Why Tracy is drawing and Juliette is dancing: What Martha Beck says about creativity & anxiety
We both just read Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck, and one line has been echoing in our minds ever since:
“Just as anxiety is the end product of a paranoid imagination, inspiration is the end product of a creative imagination.”
We talk a lot in our work about using intentional thinking to reduce anxiety—but this landed differently. It reminded us that sometimes the path out of anxiety isn’t found by thinking our way through the problem.
It’s found by shifting where in our brain we’re living.
Anxiety is a left-hemisphere activity. That part of the brain loves logic, control, and pattern recognition. It also—unfortunately—loves catastrophic forecasting and obsessing over things we can’t actually change.
The right hemisphere, in contrast, is the space of possibility. Of color, texture, music, metaphor. Of being here, now, instead of gripping the future with white knuckles.
Creativity is one of the fastest ways to shift into that space. And no, it doesn’t have to relate to the thing you’re worried about at all. You don’t need to draw your feelings or paint your stress. You just need to make something—anything.
Reading this book was actually the final nudge Juliette needed to do something that had been tugging at her quietly for years: she signed up for ballet classes again, returning to a childhood passion she hadn’t touched in three decades. Tracy, meanwhile, felt the pull to return to her roots as a creative being—writing poetry again, pulling out paints for art projects with her little one, and remembering how deeply satisfying it is to make something just because.
None of these things solved our problems. They didn’t cross anything off a to-do list. But they gave our nervous systems something else to latch onto besides control and worry. They brought us back to the present. To play. To ourselves.
So today, if your brain feels tight and tangled, try asking: What could I make?
It doesn’t have to be useful. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be yours.
