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Unfortunately for some of you, the holiday season isn’t the “season to be jolly” or “the most wonderful time of the year.” If the holiday blues has you feeling down while others merrily rejoice in the coming new year, there is a silver lining in the clouds of your negative self-talk. Those unhappy and fearful thoughts can actually be your greatest inspirations to create solutions for life’s challenges in the New Year.
It seems counter-intuitive that negative thinking can inspire us to achieve remarkable creative breakthroughs. But according to Scientific American, artists are 8 to 10 times more likely to experience depression than the general population. And there is very practical reason for the “tortured artist”. The artist Edvard Munch, who was believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder, said it best:
“My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”
Logic would suggest that in order to inspire creativity, we should focus on positivity. But the reality is we are more likely to become better creative problem solvers if we pay attention to what is wrong or could go wrong. That’s because our feelings evolved not for our pleasures and enjoyment, but rather to solve real problems to life’s challenges. Our emotions guide us at every turn, toward opportunity and away from threat by imagining the consequences of our actions as well as the future possibilities. Overly cheerful people tend to overlook both potential threats and new possibilities.
That’s because our prevailing mood changes how our brains process information. When we are happy-go-lucky, we are by definition “unconcerned about the future”, and therefore less likely to change it. Cheerful thinkers jump more quickly to conclusions by using heuristics or mental shortcuts such as stereotypes. But a negative mindset on the other hand, slows down cognitive processing and for a good reason. When we feel threatened, we need to think longer and harder about the problem at hand. When we pay attention to our negative feelings, we become better at both creativity and critical thinking. The devil is in the details.
As Clifford Nass, Stanford University professor of communication, once put it. “Some people do have a more positive outlook, but almost everyone remembers negative things more strongly and in more detail.” Nass adds that there is human tendency to ruminate more about unpleasant events as well as to describe those events in stronger words as opposed to happy events.
So instead of drowning your sorrows in champagne, why not tackle a creative challenge that has you stuck like the ghost of Christmas past. Why not embrace your negative thoughts for a change, and reframe them as the rudder steering you towards creative breakthroughs. Instead of just making another New Year’s resolution this time around, why not map out a fresh new plan to an old and lingering problem.
