And one big part of that puzzle, to me, is creativity.

Often times, creativity can provide us with many benefits. It helps keep our brains sharp, it give us a greater sense of self-awareness, and it helps us deal with personal issues more effectively.

There are many different reasons why I find having a creative activity can be valuable to our happiness and mental health. I’m going to explain most of these key reasons throughout the rest of this article.

Increased self-awareness

It’s difficult to express some emotions and thoughts using just words, but things like art, music, and photography provide us with the ability to express these emotions and thoughts through other mediums.

This allows us to discover many emotions and thoughts, perhaps some hidden in our subconscious, that we can’t access through ordinary consciousness and rational thinking.

Art and creativity gives us a way to formulate these hidden and abstract emotions into something more tangible and accessible. This often helps us develop a deeper and more intimate understanding of ourselves, and our internal world.

Learning a new skill

Creativity often requires that we learn a new skill: how to play a guitar, how to paint, or how to sculpt. And when we learn new skills, this often improves our psychology in a number of ways.

First, it exercises our brains. Learning new things keeps our brains active, sharp, and flexible. When we stop learning new things, often times our brain’s power will begin to diminish, like when you stop working out a muscle.

Also, learning a new skill boosts our self-esteem. When we finally learn how to play our first song on guitar, we think “Wow, I learned to do something pretty damn cool.” Learning one new skill can often improve our confidence to learn other new skills in the future. It can start a positive cycle of continual learning and development.

A state of engagement or flow

When we get really immersed in a creative activity, psychologists say that we enter a state known as flow.

Flow is a state of high engagement or sharp focus on one particular activity.

It’s a very trance-inducing state, similar to many forms of meditation and prayer.

If you’ve ever gotten so lost in an activity that you lost all sense of time, then you’ve probably experience a state of flow. In many ways, creative activities can produce this same meditative state.

Flow is associated with intense feelings of enjoyment, and it is one of the five factors of happiness according to Martin Seligman’s PERMA theory.

Power and control.

When we start becoming proficient in something creative, there is a new sense of empowerment. It gives us a feelig of control, and it becomes an example of the ways our ideas and intentions can have a real effect on the physical world.

Perhaps this is why so many people with mental illness show interest in creativity. For many, it may be the one area of life where they feel they have some power over their situation.

This might also be why art therapy can be an effective supplement in a lot of mental health treatment. When we engage in activities where we feel in control, these activities can often become a source of stress relief.

Creativity can be a source of empowerment for people with and without mental illness.

Conclusion

These are some of the key ways that creativity can benefit our happiness and well-being. And the best part is, most of this holds true for any kind of creative act whether it be painting, music, photography, sculpting, cooking, dancing, or whatever.

In this article, I attempt to answer these important but often difficult questions. I then share 5 fundamentals on Regaining Consciousness, as laid out by psychology blogger Sam Spurlin. These fundamentals aim to cultivate a higher state of awareness toward key areas of our life, such as our values, health, work, thinking, and relationships.

Consciousness is the bedrock of your personal development.

Consciousness is more than just a passing thought, feeling, memory, or imagination, but the underlying awareness that permeates every experience you’ll ever have.

In order to define consciousness, it helps to first think of it as a spectrum of awareness.

On one end of the spectrum, there are lower levels of consciousness, including being distracted, lazy or bored. Usually in these states, we maintain some awareness of our environment, but not very much. We can probably get a lot of tedious chores done while being distracted or bored, but this isn’t the optimal state you want to be in when trying to achieve a big or meaningful goal.

The very lowest levels of consciousness are states like drug intoxication, sleep, or a coma, where we actually aren’t conscious at all – but unconscious. Most of the time we don’t get anything productive or creative done in these states (mostly because “you” aren’t actually around when you’re unconscious).

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, there are very high states of consciousness, like mindfulness and flow. These are states of mind where an individual is highly attentive and engaged with their environment, often interacting with it in very skillful and sophisticated ways (like a painter working on their masterpiece, a baseball player pitching a perfect game, or a life-long businessman pitching a big sale).

Unlike lower levels of consciousness, higher levels of consciousness are very optimal for goal-achieving and success in virtually any domain of life. This is because higher levels of consciousness always include supreme focus and discipline.

What I want you to understand is that, ultimately, the level of consciousness we cultivate throughout our day is the most fundamental components to our well-being and success. Personal development without conscious living is simply impossible – the more aware we are of ourselves and our environment, the more power and control we have to change it.

5 Steps Toward Regaining Consciousness

Sam Spurlin writes about Regaining Consciousness in his insightful e-book. The lessons covered are intuitive and thought-provoking, but also widely applicable to cultivating consciousness toward different (and often underestimated) areas in our life.

It reminds me of a more “contemporary” version of the popular Mindfulness in Plain English, because it’s primary focus is how to practice healthy consciousness throughout our daily activities (even with common things like eating and exercise) – not just during meditation.

Sam understands that cultivating consciousness is not just for Zen monks camping out in some cave, but something that can also be applied to the “American way” of living too. This means we can work on regaining consciousness even with a 9-5 job, bills to pay, and a family to take care of.

In the book there are 5 crucial steps laid out that anyone can follow to facilitate conscious living. I’m going to summarize each step here, but if you really want to read more about each one, I recommend you check out his book for yourself. I honestly couldn’t put it down when I first started it.

Find your values.

Going through life without a clear sense of our values and goals is a sure-fire way to not find happiness. Many people live their lives aimlessly and unconsciously (like a puppet on strings), without ever introspecting and asking themselves, “What do I really want in life? What direction do I want to go in?” To cultivate more consciousness toward our values in life, Sam suggests:

• Make a list of core values and narrow it down to your top 3-5. Imagine what your life would be like if you acted in accordance with these values.
• Don’t chase other people’s dreams – question the values you learn from authority figures, the media, TV, and pop culture.
• Listen to your heart and mind above all else. Do what you honestly think is right.
• Have priorities. Sure, you may value playing video games, but is it more important than taking care of your family or studying for school or doing something more creative like writing a song? It’s up to you.

Take control of your health.

Consciousness toward our health is absolutely crucial for physical and mental well-being. Everyday we make decisions that have to do with our bodies: what we choose to consume, and what kind of physical activities we choose to partake in. The more aware we are of what we eat and how much exercise we get, the better off our health will be. Sam suggests we:

• Make small and deliberate decisions to be healthier. Start by cutting down soda intake and replacing it with water. Or try just going for a short walk every morning. Start with little things and build from there.
• Be a conscious eater. When you eat, don’t distract yourself by reading the paper or surfing the internet. Instead, pay very close attention to how the food tastes and how your body is reacting to it.
• Tune into your body during physical exercise. For example, while running pay close attention to the mechanics of your legs/body, the motions of your breathing, and any other pain/aches/sensations in your body that you may be experiencing. Think of any physical activity as a way of meditating – and your body is the object of your meditation.
• Learn from the wisdom of your body. Our body is always sending us signals on it’s condition (like when you are hungry, when you need to use the restroom, when you tore a muscle, etc.) The more we are aware of these signals, the better we can respond to our body’s needs. You’d probably be surprised on just how much you can learn from your body if you listen to it.

Doing work that matters.

Next to our health, one of the biggest factors in achieving happiness is doing meaningful work with our lives. A dead-end job that doesn’t align with our values can feel like a curse. Instead of inspiring us and motivating us, it drains us of our energy and leaves us feeling empty inside. On the other hand, a meaningful job that actually matters to us is drastically more fulfilling. Here’s what Sam recommends we do:

• Re-evaluate your current job. What do you like about it (if anything)? What purpose do you fulfill? Does it align with your values?
• If you aren’t happy with your job, begin searching for alternative career paths that you find more fulfilling. In the book, Sam mentions how he used to be a teacher (and he liked his job), but becoming self-employed aligned with more of his values and interests, so he made the switch.
• Pay attention to activities that put you into a state of engagement and flow. Very often these passions of yours can point you in the right direction when choosing a job or career.
• A big goal in my personal life is to find work that I love but also serves an important function in improving society.

Master your mind with conscious thinking.

A big part of Regaining Consciousness is taking more control over our education, thoughts, beliefs, and perspective. Throughout the guide, Sam asks us to challenge our old assumptions and beliefs, accept our ignorance about certain topics, and willingly seek to improve our knowledge and attitude about the world. He recommends you:

• Acknowledge that you have a limited perspective. You don’t know everything, so don’t be stubborn and act like you do.
• Try to look beyond any biases or prejudices you may have by looking at new information as neutrally as possible.
• Become an active learner. Choose a topic that has always fascinated you, go to the library, and then take out a few books on it. Read up on it and share what you learned with others.
• Go “Wikipedia surfing.” Go to an article, read through, it and click on any links that interest you. Keep continuing the process until you feel you have learned something new and interesting that you didn’t know before.
• Always maintain a healthy curiosity and willingness to learn. We don’t stop being students after we graduate high school or college.
• Listen to everyone’s views. Respect that other people may have different experiences, knowledge, and beliefs than you do. Ignore the trap of having to label everything “right” or “wrong.”

Nurturing conscious relationships.

One of the most important steps toward conscious living is becoming more aware of the relationships that make up our world. For some of us, we may cling onto toxic relationships that end up hurting both ourselves and the other person. For others, we may have trouble cultivating meaningful relationships. In both cases, cultivating higher consciousness is crucial. Some of Sam’s suggestions include:

• Recognize the “vampires” in your life. These are people who are always being negative and sucking the energy out of you. They are the buzz-kill to every party and the rain to every parade. Stay far away from them. They are miserable – and they expect you to be miserable too.
• Associate with “vampire slayers.” Vampire slayers are people who crush negativity in their lives. Instead of draining you of energy, they empower and motivate you. They encourage you to pursue your values and goals, and they are always around to lend a helping hand when you need it.
• The essential rule of cultivating conscious relationships is to invest positive energy into the relationships that are valuable to us, and let the one’s that aren’t valuable fizzle out. Although it may be painful to get rid of old friends, it is sometimes the necessary thing to do.

Free Preview of “Regaining Consciousness.”

If you visit the Regaining Consciousness page you can check out the first 15+ pages absolutely free.

P – Positive Emotions – experiencing joy and pleasure.

E – Engagement (or flow) – being consciously involved in our activities.

R – Relationships – having enjoyable and supportive interactions with others.

M – Meaning – creating a purposeful narrative about our lives.

A – Accomplishments – completing our goals and following our core values.

Happiness: More than just positive feelings.

All aspects of “PERMA” represent certain components of happiness, but according to Seligman not every one is necessary to live a flourishing life. In a recent interview with TIME, Seligman was quoted as saying:

“One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn’t be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy — just not in the same moment that you’re sad.

What convinced me, actually, when I first went into the positive psychology field about 15 years ago, was this: I thought that the correlation between being depressed and happy would be -1.0. [In lay terms, that means they're opposite; you can't be both.]

There are about 20 studies and the correlation is only -0.2. There’s plenty of room to both be depressed and have high positive emotion — and not be bipolar.

We’re trying to do something liberating by saying even if you [are depressed], you don’t get consigned to the hell of unhappiness. You can have meaning, accomplishment, engagement and good relationships, even if you are dull on the positive affect side.”

These ideas resonate very deeply with a lot of the content I write here at The Emotion Machine. For example, just a couple days ago I wrote an article “Depression: The Yin of Happiness,” which tries to point out that certain bouts of depression can even be beneficial toward long-term happiness. Depression can drive us to discover a deeper understanding of ourselves; and while positive affect may be temporarily diminished, there are still opportunities to extract meaning and strengthen the story of our lives.

Take Viktor Frankl for example, a psychiatrist and holocaust survivor who suffered tremendously harsh conditions while in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Frankl concluded through his experiences that even under the most wretched circumstances, an individual can still find fulfillment in life by creating meaning in their lives. Even suffering can be meaningful, and being able to persist through suffering is in-itself a kind of triumph.

Similarly, Seligman is now spending a lot of his time applying PERMA theory to the U.S. military in order to reduce rates of PTSD. He is teaching soldiers how to become more resilient and optimistic, and in many cases individuals experience tremendous growth from their painful experiences (there is now an emerging term for this psychological phenomenon: post-traumatic growth). Apparently, the existentialist philosopher Nietszche may have been right when he said, “That which does not kill us often makes us stronger.”

The main point here is that one does not need to always be experiencing great pleasure or joy to necessarily find fulfillment or improve the state of their lives. Happiness may be just as much dependent on our subjective view of circumstances as the circumstances themselves. Seligman’s PERMA theory is well-informed of this truth.

Planning on the future, not dwelling on the past.

One key component in Seligman’s latest research is the idea of prospection, the act of looking forward into the future, rather than just focusing on aspects of our past.

According to Seligman:

“The basic rock bottom premise of psychology for the last 150 years is that we’re driven by our past. Positive psychology has come to convince me that we’re drawn into the future.

I’m very interested in what is called “prospection.” As we’re talking now, what you’re doing is thinking about how you can write this up, whether to use or reject what I’m saying now. Lots of human activity is making mental simulations about the future, [or prospection]. I’ve been writing something on the ubiquity of prospection and arguing that the basic premise that humans are driven by past is wrong.

I’m all for past influences, the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn’t take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them.”

The big lesson here? The past is in the past, and you have a choice right here and right now to envision a better future and begin to take small steps to accomplish that future. This act of positively and constructively looking forward may be one of the most important tools we have to achieving a flourishing life.

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2. Start with the most important task first, so you can get it out of the way early and while your mind is most fresh.

3. Believe your will-power is in your control, and you can often motivate yourself to do more (study).

4. Bring work to do when you know you will have time to kill (such as in the waiting room at a doctor’s office).

5. Practice mindfulness meditation to increase your focus. (see 100 Breaths meditation).

6. Exercise periodically to keep your energy levels high.

7. Learn from your time management mistakes. Don’t be afraid to try new things.

8. Know the uses and abuses of setting deadlines (see here).

9. Define your values in life. Avoid meaningless tasks that don’t fit into your value hierarchy.

10. Be willing to take suggestions from friends, family, or experts.

11. Visualize process, not results. Imagine yourself doing the things you need to do to in order to accomplish your goals. This can often prime you to actually do those activities.

12. Know when you need to take a break. A well-timed break can be a healthy re-boost between activities.

13. Collaborate with the strengths of others to help you complete a task.

14. Learn that happiness is a more productive state than depression (see here).

15. Decorate your workplace or change your environment. (recent research shows it improves health, happiness and productivity).

16. Entice yourself with a reward (although incentives work best for routine tasks, not creative problem-solving: Dan Pink on motivation).

17. Focus on aspects of the activity you enjoy.

18. Be creative with aspects of the activity you don’t yet enjoy.

19. Listen to music, as long as it’s not distracting (for example, music makes us exercise harder).

20. Be more mindful of negative self-talk while working (“I don’t want to do this. This is lame. Why is Timmy such an a-hole?”). Replace these with something more inspiring (for more see quick tips for reframing).

21. Blur the line between work and play.

22. The presence of plants can increase attention and productivity (see here).

23. At the end of the day, reflect on your actions and how you can improve. Reflection has been shown to improve learning (see here).

24. Find a support group to hold you accountable.

25. Identify role models to motivate you and inspire you.

26. Keep a personal diary or blog to keep track of your progress.

27. Identify what activities put you in a state of flow.

28. Find stress relievers to help you re-energize yourself throughout the day.

29. Focus your complete attention on one task at a time. Multi-tasking can often be mentally taxing and deplete our cognitive resources quicker.

30. Prepare and cook dinner in a slow cooker. Set it and then go do something else.

31. Try going to the library, moving to another room in the house, or going somewhere else to maybe spark some new energy and creativity.

32. Try to dedicate one day toward all shopping errands (this also tends to be easier on gas use).

33. Create a schedule with other parents for carpooling to school.

34. Use a calendar (digital or paper) to track important events.

35. Call in refills for the pharmacy ahead of time so they can be ready by the time you get there.

36. Confirm your appointments before going.

37. Get chores done while watching TV or listening to music.

38. Do business meetings online over Skype (for convenience).

39. Do something while waiting on hold (on the phone).

40. Always have a pen and paper handy to write down things that come to mind (or leave voice memos on an MP3 recorder/iPhone/etc.)

41. Eat right and keep your body nourished. Without proper nutrition, cognitive sources will deplete much quicker. You need to feed your brain!

42. See your work in the context of a “bigger picture” and be proud and motivated by it.

43. Remember you only live once so make the most of your time here.

44. Find an encouraging quote to put up on your wall or read as a daily affirmation.

45. Try talking to yourself out loud when solving a difficult task. Or explain the problem to someone else. Making a problem understandable in words can often help us solve it better. (for example, see rubber duck debugging, a technique used by computer programmers).

46. Ignore the little things that don’t matter, but always seem to wrack up our brains. Don’t waste your attention and energy on things that you can’t change. If it is out of your control, it isn’t worth worrying about.

47. Re-visit your long term goals and aspirations.

48. Remember that money isn’t the only measure of productivity.

49. Pay attention to key signs of failure such as low self-esteem and only looking for a quick fix.

50. Consider keeping your goals to yourself to avoid a false sense of accomplishment.

51. Stop reading tips on how to maximize productivity and start doing things.

What tips do you find work best for you?

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I was recently reading the Satipatthana Sutta, a discourse in Theravada Buddhism that teaches students and practitioners how to be more mindful in their day-to-day activities. In it I discovered an interesting passage that I just had to share:

“When one is strongly mindful, one plants one’s consciousness deep in an object like a firm post well sunk in the ground, and withstands the tempestuous clamour of the extraneous by ‘a sublime ignoring of non-essentials.’ But this does not mean that in such a one interest is narrow and his outlook wrongly restricted. Strong mindfulness ignores the unnecessary, by adhering to the center of the business in hand, and extends its view to important peripheral conditions, with a widespreading watchfulness resembling that of the sentinel on a tower scanning the horizon ‘for the glint of armour.’ By such a balance between width and depth mindfulness steers clear of the extremes of lopsided vision and practice.”

It was the phrase “a sublime ignoring of non-essentials” that really struck a chord with me. To stay focused and intent on the activity at hand ultimately means to ignore everything that isn’t relevant to what you are doing in the present moment.

I imagine a baseball pitcher at an away game; the fans are booing and jeering very loudly. An unskilled player would easily get caught up in the madness. He would get nervous and start sweating more profusely, and he would let those external conditions affect his performance. But a skilled player knows how to sublimely ignore these conditions and focus merely on the task in front of him – get the next batter out. It wouldn’t matter to him whether there were 40,000 fans booing or 40,000 fans cheering, he is focused 100% on what he needs to accomplish in the present moment.

This example can be analogous for almost any productive activity. I’m sure you are already aware of many of the distractions that interrupt your work flow throughout the week. Imagine if you could become entranced only on the essentials of what it is you are trying to do, and if everything else just seemed to evaporate. That would be supreme focus.

I’m beginning to experience this in my own mindfulness practice. For the past week I have been doing morning walking meditations around town. I notice that the more focused I am in the movements and sensations of my walking, the less attention I have on the thoughts and feelings inside my head. It’s like a seesaw on a playground – because it is impossible for me to be more attentive of one thing without being less attentive of something else. It’s a constant give-and-take of awareness. And as I become more aware of this phenomena in myself, I can better identify degrees of mindfulness when I switch from one activity to another.

The more complicated the activity, the harder it is to cultivate a focus that “sublimely ignores” the non-essentials. That is why it is important to start building mindfulness in small activities, like breathing meditation, and then gradually extrapolate that awareness into more complicated activities* (walking, eating, cleaning, at work, etc.)