Being Nice to Yourself Increases Creativity

Psychology February 06, 2012 / By Darya Zabelina

SYNOPSIS

Treat yourself as you would treat a friend and become more creative.

When you write, draw, play a musical instrument, or brainstorm, are you as accepting of your creations or ideas as you would be of a friend's? Most of us are not. We criticize ourselves, telling ourselves we are not good enough, that we don't have the skill or the talent, or that our ideas are not worth pursuing. Imagine your friend playing a piano - would you criticize your friend for not being exactly perfect and dismiss the attempt as not being worthy? Or would you instead be supportive and encouraging? So what if, just if, we tried to be as nice to ourselves as we would be to our friend. Perhaps this would remove some of the barriers and let our natural talents reveal themselves.

Research shows that this is the case. In our recent research study we (Zabelina & Robinson, 2010) set out to explore whether a self-compassionate attitude would increase people's creativity, especially of those who are chronically self-judgmental. Half of the participants were induced with a self-compassionate mindset prior to performing a creativity task. This was done by having participants write about a negative personal experience from the past, and then listing ways in which others also experience similar events, express understanding, kindness, and concern for the self in a manner similar to the way in which they would sympathize with a friend who had undergone the experience, and view the event in an objective and detached manner. We found that individuals particularly high in self-judgmental attitude benefited from such a self-compassionate mindset, as they consequently produced significantly more original answers than their less self-judgmental counterparts.

So next time you catch yourself dismissing your ideas or creative attempts as not good enough, think about whether you would have the same response to a friend. If the answer is no, simply think how you would treat a friend in a similar situation, and apply that attitude towards your own creative endeavors. It is bound to help you tap into your enormous well of creative potential!

comments powered by Disqus

Author

Darya Zabelina

Dr. Darya L. Zabelina, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Arkansas. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Northwestern University in 2015 and was a Research Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2015-2017. Dr. Zabelina’s work focuses on understanding creative cognition, imagination, and other related processes, and how these processes are linked with more traditional subfields of cognitive psychology, such as attention and executive functions. In her work, she uses a variety of approaches, including behavioral, electrophysiological (EEG and ERP), and functional MRI (fMRI) techniques. She also does work on mind-wandering, mindfulness, problem-solving, and the influence of mobile technology on creativity and imagination. Dr. Zabelina is the director of the Mechanisms of Attention and Cognition (MoCA) laboratory, where the long-term objective is to create a theoretical foundation upon which to develop methods to enhance creative thinking, imagination, and problem-solving abilities. The fruits of Dr. Zabelina’s work have appeared in Psychological Science, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, NeuroImage, Mindfulness, and Memory & Cognition (best paper of the year award), among others. Dr. Zabelina’s work has been recognized with fellowships from the National Science Foundation (including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship), National Institute of Mental Health, American Psychological Association, Mind & Life Institute, and the Australian Government (Endeavour Research Fellowship). In 2019 Dr. Zabelina was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.

More about Darya Zabelina