For me, stress is the enemy of creativity.
For example, in preparation for my tax visit in two weeks, I discovered a significant error on my bank’s tax form (it didn’t list several significant tax transactions). I believed this was going to be a hassle to correct, and my thoughts went immediately (and somewhat irrationally) to filing extensions, audits, etc. Effectively, I caught an error before doing my taxes, but I still projected a whole bunch of worst-case scenarios.
And then what happened? The creative projects I had projected for the day were all shut down. I couldn’t focus on them until I solved this problem.
This raises the question of the relationship between stress and creativity. A good summary of this relationship can be found in the October 2020 article The Creative Brain Under Stress: Considerations for Performance in Extreme Environments published in Frontiers of Psychology. I will summarize the findings below.
One model of creativity at the neurological network-level involved the Default Mode Network (DMN) and the Executive Control Network (ECN). Roughly, ideas are created when the DMN is dominant, but the paring down of these ideas requires activation of the ECN. (As a writer, I conceptualize this as the idea for a story is DMN, but the writing of a story in ECN).
Unfortunately, when stress hits (such as my taxes) the acute hormonal changes (such as an increase of catecholamines) activate another network called the Salience Network (SN)— a network that allocates neurological resources to address problems that are relevant to the individual. Unfortunately, it does this at the expense of the ECN, down-regulating it.
Granted, this is a rather simplistic model, and even contained within it there are nuances. For example, high social stressors tend to decrease creativity, whereas low social stressors may enhance it (I wonder if that’s why exercise, which is a low social stress, tends to help my creative output?).
But it does suggest that doing my best to manage my stress via prevention and minimization (when possible) and awareness and acceptance (when unavoidable) can benefit my creative life.