Stress and Creativity

Today I'd like to talk about stress. Gripping, I know.

Last night, while speed painting, I felt incredibly stressed. I'd essentially been working all day on my model, hunched over at my computer screen eating orio's. Come 10pm I was pretty tired and cranky wanting to relieve some stress, preferably by doing something productive.

Part way through my picture I found myself wanting to throw my pc out the window and follow it out for a quick, neck-breaking end. I'm pretty sure the cause of this frustration was the stress that I'd managed to accumulate over the course of the day. The stress completely dampened my creative ability and I ended up getting more and more upset as the session went on since I simply couldn't create anything that I wanted to! I had originally envisaged an exciting scene involving a secret agent and explosions. In reality I ended up finishing with a poor rendition of a female spy doing...well, nothing really!

I could simply have been having an "off-day", but I think that stress had a hand in this matter, no matter how big of an input it had.

I had a little look on the interwebs for information about stress stifiling creativity and found that tests have been carried out on the subject. Apparaently, stress is helpful for things like maths etc but for things that require a person to be creative, stress is generally a bad thing.

Simply put, stress kills creativity. Dead.