Welcome to five-minute magic from Mindful Creative Podcast. A short bonus episode, sharing tips and insights from the book's pages of the same title. 
 
Every week I'll share one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process or work/business, or just the food for thought for the weekend ahead. 

These bonus episodes share content from the audio book, and you can find the link to the full version in the show notes.

Mindful Creative: How to understand and deal with the highs and lows of creative life, career and business

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[00:00:00] Welcome to five minute magic from the mindful creative podcast. A short bonus episode, share and tips and insights from the pages of the book of the same title. Every week I'll be sharing one or two ideas that can give you an actionable takeaway for your creative process, your work, your business. Or just food for thought for the weekend ahead. These episodes share content from the audio book, and you can find the link to the full version in the show notes below. 

When we started previewing Chapter Health, I started talking about the fact that there's a lot of people who believe they're okay, they're normal, and when we're breaking ourselves, we don't necessarily always see and feel that we're breaking ourselves, only to find out very late that we've gone on the very wrong path, doing all the wrong things, and making the wrong end actually happen.

So, The end of the previews from chapter health are very much about the fact that sometimes we need a nudge, we need to take [00:01:00] action and we need to accept what we cannot change. Sometimes we need to make, you know, peace with what we can control and things we can't control because we can spend a lot of time thinking about what we want to control and that's impossible.

So, I do talk about therapy in this chapter again. It, again, it's not for everyone. It's not for every problem. And if you do have any issues that feel might be holding you back or causing you difficulties, do seek out professional help. This is my side of things, how I see them, how I've experienced them and how they've helped me.

So yeah, have a look. Need the nudge. When something essential breaks, we generally fix it. Blown a tire on your car or bike, change it. Light bulb gone, batteries flat, quickly sorted. This extends to our physical health, a sprained wrist, a broken ankle, a chipped tooth, a pulled [00:02:00] muscle. All of these we attend to almost immediately, because particularly in the most severe cases, carrying on as before becomes impossible.

So why don't we approach mental health in the same way? Well, for a start, we're often very good at either hiding, justifying, or plain not noticing when something is amiss. Remember, we creatives excel at convincing others that we can do it all. And sometimes that means we can convince everyone, including ourselves, that we can do the entirety of life unaided.

Work hard and play hard on a few hours sleep and a can of Red Bull? Nailed it, mate. Sometimes, then, we need a nudge. We need something or someone to be gently honest with us, and maybe suggest some healthy solutions before things get any worse. Unintended mental issues always force themselves to a head.

They're the leaking tap that eventually causes the bathroom ceiling to [00:03:00] collapse. But it doesn't have to be a big dramatic event that causes it. Sometimes something far more mundane pushes you over the edge. In my case, I went to cross the street one day and found I couldn't do it. I went into a panic and anxiety attack so severe that I thought I was going to die.

This was the point at which the obstacles I'd been dodging for years hit me like an avalanche. It was time to make a change. However, it took Rachel suggesting therapy for me to go down that route. If she'd not been there, I would likely have persevered down a non therapy based route, certain that I could somehow dig myself out of the hole I was in, taking action.

I started getting counselling, And one of the first methods I was introduced to was Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, CBT. This is one of the baseline [00:04:00] methods of therapy. In essence, you learn to observe your feelings and behaviours in certain situations, and then, without judgement, record your thoughts, how they made you feel, both mentally and physically, and how you behaved as a result.

So, someone doing CBT for anger management might record a situation where the red mist descended. They will look at the thoughts and physical sensations that arose, and how strong they were on a scale of, say, 1 to 10, and how they reacted as a result. Through doing this, triggers can be identified and worked on.

It sounds simple to the point of banality, but if you've never done it, then it can be incredibly revealing, like cleaning a dirty window and seeing things clearly for the first time in ages. My CBT involved getting myself to cross a bridge, an actual bridge, not a metaphorical one, as I felt too anxious to do so.

When my therapist suggested this for my first homework [00:05:00] assignment, I looked at her blankly and nearly asked, Where are the pills to make this thing go away? Seeing things is one thing, doing something about them is another. My first therapist also got me to audit my work, rest and play ratios. They were totally out of whack.

There was no way I could physically continue the way I had been, but I needed support. Rachel was a great help, and kept nudging me to make changes. So that I had to leave the house, she even got me a dog. Hendrix, as in the Sky Kissing Guitar Legend, not the upmarket gin or the character from Mad Men. Such outside support behaviours are vital, because if nothing changes, then nothing changes.

The ripple effect doesn't happen when you stare at the water and keep the stone in your hand. You have to throw it in. There has to be action. [00:06:00] Accepting what you cannot change. After the first few months of counselling, I felt I was on the mend. But then my counsellor threw me a curveball by telling me that I would never be able to get my ducks fully in a row.

i. e. always be prepared for anything life threw at me. I reacted with shock. More than that, I found I was livid. Despite my progress, my counsellor had recognised that, deep down, I was still holding on to a naive belief that I could somehow override, and therefore not have to deal with, human nature and our hard wired instincts.

This is something that is easily done when we seek therapy or try to effect changes. There can be an inner resistance, our ego clinging on to catastrophic thoughts and romanticising the old days. Yes, your life was a mess, but it was fun. Sometimes, it can win too. Think of the person who goes [00:07:00] vegan on New Year's Eve.

By the 3rd of January, they've convinced themselves that they can still have one little harmless bit of dairy every now and again. By the middle of January, they're eating more meat and dairy than ever. The mental gymnastics involved in this kind of resistance to change can be so subtle that we hardly notice it, and it can be an unpleasant shock to have it pointed out to us.

But when we've fallen into negative mental and physical habits because we seek control, then true change can only come when we accept that we cannot control everything. Not events, not other people, not even our own thoughts. All we can have control over is how we react to those events. We have that much power.

It may not seem like much when put that way, but it's a hell of a lot more than we have when we're rushing around trying to stop the tide coming in with a bucket. Therapy is a journey, not an operation. [00:08:00] Despite some bumps in the road, I continued to make positive changes over the weeks, months, and eventually years.

I became physically and mentally healthier, the two are always linked, and worked on getting rid of my unhealthy thinking patterns. I stopped being so blinded by my career and dragged myself away from relying on social media for validation. Unexpectedly, I then began to unravel my childhood through therapy.

Realising how the mind became hardwired the way it did during my formative years, has had a massive impact on every area of my life. And just like everyone else who goes through the same thing, I'd spent decades blissfully unaware of it. On the contrary, we often wear our mentality with pride and think it's everyone else that needs fixing.

Therapy can help us uncover these issues in our mental circuitry. It can also give us the right tools to begin fixing them. Therapy [00:09:00] for everything and everyone. During the last 10 years, I've had different kinds of therapy for a range of issues. When parenthood hit me and Rachel, if you've been there you know, we did couples therapy and helped to work through many issues that had come up that I wasn't even aware of.

During the pandemic, my anxiety flared up. particularly around mortality and my ability to be there for my kids in case I happen to be one of the casualties of the virus. I did anxiety coaching, which is a form of therapy that focuses on setting and achieving goals more than healing past trauma. Through this, I was able to begin cultivating a more self compassionate mindset, which, once you've got it, can become a life saving self care method and can totally change how you see and view other people.

You're less likely to see everyone as a threat or an enemy, or see their actions as being directed against you. [00:10:00] At the time of writing, equine therapy is the most recent form of therapy, and like all of the others, it has helped me immeasurably in ways that I could never have foreseen. It helped me put all of the previous year's findings in perspective and make sense of it all.

Therapy has changed my life for the better, and I'm so glad that I was able to open myself up to it. If anything in my pre therapy story resonates with you, then I cannot recommend professional help highly or urgently enough. The therapies I've undertaken are particular to my needs, and there is something out there that will suit you and your unique situation.

The list is potentially endless. If you can imagine it, it's likely a form of therapy. It ranges from the cerebral, acceptance and commitment therapy, ACT, counselling, etc. To the practical, art therapy, colour therapy, dance therapy, etc. There's [00:11:00] therapy for individuals, couples and groups. You can have sessions in person or online.

It's an entire world, and if you let it and you work at it, it can help you with anything. And that includes you. In a way, all of this seems kind of amusing because I never saw myself as an ill person, even though I ticked all the boxes. There are millions of people who enjoyed far worse childhoods than I did.

But it's all relative, and the sufferings of others shouldn't be some kind of yardstick you beat yourself with because you think you shouldn't or don't deserve to feel the way you do. Therapy has clearly had a huge and positive impact on my life at a very deep level. But so what? Why have I shared my story with you?

I've done so because therapy is one of the, if not the supreme examples of letting other people into your private world and [00:12:00] letting them help you. If we're struggling with things or have buried our issues under tons of excess, then it's eventually going to impact our creativity. And as we've seen, the knock on effect is that therapy can also help with your creativity.

If you pick the right therapist for you, someone who understands where you're coming from both as a human being and as a creative, and if you let them in, then they can benefit you in untold ways. They can challenge deeply held assumptions you may not even have realized you had. They can give you guidance on what to do when you hit a creative block.

They can help you with strategies for building resilience. They can be a brilliantly objective observer, not necessarily of the work you create, but of the you that's doing the creating. In that sense, they're a little like a sympathetic mechanic with a car. They can get under the hood and show you which parts of your engine need some loving attention.[00:13:00] 

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens. Ellen Glasgow