How to Start (and Maintain) Creative Habits
Habits, (also known as automatic or repetitive behavior) are one of the few things that can truly make or break your creative career. Habits can guide you toward a deep flow state, or perpetuate your inert procrastination. Automatic behaviors can be your ally in making each day a meaningful enriching experience, or they can be a prison warden working hard to perpetuate your drudgery.
Your habits can mean the difference between looking back in awe as you recognize your immense growth and actualized potential, or looking back in horror as you realize that your starting point is much closer to you than it should be. Creative habits are automatic or repetitive behaviors that relate to the growth of your creative projects and experiences.
Not only do creative habits contribute to the improvement of your skills and the advancement of your career, they deeply impact your day-to-day and even minute-to-minute experience. In this article you will learn how to design new creative habits and how to change your existing habits. At the end you’ll also find a list of potential creative habits which you can put to work in your life right away.
How To Make Creative Habits
Your automatic and repetitive behaviors are governed by two distinct systems, each with its own physiology, environmental triggers, benefits, and drawbacks. For more on this check out The power of Habits by Charles DuHigg or The Upward Spiral by Alex Korb
The first system controls your reaction to attractive rewards. Habits are often triggered by strong impulses to touch something, eat something, buy something, or generally do something that seems appealing or attractive right now. This system is associated with a part of your brain called the Nucleus Accumbens (the bottom part of your Striatum) which functions on the use of dopamine. You can think of it as part of the “reward center” of your brain. This part of your brain and this system of behavior can be controlled by using deliberate and effortful attention, often called willpower, (which involves the logical prefrontal cortex), but it takes a lot of mental effort and energy.
You can create opportunities to put your nucleus accumbens to work for you by enforcing triggers that promote your creative work. To do this you must make your creative work more immediately rewarding (e.g. give yourself a treat afterwards, do your writing in a comfy chair and PJs, use a gorgeous sounding synth for your piano practice, get some exciting new colors for your painting etc.).
The second aspect of habit formation lies with simply how many times something has been done. Neuroscientists like to say that “neurons that fire together wire together”. This means that your behavior and experiences create neural pathways in your brain that reinforce those same behaviors. Nowhere is this more true than in your Dorsal Striatum, the part of your brain that encourages you to do things that you have done many times. Regardless of whether it is good or bad for you, this part of our body merely wants to repeat our most common behaviors, and it is one of the reasons we have so many default behaviors that we do without thinking too much about it.
In addition to sorting out the type of rewards you have around your creative habits, you can also reinforce creative habits by merely doing them very often, even if it is only for a few minutes. It’s easier to start a habit that’s 2 minutes long and extend it over time than it is to start a 60 minute habit right away. This is most easily accomplished by pairing your desired creative habits with a trigger of some sort. Maybe you always paint right when you wake up, maybe you always write something after dinner, maybe your cello practice typically comes after meditating — whatever it is, the more you do it, the more likely you are to begin doing it automatically, without the need for strong willpower, affirmations, or guilt trips.
How To Break Non-Creative Habits
Your first strategy might deal with the part of your habit loop associated with your Nucleus Accumbens. If you consistently have a variety of stimulating or rewarding things around you that draw you away from your creative work, then you may have some non-creative habits (e.g. social media, video games, TV, etc.).
You’ll have to either exert lots of mental effort to resist them every single time you want to do some creative work, or you can take the simpler and more effective technique of removing them from your environment in order to make more space for your creative work.
Your second strategy may take your Dorsal Striatum into account. The non-creative habits built upon this part of your habit loop are behaviors that you do very frequently which draw you away from your creative work- the difference being that these hyper-frequent behaviors need not always be pleasurable like the behaviors driven by your Nucleus Accumbens, in fact these things could be extremely unsatisfying, but you’ve just done them so many times it is hard to stop.
The key to ridding yourself of these non-creative habits is the inverse of building them up: slowly begin to limit the duration and the frequency of the non-creative habit. This may look like drinking just one less beer each night, waking up just 5 minutes earlier, or reducing your self-criticism after your work by just a sentence or two. As you work on these smaller goals it’ll become much easier to continue the process of lessening them until they cease to impede your creative process.
List of Potential Creative Habits
Getting 8 hours of sleep each night
Improvising in one new key each day on an instrument
Saving your project file
Write at least 200 words each day
Read something relevant to your work before going to bed
Read something completely irrelevant to your work to spark new ideas
Sharing your work and asking for feedback
Supporting other artists with comments and feedback
Keep an idea journal and write in it often