neural decoupling, mortal vessels, and the science of creative recovery

In a world where productivity is often a form of self-hatred (or self-punishment) and creativity is considered a waste, it's no wonder that many of us are looking for:

👉 Sustainable ways to exist
👉 Aligned communities
👉 Unique experiences off social media

When the joy of creating gets buried under the pressure to produce, we find ourselves caught in a contradiction:

Our most depleted moments are when we need creative recovery the most, and yet they are also when creative energy feels hardest to reach.

This week, we're exploring rest, but more specifically, creative recovery—not as another self-improvement task, but as a return to what makes us human. Whether you're a professional creative feeling burnt out, a business leader seeking sustainable innovation, or simply someone who's forgotten the pleasure of making something without purpose—there's profound healing in reclaiming creativity as nourishment rather than just another resource to extract.

🌱 TIPS FOR A MORE SUSTAINABLE LIFE + BUSINESS 

Depleted? Cross-Train (Creatively)

We're all exhausted. And there are lots of reasons—late-stage capitalism, parenthood, disability, trauma, burnout, untenable conditions for the working class and billionaires willfully destroying everything. (I could keep going but I won't.) It's one of the reasons that "rest" has become such a hot topic in the mental health and wellness worlds (which has bled over into content creation, online business, and more.)

And to be clear, rest is important (vital even) but I'm not suggesting that any of this can be fixed with rest and rest alone. That'd be ridiculous. And I save my ridiculousness for things that make me feel awe and joy, to feel like a kid again. But I do want to talk about rest today, and more specifically the types of rest and how you've been short changed on being taught how to rest well. 

You've probably seen infographics about the 7 types of rest floating around social media. What they aren't telling you is how creative activities uniquely address multiple rest types AT. THE. SAME. TIME. This happens through a process neuroscientists call "neural decoupling." [1] When you engage in creative activities, your brain literally shifts activity—think of it like a train track shifting from one line to the next—away from overused analytical pathways to alternative networks that have been patiently waiting their turn.  This neural tag-team, so to speak, allows those depleted areas to recover while keeping your mind engaged.

The key to implementing this is creative cross-training—matching different creative activities to specific types of depletion. It's like prescribing the right medicine for each unique symptom:

🪫 When you're depleted from endless decision-making.
🔋 Try creative flow activities like watercolors or clay.

🪫 When you're depleted from verbal overload/meetings.
🔋 Try creative non-verbal activities like instrumental music and abstract art.

🪫 When you're depleted from emotional heaviness.
🔋 Try creative activities like expressive wrtiting or guided art.

🪫 When you're depleted from physical stagnation.
🔋 Try creative activities like rhythmic movement such as dance or pottery.

This approach is magical because it targets exactly what's drained—when your verbal centers are exhausted from meetings, non-verbal creativity gives those specific neural pathways a break while activating complementary ones.

When I started creative cross-training I started looking at my existing patterns. A lot of times, your body already knows what you need. 

For me, anytime I've been in a role with lots of meeting and social interaction, my Spotify stats is always above 20,000 minutes a month. I didn't necessarily need to be creating music, but immersing myself in music was instinctual. And whenever I've been tied to a desk for long periods, you'll find me listening to music and dancing while walking the dogs to rest and reset. My body was naturally seeking creative activities based on the depletion I was experiencing.

Are any patterns or habits of your own coming up where you may already be implementing creative cross-training without realizing it?

ACTION STEP: Identify the way you are most often depleted from and experiment with its corresponding creative activity. Notice how it feels in comparison to scrolling, Netflix, or other activities you usually do—you're not just distracting yourself, you're actively replenishing what work has depleted.

✨ TIPS FOR A MORE SOULFUL LIFE

Separating Creativity from Productivity

The ancient Greeks didn't consider creativity a human trait at all—it was divine inspiration channeled through mortals. This placed the creative individual as a vessel rather than a source—a fundamental difference from today's understanding. 

Creative output wasn't considered "productive" in the modern sense, but rather a sacred harmony with forces beyond human control. The very etymology of creativity, derived from the Latin creare meaning "to make" or "to bring forth," hints at this original understanding of creativity as bringing something into existence through a divine connection.

Fast forward to today, where "creative thinking" is just another skill on a resume, and you'll see how profoundly our relationship with creativity has shifted to more of an economic asset.

This commodification creates a painful tension between creativity as a state of being and as productive output. When creativity exists only as another checkbox on your to-do list, warning signs can emerge: creative burnout, dwindling intrinsic motivation, and that nagging feeling that creative work has become an obligation rather than an exploration.

So what can you do? If we look to the WEAL Method (Witness, Explore, Adapt, and Learn+Loop) it suggests a different approach: the creative sabbatical. While few can implement designer Stefan Sagmeister's more radical practice of closing his studio for a full year every seven years, we can all create intentional spaces for unstructured thought. 

Even small  sabbaticals—an hour a week or a weekend monthly—allow your subconscious to make connections that goal-oriented thinking misses.

Research shows even these mini sabbaticals—an hour of creative wandering daily, a weekend retreat monthly, or a week of creative play annually—provide the psychological space necessary for authentic creativity to flourish. These breaks from productivity-oriented thinking allow your subconscious to make connections that our more deliberate, goal-oriented thought often misses.

And isn't that the whole point of creativity—to make connections, express our unique perspectives, and share something with the world that can't come from anyone else?

ACTION STEP: Spend 15-20 minutes and look at the next 6 months of your schedule. My challenge to you is to block off: 

• 3 weekends where you can "retreat" whether that's a trip, if you have the means, or just a staycation where you disconnect and change up your routine.
• 1 hour each week to spend on a creative activity that has no expectations.

The goal of these times is to focus on creation without pressure, purpose, or productivity. Treat these as important as any other family event, vacation, or doctor's appointment. 

p.s. If you, like me, do better with gentle accountability then I'd love to see you at a Just Because Club meetup. I host a digital meetup every Tuesday at 5pm PST/ 8pm EST where we do exactly this—spend 1 hour each week dedicated to creating your activity of choice (BYO-Craft folks!) together where we can set our Perfectionist Monsters aside and be creative... just because. Try your first session for free with a 7-day trial!

📈 TIPS FOR A MORE SCALEABLE BUSINESS

Building Creativity into Your Business Model

And yes, this is for you even if you aren't a creative for a living. Especially if you aren't. 

While I believe that we are all creative in our careers today. Whether you are in a traditional creative field or a more modern creative thinking field, there is a huge benefit of reframing the way we look at creativity as adults and business leaders.

Because the reality of today's business landscape...

If you aren't in a creative field, creativity is often written off as unnecessary and a "cost" to productivity instead of an essential investment in helping your team prevent burnout and drive innovation.

But of course, the data tells a different story. 

Companies that formalize creative time consistently outperform those that don't. Google's "20% Time" policy gave us Gmail and AdSense, while 3M's "15% Rule" produced the humble Post-it Note. These aren't happy accidents—they're the result of systematically valuing creative energy as a renewable resource rather than an expendable one.

The key is building what I call a "creative infrastructure" that doesn't rely on individual willpower or sporadic inspiration. Just as my WEAL method focuses on sustainable energy patterns, your business needs systems that support creativity without demanding constant motivation. This could scale from large scale like designer Stefan Sagmeister's approach of taking a full year off every seven years to more incremental implementations like weekly creative blocks. The possibilities are as diverse as the teams implementing them. What matters most is creating defined creative roles, collaborative workflows, and removing barriers that create friction between ideas and implementation.

How do you measure this investment? Start small: track the number of new ideas generated, improvement in team engagement scores, or even reduced turnover rates. The ROI of creativity isn't always immediate, but when tracked consistently, patterns emerge showing that creative breaks directly correlate with both innovation and team sustainability.

ACTION STEP: Identify one meeting that could be an email or messenger update and replace it with with a structured creative break. Not an open-ended "brainstorming session," but a deliberate period where your team explores possibilities without immediate pressure to produce. Track what emerges—you might be surprised at how this seemingly "unproductive" time becomes your most valuable investment.

(And if removing a meeting seems impossible, remember last week's scalable section about 20% of your effort producing 80% of your results... What showed up in that list that could be replaced with a creative break?)

UNFILTERED THOUGHTS

I've always been a creative. 

• When I was 5, I was building waterways in the flowerbeds and designing parachutes to throw my brother's action figures off the slide playhouse.
• Then at 11, I spent summers writing stories about a teenage rockstar, with a dinosaur sidekick, on my typewriter (I was a wild one, I know lol) and building a pulley system to be able to turn on the bedroom light without getting out of bed.
• At 17, you could find me roaming the halls of school taking photos and and spending as much time as possible in the dark room developing them as I learned different processing techniques. 
• By the time I was 21, I had taken a love for baking cakes and an obsession with late-00s cake decorating trends and built a word-of-mouth boutique cake business in 3 years.
• Around 25, I hand-lettered for a living and was about to get my first big commercial design project with HarperCollins for a book cover based on my personal project, Silhouettes. 

And despite all this evidence of my lifelong creativity, when I got carpal tunnel at 26 and had to end my creative business, I just stopped... being creative. 

Not forever it turns out, but for a while. Because somewhere in the back of my mind I had convinced myself that I "wasn't meant" to be creative if I wasn't doing it for a career. I had become so attached to the way creativity (and life) unfolded that I landed myself in creative purgatory for a decade. 🥴 

While I know better than to regret that decision, a significant part of my heart goes out to the part of me that was so grief-stricken that I couldn't imagine a world where my creativity looked any other way. She deserved a hug, something I try to do everyday now, even if it's 10 years late. 

At the end of the day, giving up creativity gave me the opportunity to:

✨ Rediscover it
✨ Redefine it
✨ Refine it

Without all the baggage and fear that used to drive my creativity, I can instead approach it with the awe and openness that it always deserved. 

I think I'll spend the rest of my life refining, redefining, and rediscovering creativity over and over again. And I've never been more excited for or detached from how that will look—which feels like a really great place to be.

CURRENTLY OBSESSED WITH:

• Crochet Statues. Last year, I started learning to crochet. I love it, and go in spurts as my hands allow. Every once and awhile I run across a crochet project that makes me feel flabbergasted. The home of the crochet statues is definitely one of those.
• Watching the weather. It's currently what I like to refer to as "the danger zone" here in OKC. The last week of April through about mid-May is typically when some of the worst tornados hit, especially through where we live. Which means rain pretty much everyday that washes away most of the blooms like my white roses that are getting trashed from being pelted constantly. 
• Vintage Themepark Maps. I'm desiging something for my community space, Just Because Club, which lead me down a rabbit hole of vintage themepark maps and I can't get enough. Here's the google search that I started with. We won't talk about where I ended up, lol.
  
  

HAVING A GREAT TIME HERE?

Here's a few ways you can let me know:

• Option 1: 💌 Share with a fellow creative or business owner. Community starts with each of us and friends don't let friends chase their dreams at the expense of their mental health! If you know someone seeking more sustainability and harmony in their life and/or business, send this their way.
• Option 2: 👋 Say hi! Hit reply and share a sentence or two about anything you enjoyed or hit home for you. I always hope these words find the right people at the right time, but it's always makes my day to hear from you!

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