Probably most of us experience worry, stress and various kinds of anxiety to some extent, but creative people may be especially vulnerable to these mood and health challenges.

As psychologist and creativity coach Eric Maisel notes, “Life produces stress, the artistic personality produces additional stress, creating produces even more stress, and living the artist’s life is the topper!”

But, he suggests, “We can normalize or even reframe many demands as opportunities, and when we do, the associated stress vanishes. If you are holding it as lovely to make three calls today to gallery owners instead of as something dreadful that you wish you could avoid at all costs, you have changed the demand characteristic of the situation to one of opportunity.”

[From his article The Stress Key – an excerpt from his related book Making Your Creative Mark: Nine Keys to Achieving Your Artistic Goals.]

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This kind of shift in attitude or perspective may be one of the best ways to deal with worry or more intense forms of anxiety.

In her Psych Central post How self-insults turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, psychotherapist Diana C. Pitaru, M.S., L.P.C. cautions, “Creative types are particularly apt at putting themselves down through the internal language they use.

“We constantly worry whether other people like us, how they feel about us and think of us and we never seem to worry too much about how our own words impact us. You are the person who spends the most time with yourself and most times, you also listen to yourself.

“What you tell yourself, how you speak, and the tone you use set up the environment in which you must function…the tone and language you choose become part of you and greatly influence the way you feel about yourself and how you treat yourself.”

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Robert Leahy, director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy writes in his book The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You that 38 percent of people say they worry every day, and more than 19 million Americans are chronic worriers.

Leahy offers six tips you can use to cope with worry, stress and anxiety – here are some excerpts:

1. Identify productive and unproductive worry

“First, determine whether your worries will help you find practical solutions to a dilemma.” …

2. Keep an appointment with your worries

“Write down your unproductive worries throughout the day and set aside a chunk of time, say 6 to 6:30 p.m., dedicated specifically to thinking about them.” …

3. Learn to accept uncertainty

“Worriers have a hard time accepting they can never have complete control in their lives…quietly repeating a worry for 20 minutes reduces its power.” …

For more details on these and other tips, see the article Why We Worry by Victoria Stern – which also includes excerpts from The Worry Domains Questionnaire, a self-test on how much you worry and about what.

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Creative intellect and anxiety

Former anxiety sufferer and anxiety program developer Charles Linden writes that his research “shows us that anxiety sufferers all share a superior level of creative intellect.

“This may not be experienced as academic prowess, but as a distinct range of both physical and mental attributes effecting creativity, emotional sensitivity and clarity, eccentricity, creative energy and drive…”

From his article “Creative intellect as a marker for genetic predisposition to high anxiety conditions.”

He provides anxiety relief programs at his site The Linden Method.

See link to his article, plus more quotes and a video testimonial by Jemma Kidd about using his method, in my article Dealing With Worry and Anxiety To Be More Creative.

It also includes the “worrier” image at the top, from an article about research finding that “A tendency to worry goes hand in hand with higher intelligence.” An intriguing idea.

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