Heroic Interview: Why Smart People Hurt with Dr. Eric Maisel

You're listening to why smart people hurt.

An optimal living interview with Dr. Eric.

Maisel and brian johnson. Today we have Eric Maisel with us. I am just thrilled to have Eric on the line. He's one of my favorite teachers and writers, and I've learned so much both from Eric's books and with working with Eric and just seeing how he shows up. And he's one of the world's leading creativity experts and experts on depression and creating meaning, et cetera. And Eric, I am just so excited to have you here today.

Great to be with you, Brian. A lot of fun.

Right on. Well, let's jump straight in. Today we're going to focus on creativity. We're going to do two separate interviews, one on creativity, one on depression and meaning. Today I just wanted to. I wanted to jump in with one of the big things that I hear a lot, and that really resonated with me. And your work is just kind of the idea that creativity and anxiety, as you say, travel the same road together. Can you tell us about that and why that is?

Sure. I have a book out called Mastering Creative Anxiety, which looks at, I think, probably more than a dozen special sources of anxiety for creative people and also provides a complete menu of anxiety management tools. And I want to add that because it's one thing to have some insight about anxiety in the creative process, and it's another thing to know what to do about it. Creative people need an anxiety management menu for themselves of different sorts of things to try out to see what will work for them. So what is the anxiety? Well, there is essentially a large performance anxiety, whether you're performing or creating, if you're facing the blank screen, blank canvas, it's essentially a performance because being a Western person, we're expecting an audience down the road. We're expecting someone to be watching this or looking at this or reading this. It's not like we're an Eastern sand painting Zen monk who expects the sand painting to just blow away. We actually have our ego involved. And so performance anxiety rears its ugly head instantly as we face the blank canvas or the blank computer screen. And that's why so many people call themselves blocked or find ways to not do the work that they intend to do. Just some tendril of anxiety is there. It's not necessarily huge. It's not like fear of flying or fear of spiders. It's not exactly a phobia. It can be much smaller than that, but just enough to make doing something else look much more attractive.

That's great. Well, what Are your. I know you've got the full book on mastering creative anxiety. What are some of the top tips that you share with people in your work to help us master that process?

Well, the two simplest ones are deep breathing and better thinking. So one is the physiological and also psychological value of doing some deep breathing. Just five seconds on the inhale, five seconds on the exhale. It's kind of amazing that we may be just a few deep breaths away from getting our work done, but that's often the case. We just need to do that. And then there's the cognitive approach of saying things that serve us. Most people are saying things that do not serve us. That's not the same as truth or falsity. You can be saying something that's true that nevertheless doesn't serve you. For instance, you might be saying to yourself, there are so many writers, or it's so hard to get a literary agent, or publishing is so hard, et cetera, et cetera. These are all true statements, but they don't serve you at all to be thinking. So it's good to make a distinction between a true statement and a statement that really serves you. And we want to be thinking things that serve us. As the Buddha said, get a grip on your own mind. You want to be more in charge of the things that you say. So to say this simply the smartest anxiety management technique is to marry a deep breath with a smart cognition. And I call these incantations to distinguish them from affirmations because they have the breathing component. And I did a whole book on this called 10 Zen Seconds. And the 10 in the title is the 10 seconds of a long inhale and exhale. One long, deep breath. And in that book, I examined 10 phrases that I think, or maybe a dozen phrases that I think are really useful for people to drop into a deep breath to help them get on with their work. Phrases like I feel supported or I'm completely stopping. I'm completely on the inhale, stopping on the exhale. Most people are rushing around, and in order to get their creating done, they really need to stop. So an incantation like I'm completely stopping can both reduce their anxiety and get them centered. So to make that long story short and put a period there, the marriage of deep breathing and right thinking is probably the best anxiety management tool you could create for yourself.

Brilliant. That's just fantastic. Take a deep breath, have a smart thought, get back to work.

That's right. That's right.

I love it.

Well, it's almost that simple.

Literally, though, Right. I mean, it's just a matter of actually applying it. And one of the things I intended to kind of get to a little later on, but we'll just go to right now is getting directly to work. And you have that mantra of I'm going directly to work, I'm going directly to work. And we have this story that something else needs to happen before we get to work. Can you talk about the importance of that, of just simplifying this whole process and getting to work?

Sure. And I'm going to say it in the way that I try to say it to clients, because there's something here that I really want to sell, and that's the idea of a morning creativity practice. Most people have a real life. They have either a day job or other duties and responsibilities that kick in at some point, and they hold to a certain kind of maybe all day long. Maybe I can get to my creating this evening, maybe I can get to my creating this evening. And almost always that turns to a no. We get too tired. We also get too sad, because if we haven't done our real work during the day, we get a little depressed during the day. By the end of the day, all we can do is sort of turn to TV or a book or whatever. So it's really important that people institute a morning creativity practice, namely an hour before their real day begins. And if that means getting up an hour earlier, that's what it means. And that's a habit that takes maybe weeks or months to get in place. But it's probably the most important thing that somebody who isn't getting their creative work done can newly institute a morning creativity practice. And there are three reasons why it's so important to create this practice. One is the obvious one, that if you were to show up five days a week or seven days a week, first thing each day, you'd get a lot of work done. That's the obvious one. The second reason, and this isn't so obvious, is that by showing up first thing in the morning, you get to make use of your sleep thinking, that is, you get to make use of whatever your brain has been working on all night long. And we think during the night, we dream, which is where everybody's focused their attention. For 100 years, since Freud's interpretation of dreams, we focused on dreaming. But in deep sleep we think, and if you wake up a poet in deep sleep, she'll be writing a poem. And if you wake up a mathematician, he'll be doing some math. But we don't make use of that thinking, unless we turn to our work first thing in the morning. Otherwise it just vanishes. It just goes away. All that good thinking. So you will super increase your amount of creating time by using your sleep thinking if you turn to your work first thing. So that's obviously a profound reason for turning to your work first thing in the morning. By the way, let me put a parenthesis here. A lot of people already do things before they get started, before their real day starts. They do their journaling or their yoga or their tai chi or what have you, and they find these things valuable. But in my world, those things have to move to a different time of the day. Julia Cameron's morning pages have to become afternoon pages because people are not getting their real work done. They're doing these other things which are tremendously important, but they're not getting their real work done. So that's just in parentheses. The third reason why it's so important to have a morning creativity practice, and we'll talk about this in the next interview, also, is that by getting to your work first thing, you have the experience of having made some meaning on that day already. And the rest of the day can be half meaningless and you won't get depressed. You've built up some meaning capital by turning to your work first thing. And then you can face the day of responsibilities and boring work and duties and this thing and the other with much more equanimity because you've already gotten some real work done on that day. So for those three reasons, because showing up is a good thing, because you get to use your sleep thinking, and because you're making some meaning first thing. There's just nothing better than a morning creativity practice.

Beautifully stated. I just love how articulate you are whenever we communicate in whatever form. This is so concise. I just like imagining how your brain operates. Beautiful. So then this is great. So one, get your work done first thing. Three reasons. You're going to get a huge amount done in the year. You're going to utilize sleep thinking, and you're going to make meaning, which in my experience, as I get it also creates momentum. So not only do I kind of have that meaning capital that I can draw on if necessary, but it actually tends to propel me into having an even better day. It's hard to have a bad day. And you tend to have really good days when you start off with that type of momentum, right?

That's right. And although, you know we're trying to save depression and meaning for another conversation, it's important to say here that people aren't actually after being happy. You know, they've sold a little bill of goods about want to be happy. What they actually want is to feel proud of their own efforts. That's what we're really after in life. And there are many things we do that don't make us happy, that nevertheless make us proud of. What pops to mind is Eisenhower before D Day. We just don't care what mood he was in. You know, we don't care if he was happy or annoyed or irritated or scared or frustrated. We want him to make D day work. And that's the way we want to live our life. Life as a project and as the hero of our own story. And so we want life to feel that way, to feel like we are making ourselves proud of our efforts. So if, if we make meaning each day, we're not only making meaning, which is a psychological experience, but we're also building up our self identity, we're building up our confidence because we're actually making ourselves proud of our efforts. We're not down on ourselves, we're up on ourselves. So I think that's another reason why getting our real work done is so important. It's not just for the sake of the work, but it's for the sake of our self image.

Yeah, absolutely. And this kind of gets into the nuance of the classic Greek idea of eudaimonia is more akin to flourishing than it is to a qualitative state of happiness. Right. So that sense of what is going to make us proud. I just love that phrase what can I do that will make me proud in this moment as a way to make meaning that we'll talk more about.

Exactly.

In the next discussion. But this is so powerful. And yeah, again we can talk about all these ideas for a week given the constraint. I want to say one more thing because you wrote another book on utilizing the power of sleep thinking, right? That was an entirely separate book.

That's right. Well, that's right. I did a whole book which has, I can't remember, maybe a 28 step program or something. But let me boil down those 28 steps to the three crucial steps. And that is you want to go to sleep. Human beings really want to go to sleep differently. We have this insomnia epidemic. 80 million, 90 million Americans having trouble sleeping. And they're having trouble sleeping because. Well, a couple of reasons, but the main reason is they're going to bed worried. Worried about what today brought, worried about what tomorrow will bring, worried about their Finances their love life, this, that and the other thing. If you were to go to bed with a, what I call a sleep thinking prompt, as a creative person, if you were to be thinking inside your work, not thinking, am I talented? Not that kind of thinking. But what does Mary want to say to John in chapter three? That's what I call a sleep thinking prompt. Something inside the work. And my catchy phrase for this is, if you go to bed with a wonder rather than a worry, your brain will think about whatever it is you tasked it to think about. It'll start wondering about what John wants to say to Mary in chapter three. So the first step of the sleep thinking process is to go to bed with a sleep thinking prompt or a wonder rather than our usual worried way. The second step is to actually being open to receiving information. Human beings are open and closed. We're both things and we're often closed to receiving new information because we're afraid it's going to make work for us. I have lots of clients who say something like, well, what if I have an idea and it wakes me up? And my response is, you've just had an idea. Aren't you glad that you had an idea? Why are you so worried about being awakened? Well, people get worried about new information somehow disturbing them. So to make that short story shorter, you want to go to bed with a wonder, you want to be open to receiving information during the night, and then you want to turn to your work first thing. That's the third step. The only way you can make use of what you have been thinking, the only way you can process it, is to turn to your work. If you do those three things, if you go to bed differently and stay open to your your own information and turn to your work first thing, you will have dramatically changed not only your creative life, but really your emotional life. You'll sleep better and you'll feel better.

Yeah, this is great. I remember reading that book and chatting about it with you and implementing this idea. And for what I do is I start by reflecting on what went well during the day and really kind of feeling that gratitude. And then moment, my whatever it is that I'm working on, just think about it, go into the wonder. So these days for me, it's creating a video in the morning and I do it after my meditation. I'm going to try it before my meditation and play with that. You're inspiring me to give that a try. But I think about, well, what's tomorrow's theme for the video? And plant that little Wonder question and let my subconscious mind and my sleeping mind go to work for me.

Right, Absolutely. And I know, I'm sure it works for you. I think it's interesting that you are at least toying with the idea of moving the creating before the meditating, because I know how important the meditating is for you. For lots of people, the thing that they are doing first thing in the morning is very important to them. So I have to be very careful about what I say here. I have lots of clients who, for instance, swim before they go to work, and they know that the swimming is the only thing that keeps depression at bay. They just know that for themselves. Well, I really don't want to toy with that. I don't want to tinker with that.

Yep. Well, it's interesting for me, what I do, my morning ritual, when I'm. When I'm really using the morning ritual, is meditation. And then either the video or whatever the number one thing is for me that day, or rowing. And I tend to find is a balance. Sometimes I'm ready to jump straight in. And sometimes that workout really kind of helps get things going. And I can think about it even more while I'm rowing and kind of have that, you know, work on it some more. But I think. I think you're right. I think that idea of balancing those things that we've identified in our lives that really keep us plugged in. But to your point, which I describe as the fundamentals, to your point, we got to make sure that we aren't spending all the time doing the morning papers or the morning, whatever they're called, and not doing the work, the morning pages, and not doing the work itself. So that that dynamic dance that we each need to find, you know, what works best for us. But willing to experiment, right?

No, that's right. And I've had too many clients over the years who have 5,000 journals and have never gotten their book written, and they're not at all happy about that. And they've actually never made the connection between all of that journaling and no books written. So it's one of the reasons that I want to say this so clearly. Obviously, journaling is important. Morning pages are important. All the things we've named exercise are important. But if you're not getting your work done, you're not actually making yourself proud. And you feel that.

Yeah. I remember being asked by a woman who was an artist and wasn't painting how she should get started with her craft. And there are all these abstract possibilities. And the answer is start painting. Right. They get to create those opportunities for us to actually do the work. And there's the getting ready, the getting ready, the ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim. The fire never occurs when we're kind of always caught up in that anxiety we talked about before and not willing to move through the performance anxiety and actually get to work.

That's right. And sometimes talking about anxiety and creativity, sometimes what makes us anxious is the specter of completing our work. It's a very big problem for a lot of creative people especially would be creative people. They do 500 pages on their novel, but they're still somehow 150 pages away from the end all ways. Or there's a painting on the canvas that to an outsider looks complete, but it's not complete to them. There are lots of special issues with completing. We can name the obvious ones, but I think the most important one is that when you finally say that it's complete, then it gets to be judged both by you and by the world. And we don't like being judged. We just don't like it. We don't like being crossed, criticized, we don't like being rejected, we don't like being judged intellectually. We know it's coming viscerally, we hate it. We just hate it. So we find reasons not to until the thing is done. Even if it's a complete mess, we can say, well, I can still correct it, you know, I'll just give it another six months and somehow it's going to turn into a silk purse. But if I say it's complete, then I have to stand behind it. And. And people hate that feeling of standing behind their own work. So they have to do cognitive work here and really learn what is a very intricate dance of attaching and detaching. It's not that attaching is a good thing or detaching is a good thing. They're both good things. And we have to learn how to invest in our own work and attach to our own work while we're working on it, and then let it go. Let it go in the world. Not attached to the outcome, not attached to what people are going to say about it. Grow a thicker skin, get ready for criticism, rejection, people's opinions, everything that's coming because it is coming. We don't want to be fantastical about it. Those things are coming, but we just have to learn how to deal with it. We need to be sort of strong, courageous, and mature in realizing that we need to complete things and send them out into the world and Then just deal with their reception.

Yep. Well, then I love the way you frame it. And then get back to work. Right. That phase while you're waiting for the response from the publisher or from the art gallery or whatever it is, get back to work.

Get back to work. You get a weekend off. I'm not too big an ogre or tyrant. You get a weekend off. And that's about it. Because if you take too much time off between, obviously projects do need to incubate. And what often a creative person has to do is sort of grab what project is available, even if it isn't the one that he or she wishes were available, the one that's still incubating. We have to make all kinds of strategic decisions and choices as we proceed, but we do have to make those choices. Because what happens in the. And this is what every creative person knows, and especially every would be creative person knows, if you let a week go by, that becomes six months in the blink of an eye. That's what happens. That's the bad things that happen. It's not so much that anybody really minds losing a week. We can all afford to lose a week here or there. It's losing years that is really painful. That's why we need to stay on our regimen. Because those days missed turn into months missed all too easily.

Yep. And then you have a practice too, called chunking that I've embraced a lot and I've kind of seen it in different ways, but you articulated it beautifully and the idea of just doing the tiniest thing. So rather than think about the completion and the judgment, what's the next task, what's the next act? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Sure. Once you get savvy about how you are in the beginning, you know, not even just in the beginning. Often a creative person doesn't understand what time it takes for her to do things. She just hasn't really put that in her mind, what time it takes to do things. But if you are willing to look at that for yourself, then you will understand that maybe a 7,000 word chapter of your book, a draft chapter of your book takes you a week or two weeks to do. You just begin to know that. And you begin to know that by showing up each day for an hour, you get 500 words done. And that means that you get a chapter done every 12 days or whatever the math is there. When you begin to realize that showing up and doing a little actually amounts to a ton of work produced over time, a body of work over time Then even the little you get to do doesn't seem like too little. Let me just piggyback on that. We're talking about a morning creativity practice. That's the main thing we talked about in terms of a kind of a practicality or technique. But also I try to train my clients to not score in small increments of time because even though they have this morning creativity practice in place, they're going to get 15 minutes here and a half hour there throughout the day. Sort of a. Most people do nothing with that time except throw it away. On checking their email one more time, that's what most people do today. They do something on the net, they surf or they check their email. They get rid of those 30 minutes so as to get on to the next project. A truly creative person knows because their work is so close to them, so available to them, they can turn to their work for those 30 minutes. And any writer knows if, if they're reflective of what they do. Every writer knows that in 30 minutes they can get 200, 300, 400 words done. If you just think of how fast we filled up a blue book in those essays in College, those 40 minute exams. We just, you know, filled up what, 15 pages of a blue book in those 40 minutes. So we'll get a lot of work done in those 15 minutes or 30 minutes if we use them. And we can sort of do double our creative output. This is not an output driven idea. It's just that we actually want to get this work done so we can double our output if we don't score in those small increments of time.

Yeah, so powerful. I'll be thinking of that the next time I want to check my email.

I know. I mean, it's really hard not to because email is the place where interesting things arrive for us. You know, there's a reason why we're checking our email list, not just out of anxiety, is that maybe something good's in there. You know, maybe there's a fun thing in there. You know, we're looking for a little fun, a little, a little self soothing. So it's not just out of anxiety. We're checking it. We're checking it because, you know, there may be something good there. But nevertheless, we do have to understand how we're giving away that time. If we check our email too frequently or if we play too many. It's about the too muchness. It's not the thing itself, it's the too muchness of the thing.

Yeah, just being aware, as you said, of the preciousness of that period of time. We can all get so much done in those reclaimed 15, 30 minutes of time. And just extraordinary to imagine the productive output and the continued impression and kind of grooving of the patterns of. Let's solve this problem. Let's figure this out. Let's get to completion. I want to talk about two more things and then look at some kind of fundamentals and number one, tips, mistakes. So we've talked a lot about anxiety, fear, completions, et cetera. Can you talk about mistakes and the importance of mistakes in the creative process and how to orient around those?

Yeah, virtually everybody will pay lip service to the idea of loving process. You know, it's such a, you know, we're in California, such a California thing to love process. But people only intellectually love process. They don't viscerally love it. Just as I said before. And the genuine process is that you may spend two years on a novel that never comes alive. That's reality. That's the truth of process. Pundits who claim to know will say that Beethoven's first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth symphonies are better than his second, fourth, sixth and eighth. I have no idea if that's true, but I know you can't do nine without eight. You can't. You can't do eight without seven. You can't do seven without six. You can't skip the things that don't work. That's what people want to do. They desperately want to skip the things that don't work. Nobody starts their current project saying, gee, I think this will be one of my things that don't work. There's just nobody who says that. And yet a mature creator knows that that may be the truth, that maybe 25% of what he does is superior and another 30% is good and 40% is an absolute wreck. And that's what happens. So talking about mistakes and messes, people have to become much more comfortable with the idea of making mistakes. And they have to become comfortable with it. Different from an intellectual process, different from an intellectual way. They have to, in their body, gain real permission to make big mistakes and messes, not little ones like, you know, drawing outside the lines, mistakes and messes. Big ones, like spending two years on the wrong subject matter. And I have to. I'm trying to slow down a little to let that sink in. Because people have to understand that they may spend whole years doing things they don't like. And that's the process. That's why I really try to sell clients on the Idea of a body of work that, yes, of course you want to be attached to the thing you're working on. Of course you want to be, or else you won't have motivation to do it. But you also want to have this way of stepping back all the time. Stepping back and understanding that you're in it for the long haul, that you're creating a body of work, and that maybe 62% of the stuff you do is going to be in that body of work and 38% is going to be in the round file, and so be it.

Love it. Well, that's inspiring. And again, so much we can talk about with this. Tell me briefly about desire and why desire is so important. You have. You have a thought. In your creativity book, you said great things aren't created by people whose only desires are to nap and retire early. Can you talk about the importance of desire?

Yeah, I think it is love, retirement, or some of the synonyms of love, some of the cognates, curiosity, passion. We could name all of the synonyms of love that actually fuels the artist's journey. And that's why when somebody comes to me blocked, I mean, I have many techniques and tactics and things to say, but one of the things that I like to chat with clients about is the idea of rekindling desire. What rekindles desire in a human being? And for each individual, it's going to be something different, but it's very, very often remembering what they fell in love with when they were 5, 6, 7, or 8. It's often those primary early love affairs that still matter to us. Love affairs with books, love affairs with music, love affairs with imagery, love affairs with science, love affairs with tinkering with things, the things that actually interested us back then, which probably were our prime meaning investments and meaning opportunities back then, probably still mattered to us a lot. And so by having a client do the simple thing of creating a list of what he or she loved back then, we often get back on track to what can be loved now and how important it is to rekindle desire.

Fantastic. And again, we could talk about that for so long. But just to embrace that desire, to be willing to dream big, go back into our childhood, see what's inspired us before, be willing to really go into that and go from that. I'm curious, what are your fundamentals? You're one of the most remarkably prolific human beings I know. What are your personal fundamentals?

You know, I would probably actually be repeating myself because I do think all this. I do think that my simple Life purposes are to do the next right thing and to make myself proud. And for me there are lots of sort of issue areas that interest me. Mental health being one, creativity being another, meaning being another. So I work in those areas and they are endlessly fascinating to me. But I think the bottom line are the things I've already said and that is that I believe in showing up, I believe in making myself proud and I believe that I have to be the hero of my own story. I do believe that. I believe in a radical individualism that's value based. It's not the Ayn Rand selfish radical individualism. It's what I talk about in natural psychology as value based meaning making. And you know, if were we aiming able to talk about that, I think that might encapsulate how I operate and that is following my own idea of value based meaning making and making yourself proud.

That's such a simple profound compass. Am I making myself proud? Each moment gives us an opportunity to do that or not.

That's right.

Yeah. And again, we might have, we almost certainly covered this now, but I'd love to distill this. Do you have like a number one creativity tip in the separately? I want to ask you about your number one life tip.

Well, I should have. One shouldn't die. But I fear that I have to come back to a bit of repetition. And that is my number one tip. It's a combo tip. It's the showing up and not attaching to outcomes. Creative people, and again especially, especially would be creative people want to perfect the thing in their head before they get it out on paper or on the canvas. They want to get it right first so as to ensure that they won't have a bad moment, that they won't be criticized, that they won't make a mess. You can't do that. That doesn't honor process. What honors process is showing up and not attaching to the outcome?

Beautiful. And this might be the same same for your life tip. Do you have a separate life tip?

Well, I don't. Let me this is going to be slightly long winded. But the separate life tip is creativity is just one meaning opportunity in life. I think that there are about a score of important meaning opportunities that human beings have found provoke the psychological experience of meaning. Creativity being one of them, relationships being another, surface being another, ambition being another. There are a slew of them, but only a score of them or so. And so I think my life tip is to actually create for yourself your own menu of meaning opportunities so that you have a sense of the different places where meaning resides for you. So if you're having a bad day creatively, you know for yourself that you have another meaning opportunity in turning to your mate or being of service or in some other way, and so you don't feel bereft of meaning if creativity is not working on that day. By having this menu of meaning opportunities, you know at any given moment, or at least you have the opportunity to know at any given moment where you want to invest meaning next.

Wonderful. Well Eric, thank you so much. Appreciate you taking the time. I appreciate who you are and all of your wisdom and looking forward to pulling together more in the years and decades ahead.

Thank you, Brian. It's been a lot of fun.

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