Do you think you might be suffering from the Sylvia Plath effect? Know about it here for writers and poets.
Continue Reading “You May Be Suffering From The Sylvia Plath Effect”Author: Anjana V
15 Of the Most Common Causes Of Writer’s Block – And How To Overcome It?
Are you a writer that has been experiencing writer’s block? Here we provide the most common causes and how you can combat them.
Continue Reading “15 Of the Most Common Causes Of Writer’s Block – And How To Overcome It?”Creativity and Mental Illness, Bipolar Disorder and the Arts
It is estimated that at least 2.4% of the world’s population suffers from creativity and mental illness. However, in arts-related circles, this percentage tends to increase markedly.
Continue Reading “Creativity and Mental Illness, Bipolar Disorder and the Arts”Creative Thinking Techniques and The Tools to Use
Creativity is the ability to imagine or invent something new. We are all creative beings, but many of us have forgotten this habit due to excessive rational thinking when solving problems. Here are some creativity techniques and tools.
Highlights
- Extraction of ideas from other disciplines
- Think of opposites
- Focus on the absurd
- Reframe the question
- Stop thinking, give yourself a break
- Brainstorming
- Related worlds
- Future Memory
- From the Impossible to the Possible
- What if? (Assumption Reversal)
Most creative people generate new ideas from the combination or modification of existing ideas, and, above all, they are aware that they can continuously improve ideas.
Creativity Tools and Techniques
There are a series of creativity tools for generating new ideas, they are:

Extraction Of Ideas From Other Disciplines:
Applying a new perspective on a different profession or discipline can stimulate discoveries.
Think Of Opposites:
Thinking about simultaneous opposites turns the topic into a paradox that can help you find a helpful analogy.
Look For Analogies:
You probably have several areas of expertise that you underestimate. Apply the experience you have in a specific field to another diametrically different field.
Focus On The Absurd:
Focusing on the absurd helps us discover new ideas. What do most people in your field think would be impossible? Is it that way? Or is it just complicated?
Reframe The Question:
We often do not find an adequate solution to our questions because they are formulated inadequately. We need to find the right question, and only then can we try to find the answer. Rethinking a new way of asking generates new ideas that can make it possible to find the solution.
Stop Thinking, Give Yourself A Break:
As a friend of mine says, “go to the box out of nowhere.” This is precisely why your creativity increases. When you stop squatting your mind every day, you make room for the new.
Currents of the “mindfulness” type promote mindfulness as a source of increased creativity and innovation. To stop, meditation techniques can help you enormously, but also take a walk in nature. The key is to seek some peace of mind and a disconnect with your emotions.
Other More Formal Methods
If you are not clear about the idea on which you want to start a business. Prepare a creativity session with your team and invite other experts in the sector or potential consumers of the idea to provide valuable insight. Select one of the various commented ideation techniques and assess the results obtained. There are endless creativity tools, such as:
Brainstorming:
It is a creativity tool that encourages ideas about a specific topic or problem.
Related Worlds:
It allows discovering different approaches thanks to thinking about how the same problem would be solved in different sectors or worlds.
Future Memory:
It helps to visualize the reality that you want to attract into your life. Organize the ideas and help you establish the first steps. It seems silly, but it is creativity tools that work.
From the Impossible to the Possible:
Encouraging the generation of ideas about a particular issue or problem by visualizing the situation from different perspectives causes new alternative solutions.
What if? (Assumption Reversal):
Allows you to question the status quo (that is, the state of affairs at the moment) to get a new perspective on the problem or need.
The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers
The confessional poet Sylvia Plath, born in the United States in 1932, undoubtedly had a fascinating life and work. Here is The Sylvia Plath Effect what you should know about creative writing and mental health.
Continue Reading “The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers”How To Measure The Psychological “Flow”?
Already proven methods can measure the psychological flow, and below, we explain these methods.
Continue Reading “How To Measure The Psychological “Flow”?”What is Flow in Psychology? Definition and 10+ Activities to Induce Flow
How many times have you felt “lost” about your own life? Not having defined your professional and personal goals can make you discouraged when performing tasks that do not make sense to you, let alone make you truly happy. Here are activities to induce flow in psychology.
Continue Reading “What is Flow in Psychology? Definition and 10+ Activities to Induce Flow”The Creativity Hack You Can Do in Your Sleep
It sounds easy, and it isn’t complicated. These sleep and creativity habits make our rest restful, and our brain starts to solve problems creatively.
Continue Reading “The Creativity Hack You Can Do in Your Sleep”The Four Stages of Creativity- The Incubation Effect: How to Break Through a Mental Block
When emotions do not flow, a mental block occurs, and vice versa. Here is how to break through a mental block.
Highlights
- Various life occurences can cause a mental block
- We need to approach a mental block to unblock it properly
- A mental block is an incubation effect in the stages of creativity
The four essential difficulties that cause mental and emotional blockage and the four essential tools to get out of it
Before the first meeting with a person who begins his psychological therapy, I always feel with great responsibility that my work aims to contribute to change something in his life, in the way of thinking and feeling that is causing him suffering.

And it is in that thought, questions arise, such as: How long has this person been affected? What internal and external factors influenced the beginning of this situation? What factors influence now? What qualities are your main strengths? What are the main vulnerabilities that make the problem persist? What are your most important support figures? And the places and contexts in which you feel most comfortable? Is this person on a mental block or an emotional block?
How Is Mental Block and Emotional Block Related?
A term used frequently is that of mental block: I was blocked, blank, did not know what to say. I would have liked to tell him what I thought at the time, but I froze. In the most critical moments, those mental blocks come to me. Tomorrow I have an exam. I hope I don’t have a mental block. But what is the relationship between this kind of stoppage of the mind, this inability to give an adequate response to a situation, and the emotional blockage?
The mental block is undoubtedly related to emotions. Behind this lack of fluidity in the speech of thoughts, there is an apparent difficulty in recognizing, expressing, and regulating emotions. The mental block is the expression of the emotional block, and emotional release techniques help the symptoms of mental blocks, such as anxiety, disappear.
Emotions and thoughts once again interact. They do so in both directions; sometimes, emotions are the triggers and other thoughts; we know that by managing both, we can overcome the mental and emotional blocks. Today we are going to talk about how to achieve it. And the first thing to do is to understand that these blocks are initially a defence mechanism.
How to Break Through a Mental Block
The four essential difficulties that cause mental and emotional blockage and the four essential tools to get out of it.
1. Difficulty (level 1): Emotional closure. Solution: Emotional Openness
- I don’t know what I feel, and I’m not particularly interested in knowing.
Stopping to think about what I feel makes me even worse and will not solve the situation. I prefer not to think and not give importance to what I feel because if I did, my life would be turned upside down.
Faced with this difficulty, it is essential to become aware that a part of our happiness depends on our ability to let ourselves feel; we must release both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. We will have to learn to accept, face, and learn from what happened from the unpleasant.
Of the pleasant ones, we will have to stop, attend, savour, and give them the meaning they deserve in our lives. We should not be afraid to be open to what we feel: letting ourselves feel is a first step that does not necessarily imply a drastic change in our lives.
2. Difficulty (level 2): Little Emotional Language. Solution: Vocabulary of Emotions
- I do not know what exact name to put to what I feel, even if I try. It’s like. I don’t know, and I don’t know how to express it
When talking about emotions is striking, the relief we feel is that we abandon the limited vocabulary of “good or bad.” When I am emotionally blocked, immobile in that blockage, if instead of saying: “I feel bad,” I can say: I feel “disappointed,” or “betrayed,” or “alone,” or “anxious” something begins to change? Naming the emotion relieves us because it suggests the proper process of change and adaptation.
3. Difficulty (level 3): Denial or emotional suppression. Solution: Emotional Acceptance
- I am too young to feel this way.
- I’m old enough to feel that.
- Feeling this doesn’t help me.
- I should not feel anger towards a person I love.
- I feel ashamed for feeling vulnerable.
All these affirmations could ideally emerge from the thinking of people who live within an emotional blockage, produced by the process of denial of their feelings.
I propose an exercise to break this process of denial: Think about everything that a person is supposed to “not” feel, or at least “should not feel in some situations”: envy, anger, sadness, fragility, indecision, and next, become aware that people do not choose what we feel, we feel it, and those feelings always have an explanation.
So it is not true that “I should not” feel certain things, but quite the opposite: It is normal to feel the way I feel because although it sometimes seems otherwise, feelings always have an explanation.
Detecting what I feel and understanding that it is normal to feel it arriving at that explanation is necessary to get out of the block that denial produces and break these mental barriers.
“The problem is not to stumble but to become fond of the stone.” Similarly, the problem is not detecting that I feel sadness, anger, jealousy, but denying it and becoming fond of the dissatisfaction it produces in me, not resolving what I continue to deny.
4. Difficulty (Level 4): Errors In Emotional Analysis and Their Subsequent Response. Solution: Good Emotional Analysis and Consistent Response.
- I feel continually anxious, and I know that my job is the main problem, but I cannot stop working or change companies; what can I do?
I feel pretty lonely since my marriage broke up. My friends and family, each one has his life, and I find myself lost for the first time in many years without knowing how to solve it.
Using another example, complicated but quite frequent, let’s analyze this situation: “I am disillusioned with my whole life; I don’t see any meaning in anything.”
All emotions have a message, but that message is not always valid, or at least, that message is not always totally accurate. There is a part of it that can be a “false alarm.” What part of the true message and what part of the false alarm is hidden in each of the above emotional statements?
Let’s look at the last example.
True message:
If you feel disappointed in your whole life, this emotion asks you to “take a look” because it is not much of what you expected your life to be. This involves accepting the loss of what you will no longer achieve and starting with some changes to achieve what you can still achieve.
True message:
It seems that you need some changes in your life, and with those changes, start dedicating your day-to-day to what connects your life goals with your values.
The appropriate response to analysis:
Since it is a true message, until we begin these changes, that feeling of disappointment will not fade, and we will continue to feel in that state of emotional blockage.
False alarm:
Although we sometimes feel as real, that nothing in our life is worth it, that everything disappoints us, it is difficult for this to be the case. There are always aspects of oneself, others, and life that we can appreciate and be proud of. Since it is probably a false alarm, making a drastic break with all current life would lead to feelings of sadness in the medium term for having banished valuable people and contexts from our side.
Even if we feel that nothing has value in our life at any time, little by little, we will have to continue this analysis, differentiating what we want to change, what we cannot change, and what we want to maintain.
A mental and emotional blockage is nothing more than a great wake-up call from our body that carries a great message:
Stop at once! Put off your usual priorities to solve this emotional conundrum. The reward: improve your personal, work, and partner functioning, and achieve a higher quality in your social relationships and your well-being. After reading the above, I hope that you can understand your mental and emotional blockage as an opportunity, a necessary turning point to turn towards your well-being