How Creativity Can Heal Your Life in Troubled Times

Source: Michelle Chappel, used with permission

These days, when many of us are feeling worried and stressed, a creative hobby may seem like the last thing we need. But according to psychologist and creativity consultant, Michelle Chappel, creativity can heal our lives on many levels. Here are seven:

1. Overcoming Stress. “When we feel trapped and powerless,” Chappel says, “we’re experiencing the stress reaction of fight, flight or freeze. Our attention narrows, and we can’t see other possibilities” (Chappel, personal communication, 2024; Prinet & Sarter, 2015). She points to research that shows how creativity lowers stress, anxiety, and depression, boosts self-confidence, and makes us more resilient (Connor, DeYoung, & Silvia, 2016; Kaufman, & Gregoire, 2015).

As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found, creativity can put us into a flow state, bringing us new insights and inspiration. “Taking even half an hour or an hour to do something creative can boost your mental health and ability to solve problems in the real world,” Chappel explains, adding that she practices this herself. “If I’m feeling anxious,” she says, “if I pick up the ukulele and play just two or three songs, it will get me out of that anxious state. I’ll look at the world differently.”

2. Discovering Hidden Strengths. With a Ph.D. in psychology and a background as a singer-songwriter, Chappel gives classes on creativity and self-actualization to corporate and community groups. These classes are filled with people “feeling trapped and powerless,” she sys, because they lost a job, have gotten a divorce, or are struggling with an illness. She asks her students to “experiment every week with a creative project and just see what happens.” What she notices is that they “discover a strength or superpower that they didn’t know they had or had forgotten about,” and this discovery brings new meaning and direction to their life and work.

One student, Dan, working as an attorney to support his wife and family, was feeling stuck. Chappel asked him to imagine what life would be like without his career responsibilities. As he was driving home through Salinas, California, he was so inspired by the scenery that he pulled over and held up his hands like he was setting up for a picture. Then he remembered how much he’d loved photography as a boy. He rediscovered this strength and began taking photographs as a hobby, and this "reinvigorated his life and career.”

3. Solving Problems. According to Chappel, cognitive psychology “sees creativity as a way of solving problems.” Pointing to the classic study by Maier (1931), she says, “It gets people to look at things in a new way.”

Case in point: When Chappel was in graduate school studying this concept, a friend gave her a picture that she didn't have time to hang on the wall. When the friend called, asking if she could drop by, Chappel wanted to hang up the picture but didn’t have a hammer. She then picked up her psychology textbook and used it to pound a nail into the wall to hang the picture.

4. Incubation. Another aspect of creativity is “incubation,” or taking a break from solving a problem to make room for new insights. Chappel points to research (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014) that shows how walking in nature increases our creativity and problem-solving skills. Einstein made use of incubation. Riding his bicycle, playing the violin, and going sailing often brought new insights to his work.

5. Finding New Combinations. Combining previous ideas in new combinations can also enhance creativity. Chappel referred to Steve Jobs, who combined his love of calligraphy with tech to produce remarkable new fonts for Apple products. Chappel found this herself by combining her psychology background with her work as a singer-songwriter to craft a new career as a creativity consultant and career coach.

6. Learning From Mistakes. Chappel often encourages her students and clients to overcome not only their fear of beginning new creative projects but also their fear of making mistakes.

Making mistakes is how we learn, she says, and sometimes mistakes lead to valuable discoveries, such as when Art Fry at the 3M corporation realized that a glue dismissed as a failure because it was too weak could be used to place a marker in his hymn book in church, resulting in the invention of Post-It notes (3M, 2024).

7. Being Part of a Community. In her classes, Chappel has found that “people make breakthroughs much faster as a group than individually.” There’s a creative synergy when we develop a sense of belonging that relieves our stress and our fear of being different and returns us to a state of calm, connection, and community. These group energies can heal and inspire us, especially now that we’re experiencing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation (Murthy, 2023).

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How to Begin Living More Creatively

Michelle Chappel offers these four steps you can take to begin living more creatively:

• Find a creative outlet. Sign up for a class in a creative field you enjoy—like drawing, cooking, or yoga. Listen to happy music (Ritter, & Ferguson, 2017) or pick up a creative hobby. Chappel says that when Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, played guitar after work, he felt that his coding the next day became more creative.
• Shake up your routines. Take a new route home from work or do something else that “breaks set ways of thinking.”
• Eliminate energy drains. Chappel says that watching too much news can give you a feeling of learned helplessness. “When you find yourself watching too much news, turn off the news and do a creative project instead.”
• Write down your feelings. University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker (1997) found that writing down your most troubling thoughts and feelings can be highly therapeutic, bringing relief from stress and better mental health.

In many ways, creative projects can calm us and free us from chronic stress. They can also enable us to see new possibilities—to change not only what is going on within us but also what is going on around us so we can solve some of the problems we face.

© 2025 Diane Dreher, All Rights Reserved. This post is for informational purposes and should not substitute for psychotherapy with a qualified professional.