I resonate most with your explanation, so can I ask you a question? do you think it impacted your creativity? I feel when I trying to stay on task and cant, is when I come up with most my "creative" ideas
Just as an FYI on the subject of creativity, when I was on medication for my ADHD I lost my creativity in exchange for the ability to stay on task. I didn't notice it at first but after 9 months I could play guitar better than before but I couldn't create music like I could before.
I found it did wonders for my creativity overall because creatively I almost think in puzzles, i piece together ideas and thoughts and it took a while for that to transfer to music, since ive mostly written music by feel, but as I struggled to write music i realized my issue was that i limited myself to that sense of "feel" and explained for myself why i would always feel so much writers block.learning that helped me focus more on my songwriting and building a song over just letting one sort of pop in my head.
It's a hard switch when youre used to something feeling so organic and just spontaneous, but that helps me a lot.
I really appreciate this. I write music in progression, I start with something that "feels" good and then build off of it. Once I was on medication I couldn't create that first step anymore. However changing the way I approach creating music may help with this. Thanks!
This. With meds, I can follow a idea through the not fun parts. Instead is having a fleeting idea and it going away. I'm forty and just got diagnosed and have a new job. I have to teach myself pretty much everything I need to know to do my job well. Not only am I able, but it triggers ideas and instead of assuming I'll come back to it (never was able), now I'm able to fully chase it down. I'm already making an impact where I work because of my curiosity and ability to get shit done.
Precisely. It's a long process. I'm still figuring things out a couple of years after. The difficult thing is defeating those bad habits, lack of motivation that still creep up, but it's freeing to be able to follow through on things you always knew you were capable of but just couldn't quite stick with long enough to do.
This is exactly it. I always hear people say that medication kills their creativity but for me it was the exact opposite. It like helped me harness my creativity to actually create things that I wanted to create rather than just having random doodles instead of class notes. It's definitely a different approach because I need to put it together but its still there and if anything I can use it way more effectively. Idono. I'm glad you feel the same.
Edit: before the "feel" would guide the creativity so things would just happen. But now I guide the creativity so I get control over what gets created.
How do you get away from writing by feel? I think i do this too and have writers block problems, but I don't think I understand what you're saying you changed.
Random tidbit here, but the inventor of LSD was convinced that in low doses it would be used to medicate ADHD-like disorders. I wonder how that would affect creativity...
Well in low doses it does act very much like a classic psychostimulant, and the creative aspects at higher doses do have limited research support, so it wouldn't surprise me if it were pretty effective
Our brains want to connect the dots and make the "story" make sense. So if I'm thinking about Jesus Sermon on the mount and my brain horse decides to think about having a cooking show then I'll look for a way to connect those two things. Which is how I ended up doing a sermon pretending I was a chef doing a cooking show a couple weeks ago. This I believe is how my own ADHD creativity works. Often times I find a unique way of connecting very different ideas.
My brain isn't inhibited by my own need to focus on something specific. So I just ride it and often it takes me fun "creative" places.
Inattentive is associated with a greater capacity for abstract thinking. ie: details are stripped away to form abstract connections between things. Hyperactive is more your thoughts bounce from one to the next which can allow you to make quick associations between things. ie: "sees a tutu - why are tutus pink? girls like pink. girls like ponies. OMG PINK PONIES!!! I wonder what's for lunch..."
Not OP, but I'm an artist/illustrator. I wrote a book almost 15 years ago. I got my diagnosis/meds about 4 months ago - I'm publishing my book in September because I finally was able to finish it and get funding to self publish it.
It has not affected my creativity in the slightest, if anything, it's allowed me to be more creative because I've actually started finishing projects instead of starting them, putting in a piddly amount of work, coming up with a new, more exciting idea, then immediately dropping everything I worked on previously to jump to a new project without thinking about it.
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u/oomio10 May 30 '17
I resonate most with your explanation, so can I ask you a question? do you think it impacted your creativity? I feel when I trying to stay on task and cant, is when I come up with most my "creative" ideas