Creativity and anxiety, is there a link?

Creativity and anxiety, is there a link?

Being a creative person and having suffered with crippling anxiety in the past, I have often wondered whether there is a connection between the creative mind and mental health.

Many creative people such as artists, writers, musicians, and singers have often found themselves over-thinking, over-analysing, or catastrophising. But why is this?

If anxiety thrives with an active imagination, then it stands to reason that creative people would suffer greatly from it. Those with a creative mindset are able to conceive the next great design, poem, or piece of music, but may also have the tendency to get carried away with overthinking and pondering indefinitely.

The neuroscientist and author Joseph LeDoux said anxiety was the "the price we pay for an ability to imagine the future."

When the lockdown first began to impact our day-to-day lives, even though the worry that was going on across the world was very real, many people used this unique experience to better themselves.

Thousands of us embraced it, using the enforced free time to express ourselves in new and varied ways. In fact, social media was full of people sharing how to make bread, learning new languages, or simply creating incredible art in all its forms. It might sound like it's unconnected, but what if the anxiety we were all feeling and the increased expression of our new-found creative streak were intrinsically linked?

The connection between creativity and anxiety isn't a new thing. Rudimentary studies date back centuries; Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Gogh are all credited with quotes detailing their own beliefs on the connection between their art and their mental health.

The first key research-based study on the potential connection occurred in 1983, at the renowned Karolinska Institute in Sweden. It followed more than a million people and their relatives, using a registry of psychiatric patients. The conditions weren't limited to anxiety, but included illnesses such a depression, and bipolar disorder. The study found that those people working in 'creative' industries, like dance, photography and writing, were 8% more likely to have bipolar disorder and 121% more likely if they were writers. Interestingly, it also showed that creatives were more likely to have relatives with those conditions, showing a potential genetic link between creativity and mental illness.

Since then, more studies have tried to explore similar themes with similar results. As recently as 2015, a study published in the Nature Neuroscience journal, found that the genetic factors that increase the risk of anxiety and depression are found more often in those working in creative industries and 25% more likely than those in less creative professionals. The links are definitely there, and it's clear that creative people do need to think differently as a matter of course, but what might that connection be?

Whilst there is still scepticism from some on the direct link, the way the brain works is much more understood. Studies at Dartmouth College in 2013 seemed to show that rather than being focused on one particular area of the brain, creativity and imagination lay in a widespread, wide-ranging neural network. This mental pathway is constantly manipulating imagery, ideas, theories and symbolism, to help us solve problems and come up with new ideas.

In addition, the right-side precuneus (the area of the brain concerned with attention and focus) is very active during idea generation. In basic terms, it means that it becomes harder for those people to filter out extraneous details. Rather than being a negative, it means that for those creative people, the imagination floodgates are constantly open, allowing more and more information to flow into the idea pool.

Being creative doesn't mean you have an anxious mind. Having an anxious mind doesn't mean you're necessarily creative. It's just us lucky ones who can harness the best of both worlds to create amazing things.