What If Kindness Is the Bridge Between Anxiety and Creativity?

Image by Kirill Lyadvinsky from Pixabay

In a rare moment of receptivity during an otherwise busy week, I stuck on a podcast while driving. Martha Beck was being interviewed about her new book Beyond Anxiety and as anxiety is something I’ve lived with my whole life, I’m always curious to explore it from different angles.

When Martha said, “I had one really bad bout with anxiety. It started at birth and went until I was 60...” I chuckled. This is a human I understand well. Within minutes, she was in such familiar terrain, mirroring my inner world and the themes I often explore: the overactive mind, the illusion of safety through control, and the healing power of creativity and presence.

It was so affirming to hear Martha describe how she’d once assumed anxiety was simply part of being human. That same quiet resignation lived in me too—especially in the earlier stages of my healing journey, before I realised there was another way - a path through softening, trust, and creative expression.

I also appreciated Martha’s scientific take: “Our culture pushes left hemisphere dominance… even reading and speech take place mainly in the left side of the brain.” I definitely process the world intellectually—researching, planning, thinking five steps ahead. These are strengths, but I’ve also come to see how exhausting that left-brain dominance can be.

Right now, I’m seeing it play out acutely as I support someone trying to get traction in a legal dispute. I keep zoning in on critical issues, drafting carefully worded summaries, anticipating next steps (okay, the next ten steps)—but often it feels like I’m speaking a foreign language. I’m learning (again) that clarity doesn’t always equal connection, and intellectual precision isn’t always the medicine that’s needed. Especially when others are overwhelmed, dysregulated, or just wired differently.

It’s a tough one, because I completely agree with Martha: so much of our anxiety doesn’t come from what’s actually happening—but from how much we’re thinking about what could happen. My left brain is always many steps ahead, trying to ‘pre-feel’ the pain so I won’t have to actually feel it when it arrives.

Lately, I’ve been learning to drop into my body, soften, and listen beyond intellect. Less fixing, more being.

Still, it’s a delicate dance—finding that sweet spot between useful strategic thinking and anxious overthinking. Between preparing wisely and spinning out. Between clarity and control.

Martha talks about the right brain as an antidote. She says, “If they could make a drug out of the way I felt as my right hemisphere became more dominant, everyone would be on it.” That mirrors my experience with writing, walking in nature, and the slower pace I’ve been trying to cultivate (which, honestly, often feels like two steps forward, one step back). The creative state isn’t just “nice”—it’s healing. The opposite of anxiety isn’t calm—it’s creativity.

And yet, as I’ve been reflecting—and had reflected back to me in conversation with friends—when we’re stressed, the first thing to go is our creativity. Whether it’s reading a book, painting a picture, or picking up a guitar, those soul-nourishing outlets often fall away.

What Martha says makes so much sense: anxiety can’t simply be ended—it has to be replaced. There’s a toggle effect between anxiety and creativity.

That feels like a breakthrough insight—one I’ve been discovering intuitively. It’s not enough to try to stop the anxiety; I have to fill the space with something meaningful and alive. Trying to silence it never worked—but giving it something else to do, like writing, walking, or noticing the light through the trees? That gave it a job. A kinder one.

And that part really sticks with me—when she talks about kindness. “It’s important not to go from anxiety to creativity. You go from anxiety to kindness, and then from kindness to creativity.”

She’s pointing to the idea that kindness is a necessary bridge—it softens the ground, so to speak. Trying to leap straight from an anxious, overthinking state into creative flow doesn’t work unless you first meet yourself with compassion. Kindness interrupts the spiral, allowing creativity to emerge not from force, but from gentleness.

So when we’re anxious or overwhelmed, the first and most healing question isn’t “How do I fix this?” but “What would be kind right now?”

That often starts with the smallest gestures of self-compassion: taking a breath, stepping away, placing a hand on our heart, going for a walk, turning toward beauty. That question—“What would be kind right now?”—lingers in me, especially as I consider how closely anxiety and creativity often travel together. It’s not just a personal pattern; it seems to be a shared experience among so many people I know who feel things deeply and express them through their work.

Martha critiques the desire to “attack” anxiety, likening it to berating a frightened animal. Instead, she recommends treating your anxious inner self with tenderness—like a muddy, shivering puppy needing soothing. Even pretending to be kind helps shift your state.

She shares a story about a time she was driving when a hurt bird flew into the car. At first, she freaked out, but then realised she needed to stay calm. The bird trusted her, hopping over and resting on her lap. She uses this to illustrate how the frequency of calmness is biologically recognisable and healing.

I find this kindness not only useful when interacting with others, but also when turning it inward—like lying awake in the middle of the night with my mind racing. My left brain wants to pick up my device and start solving the world’s problems, but what my body really needs is rest and relaxation. Often, I find myself replicating a visual meditation I learned from Teal Swan: imagining a bud opening slowly with each breath, moving through the colours associated with each chakra—red for the root, green for the heart, and so on—sequentially. This practice brings my awareness back to my body, and I often drift off before completing the full cycle.

Mind you, I chuckled when Tami Simon asked Martha about how just reading the word “anxiety” can make us anxious. We’re very suggestible, and the primitive brain can’t distinguish imagined fear from real danger.

As someone who has felt the effects of overexposure to anxious thoughts—my own and others’—I’m now more selective about what I consume: news, conversations, and so forth. I realise the power of internal narratives and the importance of choosing more spacious ones. Words matter. Energy matters. I used to read, think, and talk myself into fear—now I know I can choose what I feed my brain.

Most importantly, while integrating body, heart, soul, and mind creates integrity, it doesn’t mean anxiety simply goes away. My own evolution mirrors this—I’ve done a huge amount of work aligning and integrating the various parts of my inner world, stepping away from self-judgement and into wholeness. But now I’m layering in something extra: a creative life as a way to live beyond anxiety, not just manage it.

Martha talks about a whole series of daily compassion check-ins she uses, and I particularly like her practice of asking herself each morning, “What’s the nicest thing I could say to you?”

Why Are So Many Creative People Anxious?

I’ve long felt that ever-present hum of anxiety living alongside an irrepressible drive to create—and I’ve seen it echoed in so many others: artists, writers, comedians, musicians. Martha said many of the creative people she spoke with admitted to feeling anxious “all day every day”—except when they were creating. In those moments, the anxiety simply vanished, as if exhaled.

While Martha admits the science isn’t definitive, her observations—and my lived experience—suggest a compelling link. Highly sensitive people are often both anxious and creative; it’s the double-edged gift of a finely attuned nervous system. Perhaps more than that, creative expression becomes a natural coping strategy. Many creative people she spoke with said they felt anxious “all day every day”—except when they were creating. In those moments, the anxiety simply vanished. That relief becomes its own kind of conditioning: we return to creativity because it soothes us, because it works.

But here’s the catch: the left brain—the part responsible for analysis, language, and planning—doesn’t tend to register or value those moments. It overlooks the right-brain experience of joy, flow, and embodied peace. This is echoed by our culture at large, which prizes productivity and intellect over presence and creativity.

For me, creativity is not optional—it’s essential to my wellbeing. I can trace a clear line from stress to sickness, just as I can trace a line from stillness to strength. I’m starting to see that the very strategies I developed in childhood to survive—the vigilance, the pattern-spotting, the relentless strategic thinking—can become unexpected assets in adulthood. But they’re only truly helpful when paired with soothing. When I can quiet the irrational fears those strategies were built to manage and redirect their energy into something meaningful, they serve me rather than run me.

The trick to evolving, I think, is learning how to calm the anxious wiring that once protected us—and instead use its energy for something creative, present, and kind.

It reminds me of a scene in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., where Skye asks Agent May how she handles anger. May says something like, “It doesn’t just go away. I feel it. Deeply. But I take it and channel it, so I can call on it when I need it.” That line has stayed with me. It’s not about denying the feeling—it’s about alchemising it. Using its energy, not to lash out or shut down, but to fuel something purposeful. It’s the same with anxiety. We don’t have to erase it—we just need to redirect it, with kindness, into something that serves.
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