How to Break Your Creative Flow to Boost Creativity?

Some of the links below may be affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Sometimes to make something better we need to break it apart. Creativity is no different.

As we all know and feel, our creative flow of comes under constant fire. The people around us, the demand of adult life, responsibilities and to-do-lists from which we don’t seem to get an ounce of inspiration, distractions, emotions, life itself.

That’s why when we finally reach a state of inner creative flow, once we find our daily rhythm, we grab hold to it and defend it with our lives. So, knowing how challenging it is to attain it, and how fleeting it can be under external and internal pressures, am I really asking you to break it once you’ve worked so hard to find it?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking.

I’m asking to break your flow with intention and purpose. You are breaking your own creative flow, you are in control and you are doing it to boost your creativity.

Why am I asking you to do this?

1. The search for flow can become overwhelming. Not achieving the ideal of flow can become a source of anxiety that actually blocks any possibility of flow to realize itself.
2. If we stay too long focused on flow or a daily rhythm, it can lose its flowing essence and turn into a routine. Routines can become restrictive, emptying life of creativity. We want the opposite.
3. As mention above, breaking your own flow allows for a degree of self-assertion and self-control over yourself and your flow. By breaking your flow you say “I have control over my flow, and over the activities that boost and channel that flow”.
4. You won’t let fear or anxiety run wild if (or when) the moments of flow end (organically)because you’ll now see and embrace a transition between moments of active flow and moments of passive flow; the flow to rest, reorganize, refuel.
5. Creative flow is not something that stops completely. The flow of creativity keeps running within us even when we are unaware of its presence and influence. Remember this simple creative formula to see flow as something that’s never lost only transformed:

Active Flow= Creation

Passive Flow = Inspiration

Breaking Your Flow is a Creative Practice

Lastly, I will like to remind you that we are the designers and participants of our creative practice. Creativity is a practice because is something we must engage with every day.

As chief architects of our creativity, we have the power to decide when it’s time to be in “active” flow and when is time to be in “passive” flow. So when the switch happens suddenly, we can simply turn on and tune into the present moment. Ask yourself, is my inner flow telling me is time to gather inspiration elsewhere; outside the canvas, away from the notebook, off-line, outside?

Let me sum up this post with a tweet:

To better recognize and adapt to the sudden changes in our inner flow we must first get used to the sensation of change by actively break it up ourselves. Share on X

Does this idea of breaking your flow resonates with you or seems completely nuts? I’d love to know your take!