Using creativity to dig yourself out of a tough spot

If you're a person who lives and breathes, chances are you've had an extended dip in mood or morale at one point or another. It's par for the course, I guess. The trick is first acknowledging and accepting—resisting will only dig yourself further, in our experience. The second step is to find the pick and shovel to get yourself out.

Of course this will be different for everyone. After all, there are many ways to enhance positive brain chemistry like working out or hanging with friends. But there's a tool that, only until recently, I've found to be profoundly useful: my creativity and imagination.

The usual suspect in question when we're feeling low is our own brain and the loops it perpetuates—negative self-talk, resurfacing trauma, and overthinking to name a few. The task at hand is to make the brain produce dopamine in the right areas again and one way to do that is to listen to inspiring music that physically moves you. Another is to dive into a low-lift creative project with modest to minimal expectations.

By ingesting music that moves you (for me, it's LCD Soundsystem at a fairly loud decibel in my car) and/or doing something as simple as creating a positive scene of a movie in your head, you're essentially forcing dopamine into the frontal lobe and away from the ruminating mind.