Everyone should spend some time each day doing something creative that brings them joy.
Creativity is, by and large, something that most of us respect and admire in others. When it comes to influential artists and musicians, not to mention innovators in the world of tech, their creativity can even transform the way we live and experience life on an everyday basis.
But creativity comes in many different shapes and sizes, and there are all sorts of ways of exploring and expressing your own creativity on a daily basis, ranging from things like carefully arranging and ornamenting your garden and picking the right type of fencing, to spending some time painting landscapes.
However you explore your own creativity, there are some great benefits to doing something creative every day. Here are some examples.
Creative expression helps you to explore and balance the different parts of yourself
We all have multiple different aspects of ourselves, which should — ideally — be integrated into a dynamic and healthy whole, that allows us to explore our full potential in life.
On an everyday basis, though, there’s a good chance that only a very select few parts of yourself will actually be “called forth” consistently. Like the parts of yourself involved in doing your day job and handling household chores, for example.
Making time for a bit of creative expression each day helps you to explore and balance out some of the deeper parts of yourself that come to the forefront less often. In this way, it can help you to feel more balanced, whole, and “in harmony” than you otherwise would.
Creative activities can put you into flow states
Regularly spending time in “flow states” can help you to feel significantly more energized, upbeat, and immersed in your own life — and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term “flow state” even described it as the key to happiness.
Flow states are essentially states where you are fully immersed in an activity and are challenged to an optimal degree so that there’s no room for critical thoughts and broader considerations to take hold.
Creative activities — whether working on writing a novel or creating a painting — can be some of the best ways of getting into flow states on a regular basis.
Doing something creative each day can make life a lot more interesting
When all is said and done, doing something creative each day can simply make life a lot more interesting than it would otherwise be.
Creative activities tend to add a lot of color, texture, and fascination to life. They allow you to more powerfully connect with the part of yourself where imagination rules, and where the magic of life is on full display.
Going through everyday life in a totally mundane and pragmatic way can be disheartening and can seem to strip a lot of the magic from the experience of life as a whole. Spending time on some creative activity, on the other hand, can help to counterbalance the “mundane” with something more interesting.
