Bored by COVID-19? Here’s how to stay creative during the crisis

For many people the monotony of the past few months while working from home has sapped their innovation. What to do?

The lack of novelty in our COVID-19 existence can negatively affect our creativity

Over the past eight months, as the corona­virus has continued spreading, our worlds have become smaller.

Working from home has morphed from novelty to mundane. Travel for business or pleasure, once routine, has become non-existent. Seeing friends, going to our favourite restaurants, visiting family – the list of things we can’t do, and won’t be able to for months to come, is endless.

The lack of novelty in our COVID-19 existence can negatively affect our creativity — our ability to put ideas together in new, useful combinations to solve problems.

Creativity is often enhanced when we’re exposed to new situations. For example, in one experiment using virtual reality, researchers divided participants into three groups. The first group was exposed to a wild simulation that defied the laws of physics: They walked around in a room where objects fell up rather than down or got smaller as they approached them. The second group was placed in a similar simulation, but the objects behaved normally. And the third group of participants watched a film clip of the first group’s simulation. Participants in the first group showed an increase in cognitive flexibility, an essential part of creativity, while the others did not.

While most of us aren’t regularly exposed to virtual reality, before COVID-19 we routinely encountered novel situations. Even activities as mundane as taking a new route to work because of construction or having a serendipitous hallway conversation with a colleague can help increase our cognitive flexibility.

We’re also under a tremendous amount of stress right now — from worries about our job security to the health of our loved ones to our children’s education. Research on decision-making shows that our brains are wired to be more reactionary under stress, and this can take a toll on creativity. In our decision-making, for example, we’re likely to limit our thinking to binary choices.

With the pandemic keeping us in our limited and stressful worlds for the foreseeable future, do we have to resign ourselves to an increasing lack of creativity in our lives and work?

Not necessarily, according to leadership and creativity experts, as long as we know what steps to take. Here are five research-backed strategies to widen your worldview and enhance your creativity:

Harness your negative emotions

A growing number of psychologists and brain scientists are amassing evidence that negative emotions can be a vital component of our emotional toolkit. Anger, in particular, can be a motivating force, focusing our minds and moods in productive ways and fuelling us to achieve our goals.

When people perceive they have the ability to improve things, pessimistic moods can activate the reward centre in the brain.

In my executive coaching practice, I’ve seen first-hand how the anger and frustration that my clients are feeling about the pandemic and other problems in society is fuelling decisions to step away from large salaries and switch to creative endeavours.

Engage in an expressive outlet

Studies have shown that expressing yourself through art can help manage stress and ­anxiety, and even improve health.

Before COVID-19 hit, one of my clients — an executive-level leader of a healthcare non-profit whom I’ll call Julia — decided to enrol in an improvisational acting class to help her manage stress. After COVID-19 hit, Julia was thrust unexpectedly into the role of interim chief executive. Julia has found that her improv classes, which she continues to attend remotely, have helped her come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems she faces in her new chief executive role. For example, improv has helped her learn how to tune into non-verbal signals – not just words but subtext and intent.

Get into a flow state

Have you ever been so completely immersed in an activity that you lost all sense of time? You may have been experiencing a mental state known as “flow”, defined by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake”.

Research done by the Harvard professor Teresa Amabile shows that people who experience flow report higher levels of creativity, productivity and happiness. Amabile discovered that not only are people more creative in flow, they also report having more creative days — suggesting that flow doesn’t just heighten creativity in the moment, it heightens it over the long haul.

In other words, being in flow trains us to be more creative. You can cultivate a flow state without intentionally trying to be creative. Think about the moments when you’re most likely to lose track of time: What are you doing at these moments? Is it going for a run? Reading a good book? One option, recommended by Giorgia Lupi in her book “Observe, Collect, Draw!,” is to create a ­personal documentary by drawing the minutiae in your everyday life.

Broaden your network

Research shows that diverse networks enhance creativity and that knowledge diversity positively correlates with individual creativity. In the 1970s and ’80s, knowledge creation was considered an activity based on our ­ability to process data and information.

However, current science understands it as a social process enhanced by interactions with people of different backgrounds and insights.

Even though most of us aren’t travelling or attending in-person events, we can still network virtually. You can host your own event. For example, I helped form and belong to a group of female entrepreneurs that meets biweekly on Zoom. We come together as business owners with complementary skills who want feedback from smart, motivated individuals, about how to take our businesses to the next level.

Spend time in nature

A psychological study that looked at the impact of nature on creativity found that spending quality time outside improves people’s creative potential. Fifty-six people who went on a hiking trip took an assessment that used word associations to measure creative potential.

Twenty-four took the test before they began the trip, and the other 32 took it on the fourth day. Those in the latter group performed much better. Researchers ultimately found that spending time in nature improved creativity test scores by 50 per cent.

These five strategies are an excellent place to start if you’re hoping to spark some new ideas. “Our creativity will wane,” the creativity expert David Burkus counsels, “unless we make conscious efforts to ­counter the narrowing and anxiety of our current situation.”

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Susan Peppercorn is an executive career transition coach and speaker

Copyright Harvard Business Review 2020/Distributed by the New York Times Syndicate