How to Prevent Creative Tension from Becoming Over-Attachment, Frustration and Stress

Spending a lot of time refining and focusing on your vision can lead to over-attachment and frustration when you haven’t got it yet, and this frustration can cause you to be more impulsive and urgent in your decision-making and behaviour, and to shut down your open-focused creativity and miss unconventional opportunities to make your vision a reality. Creative tension shouldn’t make you feel frustrated. That’s not useful.

Here are some ways to prevent:

Hold a playful attitude. You can be clear on what you’re aiming for, but don’t take yourself too seriously. Try to see obstacles and failures as being all part of the game, making the game more interesting.

Don’t beat yourself up or dwell on mistakes or failures. Negative self-talk can quickly tip you over from eustress into distress, where your performance and the quality of your thinking drop.

Look after yourself and schedule time for rest and pure play. You can’t be in the optimum creative zone all the time. Dan Coyle says we seem to be capable of between 60 and 180 minutes of deep practice and then we need a decent break. Make sure you eat, sleep, exercise, and rest well.

Notice when you’re resisting reality and practice letting go of the need to force things to go your way.

Stay open to different ways that you could close the gap between reality and your vision.
Hold fast to your “what” – your vision of what you want to create – but be very loose about your “how” – how you create it. Make sure that you vision is a genuine “what” and not a “how”.

Don’t entertain feedback and anxiety from other people who are struggling to tolerate the gap between your reality and your vision.

Resist complaining about not being where you want to be – to yourself or to other people. This increases frustration and can make the creative tension unbearable.

Reference: Duncan, Cath “A User’s Guide to Creative tension” Productive Flourishing, 7 June. 2010, productiveflourishing.com/a-users-guide-to-creative-tension