For me to function and make art I like to use a few important tricks to counter depression and keep my mental health in check. There are a lot of things that can knock you off the path and if you have a mental health condition then staying on track is even harder. I write this bit of advice for myself in the future (as it’s easy to forget to do the things that work) but also for anyone for whom it might be helpful.
1. Goals
The first thing that helps a lot are goals. Just something to move towards. Sometimes motivation is so low that the only way I can get myself to do anything is to set a small goal and then drag myself towards it. Very often this leads to good results though. I can string together a bunch of small goals until they become a victory.
When you need to set a goal a simple question you can ask yourself over and over is “what is the most important and impactful thing I could do right now?” or “what can I do that will contribute the most to my larger goals?” If a project is very complicated it helps to break it down into smaller goal chunks and just tackle them one at a time.
I tend to picture myself in a snowstorm with snow up to my waist, pulling myself on a rope that is tied to my next goal. That’s about how little motivation I have sometimes to do anything. When I work, I try to have one specific goal that I am working towards, and I try not to think about anything else. This brings me to my next tactic.
2. Be careful what you think about.
It’s very easy to stray into a river of negative thoughts that seem incontrollable when thinking about art, life and creative careers. You won’t be able to have control of what your brain wants to focus on all the time, but you will be able to control it sometimes.
You want to focus on two things: (1) what you are grateful for in your life (family, friends, loved ones, pets, stuff that makes you happy), and (2) what you are doing right now (what are you drawing? Who are you with at the moment? What are you reading?). You want to avoid focusing on (1) the past (past defeats, humiliations, errors, mistakes, arguments, bad decisions, etc.) and (2) the future (future problems, things like the future economy, AI, and the million things that could go wrong with the future). You kind of want to be right here, right now, doing what you are doing to the best of your ability. This seems to free up a lot of mental energy to focus on whatever you have right in front of you.
There isn’t a lot you can do about the past. Spending all day being sad about bad things that happened is liable to make you depressed and you’ll gain very little from it. The future is very uncertain. We don’t know what is going to happen, and you could easily spend the entire day worrying about one thing or another that might or might not happen. All the time spent worrying about these things robs you of the ability to get things done.
This is very much in line with what you may have heard about mindfulness from information on meditation and in Stoic practice. It’s also a practice that appears in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and you want to be careful about engaging in the kinds of cognitive distortions that CBT helps you avoid.[i] Meditation can be helpful in teaching you some mental discipline when it comes to not letting your thoughts stray into dangerous areas that will generally bring a lot of needless suffering.
You'll also want to avoid comparisons, particularly negative comparisons. “By my age that guy was already a famous artist, married, had kids and made 200k a year” is a terrible line of thinking that does very little for us. The more you punish yourself this way the less you can get done now to enjoy the things that you do have.
I’ve started to visualize this approach like a little jet fighter interface, where you want to try to fly your plane down the middle and avoid the outside areas. The outside areas tend to lead to unproductivity, depression and just misery generally. If I find myself on the outside circle, worrying about the future, ruminating on the past, engaging in a cognitive distortion, I just fly the plane back to the center, first to what I am grateful for and then to what I want to do right now. That’s the "guidance system" I use. It helps to write down a list of things you are grateful for, because you may forget on a difficult day.
3. Use Quarterly goals for longer term planning.
You may be thinking “Ok but I have to think about the future so that I can engage in high payoff delayed gratification activities.” And you’re right, you probably should, but you don’t want it to consume 99% of your waking hours. Which is why I use quarterly goals. Every 3 months I set goals for myself for the next quarter and that’s the time where I really allow myself to think about the future with no limits. However, once the goals are set, it’s a bad idea to change them constantly. You want to stick to those goals for the next quarter to see how it goes. At the next quarter you can readjust your goals based on what happened. As for the past, I think the best solution to past mistakes is not to spend all day contemplating them but to try to do better with the next set of choices you have to make when they come.
4. Building motivation
Building motivation to do creative work can be very difficult. If I do what I’ve mentioned above I can usually muster enough focus and drive to be productive. For a difficult task like writing fiction, I often use what I call the 20-minute rule: “I can make myself do almost anything for 20 minutes.” I just set a timer for 20 minutes and try to write. If I try for 20 minutes I consider it a victory, even if I write very little. These little blocks of time can be surprisingly productive, are easy to fit into any schedule, and can be repeated multiple times a day, taking advantage of subconscious processes when you aren't writing.
As long as you’re setting goals, are being mindful of what you are thinking about, and are committing to at least a minimum amount of time and effort to your goals, you should get some results. Doing these little blocks of effort also helps turn what you are doing into a habit which can significantly increase the likelihood that you will do it daily and harness the power of long-term effort.
Conclusion:
This advice is not 100% effective all the time, but it is 80-90% effective for me. And when things go wrong it is usually because I am engaged in some activity/thinking that is not helpful or forgetting to focus on what my goals are.
Cited works: [i] For more information on CBT cognitive distortions, check out this site: https://psychcentral.com/lib/cognitive-distortions-negative-thinking.
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