Inner Critic, Creativity And The Dusty Watercolours

I've been thinking a lot lately about our peculiar relationship with creativity. Especially the tension between the inner critic and creativity.

Many of my clients crave it - especially after a depleting week of juggling multiple demands where all they want is to give their overworked brain a rest. And yet it's one of the hardest things to give themselves permission to do.

For one client, it's the idea of an afternoon where she puts some music on, takes the watercolours out and just enjoys the process. There is a beautiful set at the back of the cupboard - bought with the best of intentions, but collecting dust ever since. She feels the urge to take it out - maybe even make a birthday card for a friend?

But somehow the idea never moves beyond this point. She starts having second thoughts. Maybe she remembers that the dishwasher filter needs cleaning, the kids' uniform needs labelling or another one of those really mundane items on the endless to do list - and before she knows it her attention drifts elsewhere. The watercolours never come out of the cupboard.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Or maybe she does take them out, admires how gorgeous the colours are, tries a few strokes and very quickly realises that those lines and shapes are very far from what she had in her mind. The contrast between how gorgeous and expensive the set is and the disappointing lines on the page feels almost unbearable.

The inner critic takes over and does not miss the opportunity to confirm that yes - she was never the creative type. The idea of that birthday card feels shameful now.

This is particularly painful for people with high standards, good taste and a long track record of being good at what they do - when the image in our head is confronted with this mediocre thing our hands produced.

The digital world doesn't help either. We can see more beautiful creations during a quick coffee break Instagram scroll than previous generations of creatives encountered in a month. No wonder that it gives our inner critic unlimited ammunition.

From dirt to Jedi training

Over the last couple of years, pottery has stolen my heart (and wallet). I became hooked, mesmerised by the fact that a ball of clay - basically dirt - can transform to a cherished object. I quickly realised that centring and shaping the clay on the pottery wheel is directly correlated to how grounded I am. If I am calm and focussed - the work flows and feels easy. Find me on a bad day, with scattered thoughts and it's a wobbly mess. It feels like I have to master my mind every time I sit down to the wheel - it's like my own Jedi training in the most unexpected of places.

What pottery has taught me is that creativity isn't a nice-to-have that lives at the bottom of the to-do list. It's how I stay in touch with the parts of myself that aren't about thinking, solving, or holding everything together.

We've spent so long prioritising output, efficiency and problem-solving that we've devalued activities that don't serve a concrete purpose or aren't an optimal use of time. And I get it - when we're juggling so much, spending a Saturday afternoon with watercolours can feel almost irresponsible.

Creativity and the Inner Critic: the neuroscience

But here's what I keep coming back to. Our brains aren't only wired for productivity and threat detection - they're also built for play, for making things, for that particular kind of absorption where time behaves differently.

In her book "Beyond Anxiety", Martha Beck calls creativity and anxiety a toggle switch: when one is on, the other dims. And there's something genuinely interesting happening in the brain that explains why.

The analytical, problem-solving part of our brain - the one that my clients and I rely on heavily in our professional lives - turns out to be the same machinery that drives anxiety. It runs scenarios, anticipates problems, evaluates risks. Incredibly useful in our careers. Less useful at 2am when it won't switch off.

Creative activities engage different neural networks altogether. When we're absorbed in making something, the brain's threat detection system actually quietens down. Research on flow states shows that during deep creative absorption, the amygdala (our brain's alarm system) becomes less active and the self-monitoring that fuels so much of our anxiety takes a back seat. It's not a relaxation technique - it's more like routing traffic through a completely different part of the city.

This might be especially worth paying attention to if you spend your days in analytical work - you've been strengthening one set of neural pathways all day, every day, for years. Creativity is one of the few things that gives the other networks a chance to come alive.

I see this playing out in organisations too. Teams that are afraid to think spontaneously, to propose ideas that might fail, to innovate without a guarantee of success - they're operating from the same place. When people censor themselves out of fear, creativity gets locked down - and with it, our ability to adapt and thrive in this fast changing world.

I'll be honest - those little bubbles of creativity have kept me sane through some really difficult times. In the hardest moments, it felt radical to give myself permission to park everything else for a few hours and sit at the wheel or pick up a pen - it has done more for me than most other "self-care" things I could think of.

And that's perhaps the most important thing I've learned: it doesn't need to be good. It actually can't be good, especially at the start. There is no way to avoid the wobbly, the lopsided, the awkward - and bad is the only way in. The making is the point.

I wonder if you have your own version of those dusty watercolours. Maybe it's time to take them out. Not to produce something worthy. Just to see what comes alive when you do.

Your inner critic will almost certainly show up. It will have opinions. Thank it and keep going. I've written more about how to work with that voice rather than against it [here].

Curious to explore what might be getting in the way of your creativity - or what it could unlock? I'd love to hear from you.