Reddit mentions of The Artist's Way: 25th Anniversary Edition

Usually when I am low on energy it is because I am discontent/depressed/unhappy with my life. If you do a good number of these and still have low energy, go see a doctor.

• +1 for exercise. Make it fun, though. Rock climbing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Tough Mudders, GORUCK Challenges, boxing, yoga, dancing(!), ultimate frisbee, go to the batting cages, pickup basketball, rowing, horseback riding, etc. Do something competitive if you're competitive, something social if you're not, something meditative if you're neither.
  
  
• How much water are you drinking? Nothing affects my mood and energy levels more than (de)hydration. Buy a canteen and drain it X times per day. Start immediately after waking.
  
  
• If you smoke, quit.
  
  
• If you eat crap, eat better. /r/fitness has diet advice that works for performance not starvation.
  
  
• Meditate. Start with five minutes, twice a day. If meditation disagrees with your religious beliefs, start praying more, silent prayer if allowed.
  
  
• What are your interests? If you answered "hanging out with friends" or "I don't know," there's your problem, right there. Try one new thing each week. Almost everything these days can be tried out for a minimum expense. Find a hobby and a way to do it with other people. Once you have your hobby make sure you do it with other people at least once a week.
  
  
• Play more. Seriously. tl;dr: do one fun thing a day and one scheduled, planned fun thing a week.
  
  
• Vitamins make a real difference for me, especially vitamin D during the winter. While on the topic, check your SAD symptoms.
  
  
• How's your drug and alcohol intake? How do you feel when you go clean for 30/60/90 days? If the thought of dropping booze/drugs frightens you, if you drink/use daily, or if you drink/use massive amounts on the weekends, this is probably what's wrong. Quit for 30 days. If you don't make it or if you turn into a giant asshole during those 30 days, talk to a therapist, talk to a friend who has quit, or go to an AA meeting.
  
  
• How's your caffeine intake?
  
  
• Quit fapping. Especially if you are a dude.
  
  
• How are things at work? This site can make them better. Not just for job seekers.
  
  
• How much do you socialize? Do you do it in the ways that fit you? For instance, if you're an introvert, do you mainly meet people for dinner/coffee/drinks at a quiet bar or someone's house, and if you're extroverted, do you mainly meet in large groups with lots of social stimulation? Whether introvert or extrovert, make sure you're socializing at least twice a week.
  
  
• Don't have friends? Make some.
  
  
• Make gratitude a habit. At the end of each day, write down five things you're grateful for.
  
  
• Develop goals and work toward them.
  
  
• Get organized. Lack of energy can come from lack of focus and too many responsibilities weighing you down.
  
  
• Start doing something creative. Paint, sing, write, take a pottery class, take a storytelling class, etc. Already know you're creative? Read and follow The Artist's Way. In fact, just read and follow The Artist's Way even if you don't think you're creative.
  
  
• On a related note, learn how to make something with your hands. Knitting, carpentry, sculpture, glassblowing, metalworking, welding, legos, whatever.
  
  
• How is your financial situation? If it sucks, head over to /r/personalfinance and start fixing it.
  
  
• Did you grow up in a dysfunctional household? Try therapy, ACoA (not just for children of alcoholics), or al-anon.
  
  
• How much time do you spend online? Try a week of limiting it to 30 min/day.
  
  
• Clean your home. Clutter subtly sucks people's will to live.
  
  
• Consciously hang out more with high-energy people. We are herd animals and others effect us in amazing ways.
  
  
• Ask someone out on a date. No one comes to mind? Time to quit fapping/meet new people/both.
  
  
• Meditate (although exercise is the #1 advice here for a reason, meditation is amazing).
  
  
• Seriously, meditate. 5 minutes, twice a day.
  
  
• OK then, do yoga.
  
  
• Go on a 1-day retreat.
  
  
• Take a road trip. It can be a weekend road trip.
  
  
• Start watching sunrises and sunsets.
  
  
• Go to museums if your town has them.
  
  
• Go to the beach if your town has one.
  
  
• Hike the local mountain if there is one.
  
  
• Talk to someone who knows the local music scene and start looking for a local band you like. Go to their shows.
  
  
• How do you fill your down time? Reading, reddit, fb, Netflix, TV, gaming? Whatever it is, limit it to 30 min/day. Substitute something active or social, preferably both.
  
  
• VOLUNTEER. Help people. Sign yourself up for a once-a-week commitment.
  
  Hope this helps.
  
  EDIT: Thanks for the gold and the /r/bestof! I am super excited.
  
  EDIT2: I totally forgot sleep. Sleeping until you wake up naturally is the best, but if you can't do that, I'm a big fan of sleep apps that use your phone's accelerometer to wake you during light sleep, like Sleep As Android.

Know your fears - this is something I took from twyla tharp's incredible book the creative habit. In the book, which you should absolutely read, she talks about fears, and then, in an act of incredible courage, writes all of her personal artistic fears right there on the page for the world to see. (Her fears are, "1. People will laugh at me. 2. Someone has done it before. 3. I have nothing to say. 4. I will upset someone I love. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind.")

I'm so grateful for her articulating those, because it allowed me to see the incredible power of simply setting your fears down on paper and understanding them. I realized that my own fears, which are different from hers have been dramatically impacting my behavior. Just by putting them down, they lose a smidge of their power, because you begin to see the logical flaws in your subconscious reasoning. (Incidentally, in the spirit of Twyla's honesty, my fears are: that my writer friends and mentors will read something I wrote and decide that I am a weaker writer than they thought; that my manager and agent will read my work and take me less seriously; that the next script will not help me move forward in my career, that I'll stall and lose my job and get fired; that I will have to move my wife back into a shitty living situation when we can't make rent.)

Action item: find a blank page. Write: "I'm afraid of..." and then keep your pen moving. When you get stuck, re-write, "I'm afraid of..." and take a different tack. Think about writing whatever you're procrastinating on right now, and the weird feeling in your gut that appears that's stopping you from working. Dig into it. "I'm afraid of..."

If it helps, you can burn or shred this page later.

Then, maybe later on, distill what you've written down into a few bullet points. Maybe you'll do this once, or maybe you'll come back to this exercise over and over as you write and discover more about yourself and what's actually motivating you.

welcome and embrace your fears. this is something I've distilled from a lifetime of reading Buddhist psychology and philosophy. A great introduction to the concept, though, would be Fear by the Vietnamiese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The point here is that when you think about writing, or sit down to write, and find yourself encountering writers block, instead of just pushing past it, you want to sit back a moment and say, "I know there is this fear in me. I've seen this before, I've written it down." Then, instead of fighting it, you just sit with it a while and don't try to change it. Eventually, you can even come to take care of it, and take care of the wounded part of you that is causing the fear.

action item: when you find yourself procrastinating or experiencing writer's block, stop a moment, and say: "I'm experiencing a fear right now. Hello fear, old friend, I see you in me." This is a better strategy than 'powering through' or watching youtube for 6 hours (my typical move).

bigger action item: beyond the scope of this post, but I've found the above is significantly easier if I've been meditating regularly for 15 minutes a day or longer. Google, search youtube, subscribe to headspace or calm. If you think this is hogwash, the best skeptics discussion of meditation is 10% happier by dan harris.

routine: this is the underlying premise of the creative habit, which gives it its title. The idea is, it's much easier to overcome initial resistance if you develop a routine you follow every day, and the routine ends with you beginning to work.

action item: cultivate the habit of writing every day. Cultivate additional little habits that trigger 'it's writing time', like lighting a candle, putting on your headphones, sitting in a specific room or at a specific table, whatever. Something along the lines of a free-throw shooter dribbling three times before every shot, sort of thing.

morning pages. This is from the book the artists way by julia cameron. The whole book is kind of an exploration of writer's block, in a sense; and it's full of very smart ideas and actionable suggestions on the subject. But the cream of her teaching is: write three handwritten pages of whatever every morning, or when you sit down to write. This little suggestion is truly life-altering -- I was extremely skeptical upon hearing this advice, and now I swear by it. It gives you a place to excise all the junk and demons floating around in your brain every day, kind of like being your own therapist. And it gets you in the habit of moving your pen, writing what comes out, and not self-censoring. It is a way to both strengthen your ability to start writing freely, and simultaneously weaken your fears, procrastination, and distracting surface emotions.

action item: cultivate the habit of writing 3 pages longhand every day. If you're really stuck, get the book and work her 12-week program, it will absolutely un-stuck you, guaranteed.

do the work: the last thing I want to put here is kind of self-evident, but it deserves saying anyway: when it's all said and done, you need to actually put your ass in the chair and start writing. It's like swimming: you can't get better at it by thinking about it strategically or theoretically; you need to put most of your effort into putting out pages. Especially when you're just starting out, the best thing you can do is do a huge volume of work. It's not going to be as good as you want to be at first; it's like that for everyone. You just need to fight through that and write more, and it absolutely will get better over time.

action item: put yourself on a deadline to finish one short every week or two weeks or something. Or one pilot or feature every three or four months. Commit to making mistakes as fast as possible, embrace that things will fall short of your aspirations at first, and just do as much volume as possible.

Hope this helps and I welcome any feedback.

I first ran into this idea reading The Artist's Way with an online group. It's one of the first regular disciplines she recommends to foster creativity.

Personally, it took me a long time to get comfortable with Daily Pages and to find a way to distinguish between them and "regular journaling". For a long, long time I tried to journal for three pages every morning, which was exhausting, took forever, and was emotionally difficult.

When I finally gave myself permission to just write whatever was in my head ... to do lists, random worries, rants, pretend arguments with people, whatever ... it became easier to build the discipline, and much more helpful to me.

The difference is that my daily pages help me figure out what's stealing my attention (things I worry about, relationships that need tending to, etc.) , but that I might be avoiding, or even unaware of. Letting my messy and less formed thoughts out on the page often reveals to me what I'm neglecting in my life. And yes, sometimes that is my grocery list and meal plan for the week. Other times it's bigger issues about my health or my family. If I just let it be the stream-of-consciousness brain dump that I intend it to be, it can be quick and fairly easy to do. Just let it flow.

Journaling, the conscious act of trying to write focused ideas on a particular subject, is most useful to me when I need to figure out a next step, or unravel what I'm really feeling and thinking about something. It requires more effort and focus on my part, and potentially could span several "sessions", but almost always ends with a sense of purpose and clarity.

I guess what I am trying to say is "Don't cross the streams." Daily Pages are a discipline of writing 3 (or whatever you choose) pages of what's on your mind. No more. No less. Garbage and all. Journaling (for me) is writing until the thing is resolved (to some reasonable degree) and that takes whatever number of pages and minutes it takes.

And to tie this back to Notebooks, my Daily Pages notebooks are usually cheap and I'll test various pens and inks or just use a daily carry G-2 ... whatever. My journals are my "good" notebooks. I use my favorite pens and inks. Heck, even my penmanship is better in my journals. (Chicken scratch is not only OK in my Daily Pages, it's practically required)

You got lots of good advice on the thread. I just want to reinforce that at almost 28, you are so young and you have your whole life ahead of you. Anything can happen. But you need to start the change. If you keep doing the same things over and over, you can pretty much expect the same to keep happening. So YOU need to get this process started. You have nothing to lose, girl! You are an intelligent, healthy woman, you are competent, you've got a stable job, you write well... You can be whomever you want to be.

The thing is, right now, you are lacking motivation. You have no challenge going on. So I think it's time for you to stop holding yourself back. Go for it. Write a kick-ass resume and start applying for a job at a company you like. A good book with ideas for job hunting is Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters. I gifted this to a friend a couple years ago, and it was very good for her. For negotiating skills, getting a raise or a new position, and actually to get people to love you everywhere you go, read How to Win Friends and Influence People.

You really shouldn't compare yourself to others. We never know how people really are... That happy marriage, maybe it's not so happy. That fancy lifestyle, maybe powered by credit card debts... We just never know. So don't waste your time and energy (those are limited resources) on other people. Focus on how you can improve YOUR life. How you can be happy by being you and doing you. Think of your time and your energy as a currency. It's to be spent in the only person that deserves it -- you.

If you don't like the gym, don't go to the gym. Life goes by so fast, don't waste your "currency" on something you don't love. Ditch the damn gym. What about running, hiking, kayaking, yoga, tai chi chuan, dog walking, belly dance, ballet, climbing, skateboarding?! Surely you can find something that you love, that makes you happy AND that makes you healthy and strong! You might even meet people and make new friends who share those interests with you. The same applies for hobbies. If you haven't found a passion, try to discover it! You can take guitar lessons, try painting or drawing, cooking... keep trying. Keep learning more about yourself. Surround yourself with things you love, people you love, sports you love. Give yourself, your body, your mind, the love you deserve. Buy some essential oils, give yourself a nice foot massage. Be proactive when it comes to this. It is your life. Your happiness is your responsibility!

Lastly, I'd like to recommend a book I am reading now. It is changing my life. It's called The Artist's Way. When the author wrote it, she was focusing on writers and artists. But the truth is, this book is for everybody. It's a "course" in 12 weeks and it involves two main things: writing 3 pages of stream of consciousness daily, and going on a weekly date with yourself. Every week you deal with a different aspect of your life - or rather, a different block in your life. Little by little you work on removing the blocks, very gently. Your work on your self-esteem, your courage, your creativity... To me it feels like therapy. It's life saving.

Just remember, it's never too late. :)

I recommend The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It doesn't directly address CPTSD, but it does talk a lot about the inner critic (Cameron calls it the censor) and the inner child. There are a lot of exercises that are helpful.

Tienes que practicar no prestarle atención a esa parte de ti que te dice que no tienes nada interesante que escribir.

Te propongo un ejercicio que leí en un libro. Cada día tienes que rellenar 3 páginas. Solo hay dos reglas:

1. No puedes corregir nada de lo que escribas. Tienes que dejar faltas de ortografía, gramática, typos, etc.
   
2. No puedes detenerte a pensar qué vas a escribir. Tienes que escribir "en automático".
   
   Escribe lo primero que se te pase por la mente. Da igual si es una tontería o no tiene sentido. Si no sabes qué escribir escribe "no se qué escribir" hasta que rellenes las 3 páginas.
   
   El objetivo no es hacer literatura ni escribir bien, es rellenar papel. La autora del libro dice que es mejor escribir a mano, pero yo creo que es cuestión de gustos.

What I do isn't quite like you describe, though it is much like D. above.

I do morning pages, which I was first introduced to in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. The tl;dr? Basically 3 pages of longhand stream of conscious writing on pen and paper. For me, this ends up being about an hour's worth of writing. It's one of the first activities of my morning, usually within an hour of waking, so I'm still "booting up", so to speak.

It's a habit that I've had off and on since I first read Julia Cameron's book probably a dozen years ago. I would correlate the times when I was writing with my most mindful and aware times of my life. I am more in tune with my desires. I get ideas for what I want to do. I may start writing by complaining about how tired I am, move to writing about something I want to do, and then end up writing about some change I need to make. You really do get to the bottom of things. And by doing it every day, you have that daily touchstone of what's going on in your life.

I've just been back in the daily habit for three weeks and it has already made a big difference. I've been able to make some changes in my life that are putting me on a better path.

The first book I thought of is The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.