Creative Conditions: 3 Must-do's to Drive Your Can-do
Giving yourself a fighting chance to be brilliant begins with a few simple things (note: I said SIMPLE, not easy).
The essential element in nurturing our creativity lies in nurturing ourselves.1
I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it.
We gotta get boring and annoying for a hot minute, so bear with me please and try not to zone out. I wouldn’t include this little lecture if it wasn’t truly, absolutely, painfully, frustratingly necessary.
Here’s the deal. To give yourself the best possible odds of showing up to your workspace full of creative juice, ready to be squeezed out into tasty artistic goodness, you need to do a couple of basics things at least somewhat well. Think of it like needing to put on pants before you leave the house – yes, it’s uncomfortable and you’d rather not, but you really don’t want to bear the social cost of walking around in your gruts (I assume … If you’re into that kind of thing, love that for you. I’m not here to kink-shame).
To give yourself a reasonable fighting chance, you need to:
Sleep at least a reasonable amount.
Eat at least reasonably well.
Move your body reasonably often.
Now, before we go any further, let me be very clear: this isn’t easy, and I reckon we’ve been massively conned into believing it is. This goes for neurotypicals as well as us neurodegenerates. It takes quite a bit of planning and energy to look after your body well, especially when the world continually encourages you to ignore the cues it gives you so you can chase the dragon of “productivity”. No, it isn’t cool that you work so hard you can’t remember what your family looks like. No, it isn’t progressive to time your bathroom breaks, or blag on about bloody “biohacking” on LinkedIn. You don’t need to beat your own operating system; you need to understand how nature has programmed you and work in harmony with your biology as a living being.
Eat. Sleep. Move. Repeat.
It may not be easy, but it is simple.
Getting the basics right isn’t going to completely rock your world, just to be clear. Meeting your body’s needs won’t make you a creative genius, but it will create a good foundation for you to begin from. Without it, you’re building on swampy ground and you’re going to be pushing shit uphill (or something, I’m not an geotechnical engineer). Gabor Mate* has an interesting take on the word ‘deficit’, in relation to ADHD: when we are giving the world more than we are receiving, we are in deficit. Our account is overdrawn, so to speak. One cannot easily create from such a place. Food, sleep, and exercise will at least get you out of overdraft.
Counting the cost
If you think you can’t afford the time needed to take care of the basics, you are lying to yourself. You can’t afford not to. Play the tape forward, and really think about the cost of cutting the most fundamental corners there are. Picture yourself, surrounded by your particular brand of chaos glitter (for me, its coffee mugs, crumbs, and loose sheets of paper). Really think about what two hours’ sleep and a week of eating toast feels like. Shaky, nauseous, irritable, jumpy, isolated, overstimulated, underwhelmed. Drowning in that distinctively ADHD-flavoured feeling of wanting to tear off your own skin, too far underwater to claw your way to the surface and save yourself.
Believe me, I sympathise. Regulating yourself is hard when you’re in a period of great creativity, but very necessary. Everything gets out of whack when you’re up till 4, sleeping till 1, living amongst chaotic detritus and forgetting to eat.
1: Move, bitch
We need to move. We are made to move.
Like moody racehorses stabled too long, we get antsy and start destroying the joint without regular exercise. We eat shoes and chew through walls, and that’s bad enough. Worse, when we’ve been without exercise too long, there’s a huge internal barrier to beginning again. We need a good kick in the sides to get us moving after a week lazing in the sun, and we’ll probably complain the whole time even though it’s what we need more than anything.
Gabor Mate recommends as much exercise at as high an intensity as you can bear, plus lots of stretching (we’re generally pretty tense people). Another ADHD expert, Dr Daniel Amen, prescribes 30-45mins daily low-moderate intensity. My personal rule of thumb, passed on to me by the brilliant Dr Tony Hanne, is that if you don’t do something every three days at a minimum you will feel like warm garbage (I’m paraphrasing).
But above all, remember that something is better than nothing. It matters much less what sort of movement you do and for how long, as long as you do it regularly and it feels good for you. Humans are complex, and you’ll find your own rule of thumb … as long as you avoid telling yourself you’re just not the sort of person who exercises. That’s akin to saying you’re just not the sort of person who uses toilet paper. It’s an excuse, and you owe it to yourself to learn if only because your life will be more pleasant. Instead, tell yourself you’re a person who is learning to exercise, and see what happens.
Thinking on the run
In addition to the overall body benefits of moment, there’s some additional creative bonus points. Creativity requires action, and physical activity must be present for our minds to work well.
Many people report that they do their best thinking during or post-exercise. I get great ideas while swimming or running, especially if I’m listening to particularly intense or energetic music. Exercise helps create the kind of free-association floating attention necessary for ‘aha!’ moments – rhythmic motion, like driving or showering, facilitate the answers that come when you’re not trying to solve the problem.
Conversely, lack of exercise seems to lead to a sort of internal creative sluggishness. When I get soft in the biceps and hammies, you can guarantee my mind has lost its edge and I’m not writing, or reading, or making, or feeling alive and crackling with that sweet sweet ADHD electricity.
Hey, it happens to us all sometimes. Just get back in the saddle as soon as you can.
Learning long-term
Another plus: exercise teaches us about process (remember, creativity is a process). We keep showing up, stack days onto weeks onto years, and we slowly see the payoffs over time. Our brains don’t intuitively understand this process very well, and we need practice in order to build and strengthen neural pathways related to agency and future rewards. If we can choose what’s right over what’s easy, as often as possible, we can gradually teach ourselves another, better way.
Remember: your brain can always grow and improve. You can’t “cure” your ADHD, but you can aim for a little better each day, and over time you’ll do things you couldn’t have imagined at the start.
2: Go the fuck to sleep. No, really, though. Don’t make that face at me.
If you are sleep-deprived you cannot concentrate, focus, or remember as well as people who have caught enough Z’s, and we’re already behind the 8-ball on this one. You can’t remember where you put your keys on a GOOD day (always in a random pocket of your handbag where you never normally leave things, you’re welcome). How are you going to squeeze out enough brain juice to do your best creative work under even less than optimal circumstances?
Without good rest, you’ll be more irritable throughout the day in the short-term, and in the long-term you’re significantly more likely to suffer from depression and/or behavioural difficulties.2
Again, it’s less important when you sleep than that you get enough high-quality, refreshing sleep. I’m not here to tell you to get up at 5am and go to bed at 9 or whatever, you’re the one who’s best equipped to figure out what works best for you. The Power of When3 is a handy resource for thinking about your “chronotype” (when your circadian rhythm naturally falls, and therefore when you are likely to get your best work done).
Sleep and attachment
Gabor Mate, writing about ADHD and sleep, reckons there’s something about separation anxiety and bedtime that we find hard, possibly something leftover from childhood and having to go off on our own for the long, dark, night4. Certainly, if we take it as a given that parts of us are very young, like toddler age (I’m going to write a lot more on this in future), it makes sense. Younguns are notoriously terrible at getting themselves off to sleep on their own, even when they are exhausted and really really want to sleep. Relatable, yes?
In any case, Mate noticed that when he felt secure in his relationship with his wife, he had less of a wish to stay up late. If you’re struggling with poor sleep, and there’s someone you can have a chat with in order to soothe your attachment system, what’s the harm in giving it a go?
Anxiety and chatty brain
My number one tip for managing insomnia, which has transformed my life, was learning that the anxious brain thinks in words and therefore, if you feed it words, it can’t overthink. If you can listen to a podcast or audiobook that’s somewhat intriguing (but not so exciting it keeps you awake), at a volume level where you can only just hear the words, you’ll have a much better chance of getting off to the land of Nod.
You’re welcome.
3: Fuel yourself: eat smart and shit brilliance
What we put into our bodies literally becomes us.
Think about that for a second. Toast and pizza and wasabi peas go into your face hole, and your body transforms them into all kinds of stuff. The cells of your muscles and stomach lining and taste buds, the blood pulsing just under your skin and the hairs on the back of your neck. The energy you need to talk and move and think and – inevitably – to create.
When you eat, you are choosing what fuels your creative output, so try to make the best selections you possibly can. I’m not a dietitian, and my first advice would be to try and find one that understands ADHD food challenges. You don’t have to figure it all out yourself, and whatever you pay will be a good investment. But as a rough common-sense guide:
Eating is better than not eating. If all you can truly manage is toast, eat the toast.
Whole foods are better than corner cutting products like green powders and meal replacement drinks. That said, if that’s the only way you can get nutrients in, then do what you gotta do. Get that goodness in your body however you can, and look at doing better over time as things improve overall.
Watch your habits at deadline time. Like a long-distance runner, if you miscalculate your final sprint to the finish you’re going to have a bad time. Eating takeout or skipping meals for a day or two might be necessary, but remember:
Your productivity gets worse the more you live like a garbage raccoon,
You are inherently very bad at judging how long you’re going to take to finish something.
As Gabor Mate points out (and he’s a smart bloke, I’ve got no reason to disagree) we are sensitive beings, and this includes being sensitive to what we put in our bodies. So it’s an extra terrible idea for us to live devoid of forethought and deprived of basic nourishment.
Parts of us are also very young – childlike, in fact – and children are notoriously terrible eaters. Given the choice, most kids tend to favour the familiar, and bland, and scarf it down with little thought to the future. We are the kids at the party that eat themselves sick, every time, never able to expand our awareness outside of the present moment.
We do this for years, unaware that the future will eventually come. The future is today, fellow kids, today stacked onto the tomorrow that becomes today, on and on, until we close our eyed forever. Choose the best you can, today.
A final word. Please remember, gentle reader, that giving your body what it needs to function is a process. Don’t think of it as a skill to be mastered, a thing to be ticked off like learning to ride a bike or tie a knot.
If you find yourself in chaos, your body uncomfortable and hungry and exhausted, gently pick your way back to caring for it. Take a walk, eat something, close your eyes and rest a while. You will have times you do well at giving yourself a fighting chance (probably very long periods of time, as you find things that work for you). You will also have times you struggle, because being alive is complex beyond comprehension. Think of it like the coming and going of the tides, the ebb and flow of life.
What’s happening in you and around you will nearly always be bigger than what you can reliably control, and sometimes all you can do is tread water until you find your feet again.
Writing for a Cause
All subscription funds raised by Painting with Lightning go towards funding independent research in psychotherapeutic treatment development. My areas of experience and interest include suicide bereavement, sexual trauma, ADHD, addiction, and the use of AI in psychotherapy.
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This post was written and edited without the use of AI.
Cameron, J. (1994). The artist’s way: A spiritual path to higher creativity. Souvenir Press.
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Random House.
Breus, M. (2016). The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype--and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More. Penguin Books.
Maté, G. (1999). Scattered minds: The origins and healing of attention deficit disorder. Penguin Random House.