Are we all creative?

I’ve just listened to a podcast of a Danish psychologist, where she claimed that creativity is one of the most underrated areas in psychology when it comes to people’s quality of life. And I couldn’t agree more. We know that creative activities can be beneficial for mental health, dealing with stress or working through difficult feelings. However, we don’t talk enough about the preventive powers of creativity and why it is necessary for a human being to stay creative at least as much as to be physically active. 

For whatever reason, our society decided to treat creativity as either some luxurious spare time folly or an exclusive item limited to highly talented people who in their creative endeavours contribute to the development of the whole society. If you aren’t one of those creative geniuses and if by any chance you have limited spare time, you are very likely to push creative activities either lower on your priority list or completely out of your life. 

Sir Ken Robinson in his Ted Talk (and books) argued, that schools kill creativity and that we are being educated out of it. Just think about it, how natural it is for a small child to pick up a pencil and draw, to build, sculpt, make sounds and all of this. We would be worried about their development if they didn’t. Yet, we are not worried at all about adults who don’t draw, paint, sing or make. We just say “Nah, he/she is not creative” and move on. 

Why on Earth would small children naturally engage in such activities, why would we have art throughout the history of humankind, if it was not essential? And yet we think that we can simply opt-out from being creative and at the same time maintain our overall health. 

Now, I’m not talking about everyone picking up oil paints and starting to paint elaborate landscapes. I’m talking about “everyday creativity”. Or better creative activities. It can be as simple as knitting a hat, doodling for a while or playing a musical instrument. It can include making things for your own home or just writing down your thoughts and playing with words a little. You can do it as a part of your job, your time spent in your home or with other people, it doesn’t matter what form and shape such activity takes. The most deciding factor is the enjoyment of the process, the fact that you are bringing to existence new forms and ideas and that it is not all happening just inside your head but you use your body to make it happen.

There are many reasons and possible explanations why this has a positive impact on our lives, but for the sake of this blog, let’s just leave it here. The drive to create something, to engage with the world and to use our body and mind for expression is something deeply ingrained in our humanness. We can’t simply dismiss it, we can only suppress it. And when we do, it shows at some point, somewhere. Similar to physical activity which has a direct impact on overall health, creative activities impact our psyche. And we really should care for our minds as much as we care for our bodies.