in any line of entrepreneurial work, you need to be creative. You need to innovate, and to do this, you need inspiration. But inspiration can’t happen when we’re stressed out all the time.
Inspiration happens when we have peace of mind and a calm state of being. That’s when we’re open and able to receive inspiration. When we’re calm. our emotions are in check. Our thoughts are engaged at a higher frequency. We’re able to work in our zone of genius without fear or worry.
In a creative state, you’re able to accomplish deep work, or what’s also called flow state. This feeling of being in the zone is essential for developing creative solutions, inventing new products or services and seeing new opportunities.
For writers, flow state is when you’ve written 1,500 words in what felt like a matter of seconds. Time flies by and you do your best work without even feeling like it’s work.
Entrepreneurs and Emotional Burnout
Usually, creative types are highly sensitive beings. They’re more susceptible to the sway and pull of other people’s energies and the collective energy of our tribe, city, country and the entire planet. This makes creative people, especially entrepreneurs, innovators, writers, artists, coaches and anyone who considers their path to be one of creating solutions, extremely likely to experience emotional burnout.
Emotional burnout is this horrible state where you can no longer do what you want to do, such as be creative. It’s this space of feeling like your energetic gas tank is empty. That’s because we’re no longer emotionalizing our work and therefore, not able to fuel up. It’s not that we don’t love our work. It’s that we just don’t have any positive emotion to give to it. It’s the feeling of disconnect and even exhaustion.
For creative people, if you’re not producing, creating, inventing, helping or problem-solving, you don’t feel you have a purpose. And when you don’t feel you have a purpose, you feel emotionally invalidated, and you definitely won’t have the energy to create.
Emotional burnout and stress can stifle your creativity and can hurt your business, craft or passion.
Emotional Wellness Practices for Enhanced Creativity
Stress management and emotional wellness practices are vital for entrepreneurs and creative types. Because of the above-mentioned nature of society, burnout is becoming an all too common occurrence. Many people wind up abandoning their business or craft because it’s too stressful or emotionally taxing.
But instead of abandoning your zone of genius, a better solution is to develop an emotional wellness lifestyle. Yes, lifestyle. This means taking a step back, outside of your daily stresses and deciding that you deserve better.
A lifestyle focused on emotional wellness is enriching and fulfilling. If you can train yourself to prioritize emotional well-being, you can overcome challenges and worries. You can feel better equipped to manage stress as it inevitably arises.
Here are four emotional wellness practices that can help strengthen your ability to tap into creativity:
- Raise Your Awareness: All shifts start with awareness. If you’re feeling emotionally burnt out, don’t ignore it. Awaken to it and acknowledge that it’s something you’re going through. When stress and anxiety are brought into the light, they can no longer control you from the shadows.
- Build Trust: Once you’ve acknowledged your burnout, trust that it’s normal. And trust that it will pass. Everyone experiences what you’re going through to varying degrees. When you trust that your experience is valid, you can have faith that it will improve.
- Plant New Thoughts: Reaching and acknowledging emotional burnout is actually a blessing. It’s an opportunity to meet your challenges and plant new seeds of thought. Ask yourself instead of feeling emotionally exhausted, how do you want to feel? Gratitude, appreciation and even reverence for your existence—those are powerful emotions. These emotions can charge you up again. But it might not happen like a switch. It can take time to settle into your subconscious.
- Detach And Release: One of the most important emotional wellness practices is release. Confronting exhaustion isn’t easy. Shifting your thoughts is difficult. But once you’ve gone through this process, it’s critical to detach and release. Detaching means not identifying with your negative emotions. And releasing means trusting that your newly planted positive thoughts will grow.
Replenish Your Creative Fuel Tank
It’s vital that creative types spend time alone. No phone. No friends. No spouse. No kids. Alone. This is where you can replenish your creative fuel tank. Spending time alone regularly is one of the best preventative solutions to emotional burnout. Alone-time is a stress-management necessity, and it’s another one of your emotional wellness practices that you can use in any of the above four steps.
You should aim to spend time alone as often as possible. Not just when you feel burnout bubbling to the surface.
By deliberately recharging your emotional state, you can get back to creating. You can once again enjoy the process of working on your business, project or craft. You’ll feel more refreshed and revitalized. And most importantly, you’ll open up space in your consciousness to receive inspiration and ideas that are required to keep you in a state of flow more often.
Healthy Content is passionate about partnering with health and wellness businesses and entrepreneurs. We value your creative work, and we want to support you. Working with Healthy Content on your blogs, articles or website content can free up time and space for you to get back to building your business and wowing your customers. Contact Healthy Content today to discuss a health and wellness content solution.