The Difference Between Creative Rest and Creative Avoidance
One of the most asked-about questions in my practice, and what I actually think about it.
This is a guest post from Kathryn Vercillo as part of her Creative Health Cartography Workbook tour. I've lost more studio hours to this exact question than I care to admit. Am I resting, or am I just hiding? Kathryn does something here that I find genuinely rare: she doesn't shame either answer. She just helps you see more clearly what's actually going on, which turns out to be the more useful thing anyway. I think you'll find her way of thinking about this worth thinking about. More info at the bottom. Enjoy!
Picture a Tuesday afternoon that has been set aside for creative work. The desk is clear. The time is available. And the person sitting in front of that clear desk is finding reasons, one after another in a patient and resourceful stream, to be anywhere else in their head and life except inside the project that is waiting for them. The emails that suddenly seem important. The research that could precede the work rather than follow from it. The realization that the notes need to be reorganized before actual writing can begin. The sense that the conditions are almost right, that with a little more preparation or a little more time or a slightly different starting point, the work could actually happen.
This is one of the most common experiences creative people describe to me, and also one of the most confusing ones to be inside of, because the experience of sitting in front of the desk genuinely not knowing whether you need rest or whether you are avoiding something real is profoundly disorienting. It feels like a question you should be able to answer about yourself, and the fact that you cannot tends to generate its own layer of shame on top of the already uncomfortable situation.
The question I hear more often than almost any other in navigation sessions and in my inbox is some version of this: how do I know if I am resting or avoiding? Here are some of my thoughts on that …
Why the two are so difficult to distinguish from the inside
The avoidance pattern rarely announces itself as avoidance. It arrives dressed in the clothing of legitimate need: the sense of requiring more time, of the creative conditions being almost but not quite right, of something internal that needs to settle before the actual work can begin. These sensations are real. They are not invented. The nervous system is genuinely producing them. What makes them difficult to interpret is that the same sensations can be produced both by genuine need for rest and by the anxiety that is organizing itself around the approach to the work.
The rest pattern, meanwhile, often comes with its own internal interrogation. Even when rest is clearly what is needed, the internal voice that has absorbed productivity culture’s demands tends to treat it with suspicion. The rest feels guilty, or provisional, or like something that has to be justified and earned before it can be fully entered. This makes even legitimate rest feel structurally similar to avoidance from the inside: uncomfortable, questioned, accompanied by the persistent sense that the real thing is somewhere else that you should be getting to.
Rollo May, the existential psychologist whose book The Courage to Create remains one of the most rigorous examinations of the relationship between anxiety and creative work, argued that creativity and anxiety are inseparable for anyone who is making work that genuinely matters to them. The creative act, precisely because it involves bringing something new into existence that did not exist before, requires a confrontation with the unknown that the nervous system codes as threat. The more the work matters, the more the nervous system tends to stand at its entrance. May’s insight is that the anxiety is not incidental to the creative process. It is part of it. The question is not how to eliminate the anxiety but how to develop the capacity to move with it rather than away from it.
What avoidance is protecting
Avoidance is almost always protecting something real, and understanding what it is protecting tends to be more generative than simply trying to push through it or judging it as weakness.
The approach-avoidance conflict that psychologists describe, the experience of being drawn toward something and simultaneously pushed away from it, is particularly common in creative work because creative work frequently carries a combination of deep desirability and genuine threat. The work matters, which means the stakes of doing it badly, of revealing something unflattering, of failing in front of the people whose opinion matters: all of those stakes feel correspondingly high. The email is easier to write than the essay precisely because the essay carries more identity. The minor project is more accessible than the central one precisely because the central one is where the real vulnerability lives.
Avoidance also tends to cluster around specific transition points in creative work. Beginning is difficult for many people, particularly when the beginning requires stepping into uncertainty without a clear map. Finishing is difficult in a different way: finishing means releasing the work, and the work in its unfinished state is still protected from judgment in a way that the finished work is not. The specific stage where the avoidance intensifies is often information about exactly where the threat is located, which is worth paying attention to rather than simply trying to override.
Sometimes what avoidance is protecting is the relationship to a medium or process that has accumulated painful associations. A writer who experienced significant public criticism for a previous book may find that the approach to a new book is organized around an avoidance that has nothing to do with the new project and everything to do with what the previous project cost. The body remembers. The nervous system has logged the threat and is trying to prevent a repetition.
What rest is actually doing
True creative rest has a quality of accumulation and movement that distinguishes it, over time if rarely immediately, from avoidance. Things gather in rest. The default mode network, the brain’s resting-state system that is most active when focused task engagement steps back, continues processing in ways that feel like nothing from the outside and produce, sometimes unexpectedly, the connections and resolutions and new angles that active focused work cannot force. Distance from a project accumulates in rest, and that distance is generative: it allows return with different eyes, with the capacity to see what the too-close view could not resolve.
The body replenishes in rest in ways that are specific and real. The nervous system requires genuine downregulation time, which tends to be longer than productivity culture suggests and longer than the person in rest tends to be comfortable taking. The creative person who has been running on sympathetic activation for a sustained period, managing the anxiety and the output and the relational demands of creative life simultaneously, may find that genuine downregulation feels initially like nothing happening and eventually like something shifting, a loosening, a return of a quality of interest and aliveness that the driven state had been consuming in order to sustain itself.
Rest that is doing its work leaves you, eventually, with something that avoidance tends to foreclose: the felt sense of readiness, of having returned to baseline, of the approach to the work feeling less like a guarded door and more like an open space. This is not always a dramatic shift. It is often subtle, the difference between a slight interior tightening and a slight interior opening, detectable only by someone who has developed some fluency with their own internal states.
A practical question worth sitting with
One question has consistently opened something in navigation sessions when the rest-or-avoidance question is live: if this were genuine rest, what would the next twenty-four hours actually look like?
Sitting with that question tends to produce information. If the picture that emerges feels like relief, a genuine settling into the body and the present moment and activities that restore rather than demand, rest is probably what is needed. If the picture surfaces immediate resistance, a sense of things that have to happen first or conditions that have to be met before actual rest can begin, something closer to avoidance may be more active in the situation.
This is an orienting question rather than a diagnostic tool. It tends to illuminate rather than resolve. But illumination, in this territory, is often enough to begin with.
Getting curious rather than getting critical
The impulse to judge avoidance as failure or weakness tends to produce the opposite of what it is hoping for. Shame and self-criticism raise the threat level around the work, which tends to intensify approach-avoidance dynamics rather than dissolving them. The avoidance, which is already a response to perceived threat, responds to shame with more protection rather than less.
Curiosity moves differently. What is the avoidance protecting? What would need to be true for the approach to feel less threatening? What is the specific texture of the hesitation at this particular stage of this particular project? These questions are investigable, and the investigation itself tends to reduce the charge around the avoidance in ways that direct confrontation cannot manage.
The Creative Health Cartography workbook includes exercises in the psychological domain that approach both rest and avoidance with this quality of curiosity. The goal is to see what is actually happening more clearly, because clarity about what is actually happening is where real movement tends to begin, and real movement, in creative work as in most things, begins from where you actually are rather than from where you think you should be.
Follow Kathryn’s writing and the new podcast at createmefree.substack.com. If you’re curious about your Creative Health archetype, take the free quiz here. And if you decide to purchase the workbook or Kathryn’s Creative Health Cartography services, use WorkbookTour20 for a 20% discount.
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So true! Thanks for sharing :)