Dr. Carl’s lecture on Anxiety and creativity was profound in the sense that it raised many questions in my mind. One of them is, “How does anxiety fuel creativity?”

and “How do mania and high-functioning anxiety fit into the equation with creativity, are they correlational?.” He explained that creativity from a psychological point of view is “divergent thinking/intelligence”. 

The explanation of anxiety-based conditions/disorders was very interesting in the sense that he explained very simply. He explained Panic disorders as being an uncontrollable and unpredictable condition where a person experiences heightened anxiety in the presence of a trigger. He further explained conditions like General Anxiety Disorder and Social anxiety (avoidance of social situations). 

One of the most interesting facts he talked about was “thinking about fear and anxiety on a continuum, and the presence of stimuli is what differentiates them”, fear is something that is more rooted in the present moment whereas anxiety is more rooted in the future. (worry), i.e., safety signal hypothesis.

Another interesting thought was how anxiety can be used to turn into a functional behavior from a problem behavior. This lines up nicely with the idea that a lot of artists feel anxiety a lot more than others and how that can be converted into our advantage to produce more work. This is of course debatable and something that might require years and years of mindful practice.

We ended the session by doing an activity sheet that required us to identify our anxiety behaviors and convert it into a plausible functional strategy to be more creative and learn to calm down in times of high anxiety. Overall the guest lecture was very valuable and I learnt a lot.