Stress and Creativity, with Modupe Akinola

(mouse clicks) (ethereal music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hi, everyone. This is Modupe Akinola, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and welcome to Wednesday. This week is all about rethinking the way we deal with stress, and something that stress can help us with is creativity, which we need to solve problems, take on tasks, and find ways to innovate overall. So today I'm going to talk about how stress can enhance creativity and some practical ways to use stress to our advantage instead of feeling overwhelmed. (birds singing) So one of the ways stress positively affects creativity is that when you're in a stressed state where your body is flowing in a way that is kind of enhancing, in a flow state is sometimes what it's called, then you're able to make more remote connections between different things. So what I mean by that flow state is you're kind of in an approach orientation, you wanna go for something, and then if you look at your physiology, your body is just responding. Your heart is responding in a way that the walls of your blood vessels are dilating. The blood is being able to circulate in the way that's kind of flowing and efficient and allowing you to think kind of big picture, and that is what can be beneficial for certain types of creativity. And a piece of creativity is being able to connect things that might have otherwise not been as connected. Think about when you're planning to cook a meal and then you look in your cupboard and you don't have that XYZ thing that you know you need, but you're like, "Oh wait, nutmeg. Maybe I can use that instead of cinnamon." That's making a remote connection between something that allows you to get the best cake possible. You know, or there are times where you're trying to figure out the best route to go somewhere and you creatively, something pops into your head. That's what I mean by being in a mindset and a state that allows you to make remote connections between things. (gentle music) I wanna tell you about a study that I conducted with one of my collaborators where we were trying to look at and see how stress positively enhances creativity. So we stressed people out, we had them give a tough speech to two interviewers who were kind of looking at them in a negative way, and do some math, really hard math. But one of the things we did in advance of the stressful situation was we did remind them of how stress can be enhancing, that there are situations where fighter pilots are really, really focused and they're able to do what they need to do more efficiently. Or we all have moments where you've watched sports and it's a penalty kick in soccer and the person makes the goal. Like that is intense stress where someone has risen to the occasion. So...