Hypnosis for Artistic Creativity

What is a creative block?

Let us start by setting aside the romantic explanation, because it stops you looking in the right place.

A creative block is rarely a lack of ideas. It is most often an excess of judgement: ideas arrive and are eliminated before they exist, by a highly demanding inner authority that has excellent reasons to be demanding. Inspiration has not gone away, it is being filtered upstream.

Which explains something every creator knows: the best ideas come in the shower, while walking, as you fall asleep. Not because those moments are magical, but because the censor is off duty there.

Several situations hide behind the same word

• The starting block. Every beginning is bad by definition, and perfectionism makes the first draft unbearable.
• The finishing block, more common than people think: the project stays permanently in progress, because finishing it would mean showing it.
• The block that follows. After a rejection, a review, a commercial failure, or sometimes after a success that would have to be matched.
• The loss of meaning, when you no longer know why you do what you do. That one is not solved by techniques, and it deserves time.
• And exhaustion, which is not a block at all. See the note below.

What belongs to the stage rather than the studio is covered on our page Hypnosis for Artistic Performance: stage fright, auditions, memory blanks, the performance that went wrong.

Hypnosis for creativity: goals and benefits

Let us start with what hypnosis does not do, because promises are plentiful on this subject.

It produces no idea in your place. It does not make you talented, it replaces neither the craft, nor the hours of work, nor the technique. It gives access to no hidden reservoir of ready-made works. And it does not replace medical care if the block comes with the signs described above.

What support aims at

• Putting the censor on standby during the creating phase. This is the main lever. The point is not to remove it, since it is what makes the work good when the time comes to revise, but to keep it out of the room during the first draft.
• Regaining access to the absorbed state, the one where you do not see time pass. It is a familiar state that most creators have known and believe they have lost.
• Getting back to work, quite simply. Many blocks live in the ten minutes before sitting down, and that can be worked on very concretely.
• Taking up at a distance a memory that still weighs at the moment of starting: a rejection, a wounding review, a family remark about doing something serious for a living.
• Perfectionism, keeping the standards and unplugging the paralysis.
• Impostor feelings, which overlap with Hypnosis for Self-Confidence.

Attention and the ability to work at length without scattering belong to our page Focus and Exams. And if anxiety is what dominates, see Hypnosis for Stress and Anxiety.

Why Hypnosis and creating resemble each other

The comparison gets made carelessly all the time. It does rest on something precise, provided we say exactly what.

The state of deep creative work, commonly called flow, is characterised by attention entirely absorbed by the task, a loss of the sense of time, a withdrawal of the critical gaze on oneself, and the impression that things almost make themselves. These are characteristics found in descriptions of the hypnotic state, and the resemblance stops there: as far as we know, a single study has directly compared the two states, in seven people, and concluded that the lived experience was similar without settling anything further. It is an analogy, not a result.

The best-studied bridge is elsewhere. The capacity for absorption, that is, the ease with which you let yourself be entirely taken by a book, a piece of music or a landscape, is the personality trait that holds up best when researchers look for what predicts responsiveness to hypnosis, and roughly the only one. The link exists, it is real, and it is modest: depending on the studies, absorption explains something like a tenth of what separates people on this ground. That is enough to explain why many artists feel quickly at ease in hypnosis. It is not enough to make it a rule, and we will not present it as one.

What support contributes is therefore modest to describe and useful in practice: learning to return deliberately to a state you already know, instead of waiting for it to come.

Will I lose my creativity if I get better?

This is the question almost every artist asks, often in a low voice, and no page on the subject answers it.

Behind it lies the idea of the tortured artist: suffering as fuel, and the fear that easing the torment will put out the work along with it.

Three things can be said honestly.

The first is that the fear is not silly, and it should be acknowledged rather than brushed aside. Large Swedish registry studies, covering hundreds of thousands and then more than four million people, do find an overrepresentation of certain disorders among those who have had an artistic education. Nobody serious says otherwise.

The second is that these same studies do not say what the legend makes them say. The link is with the risk of developing a disorder, not with the illness in progress: people with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not rate themselves as more creative and do not score higher on creativity tests, they show difficulties with mental flexibility instead. The few studies that have looked at the work itself point the same way. With Schumann, the high periods produced more pieces, but the mood state at the time of composing had no bearing on how those pieces lasted. With Virginia Woolf, production was concentrated in the periods when she was well. And when the question was put directly to twenty-four artists stabilised on treatment, twelve reported increased output, six unchanged output, six reduced output.

In other words, it is not suffering that writes: it is the capacity to work. The two do not go together.

The third is that we are not trying to smooth you out. Support on creativity aims neither to remove your sensitivity, nor to flatten what runs through you, nor to turn you into someone serene with nothing left to say. It aims to let you work with all of that, rather than be stopped by it. And if a mood disorder is involved, the question of treatment is not ours: it is discussed with your doctor, to whom this fear can be said exactly as it is.

What the research says

We need to be direct: no clinical trial has evaluated hypnosis with blocked artists, and creativity is hard to measure.

What exists is older and narrower. A series of controlled experiments, run between 1967 and 2007 on students rather than on creators, compared creativity tests taken after a hypnotic induction or in a control condition. The two best-conducted ones find better results on the hypnosis side. The most recent, a randomised trial from 2007 on still-life drawing, concludes that the hypnotic procedure had significantly greater effects on creativity in drawing.

But it adds a caveat we would rather quote: that effect depended neither on the participants' hypnotisability nor on their capacity for absorption. A 1989 study had found the same thing, and noted in passing that participants judged themselves more creative without their output being any more so. That caution applies to this whole page.

In other words: a few old, small experiments, never repeated in almost twenty years, pointing in the right direction without confirming the explanation usually given for them. And nothing on what concerns us here, an artist who can no longer work. We would rather write it down.

How a Hypnosis session on this subject unfolds

The interview. Your practice, what you are working on, how long it has been stuck, and at which precise point in the process. If what you describe goes beyond creative work, your sleep, your drive, your mood day to day, we will invite you to raise it with a doctor first. It is not for us to judge, and we will not wait for their answer to support you on what does fall to us.

The goal. Set together and deliberately small. Not "get my creativity back", but for instance: produce one page a day without rereading it, or reopen the project set aside.

The induction. A natural state of focused attention that you already know. You stay conscious, you hear everything, you can speak and stop whenever you wish.

The work. It most often bears on putting the censor on standby, on access to the absorbed state, on the minutes before getting down to it, and sometimes on an old memory that returns at the moment of sitting down.

The debrief and the exercise. A conversation about what you experienced, and a self-hypnosis exercise to take away, generally designed to be used just before starting a work session. It is the daily practice that counts, not the session.

In practice, video changes everything on this subject. Creativity has no borders and artists are not concentrated in one city: video consultations work as well as an in-person office, wherever you are, and here they carry a particular advantage. You are at home, in your studio or at your desk, which is exactly where the block happens, and where the exercise will have to be used.

The number of sessions is defined during the first interview.