Jake Burhans explains how chronic stress shuts down your prefrontal cortex and kills creativity. He argues relaxation is trainable: focused breathing and letting go of lower-level emotions restore the calm state where ideas actually flow and you make better decisions.
We've been trained to be in this state of stress and fear and anxiety in our bodies. It's like we're just slamming on the freaking gas and the brake at the same time while we're sitting in traffic, and the RPMs of the car in that red section on your dashboard, right? 7, 8, and they're like, whee, it is just revving out of control. That's what our bodies are feeling when we go throughout our day, just constantly stressed out about things, worried, frustrated, angry. We hold on to those lower-level emotions cuts us off from all creative intelligence. All the ideas that come in that you need to solve your problems, all the energy you need to execute effectively, right? The creative flow, the ability to act, make good decisions— all that stuff is completely cut off when you are not in a creative state. So you can either be in a creative state or you can be in a stressed fight-or-flight state. You don't want to be in the fight-or-flight state because it shuts off your prefrontal cortex in your brain and shuts you off from all your ability to really make good decisions. We constantly need to be relaxing ourselves. So the key there is when those emotions come in, it's not that you don't feel them, but you have to let them go. That's a muscle you have to work, is learning to let go. But relaxation unlocks the creative power. You are the controller of your internal state of being. Remember that. You control your internal state of being at all times. The quickest way to return from a chaotic external state is to breathe, remain peaceful on the inside despite the energy. And if you can remain peaceful, you'll stay in that creative state and you'll figure out the best way to get out of the chaos. But if it's chaotic out there and you jump into the chaos and you activate the sympathetic nervous system and you're in fight or flight, well, guess what? Brain's shutting off. You're making terrible decisions. You're going to be in the chaos longer. So you have to learn that your internal world creates your external world.
