https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=t_grwDqkFJY
For those who are very creative but high in neuroticism, how should one work to gain emotional stability in order to go out into chaos to do more creative things? That’s a really good question. You know, I learned about that by reading Jung’s works on alchemy, weirdly enough. And so, back again in graduate school, when I was starting to write maps of meaning and really tearing myself apart psychologically, trying to understand evil, I suppose, the evil of the Cold War and the evil of the individuals who composed Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, I was reading Carl Jung because his tracks on alchemy were a lot about self-transformation. And he talked about… it’s hard to explain his works on alchemy, but suffice it to say that his advice was something like the advice he derived from the alchemist, was that if you were going to mess around with very complicated and dangerous matters, that’s a good way of putting it, that you should really put your life together. And so I would say the right way to deal with your neuroticism is to increase your conscientiousness, because we also know that the higher your conscientiousness, the lower your neuroticism. Conscientiousness does seem to keep neuroticism in check. And so I would say, and have said this to many people, clean your room, organize your life, like get a routine, get up every day at the same time, go to bed at the same time, establish disciplined habits. And that will help a lot. Schedule. Like, and here’s how to use a schedule. Use a calendar, use Google Calendar, but don’t use it as a tyrant. You know, you want to use your use a calendar as if it’s your your confidant and advisor. And what you want to do is use the calendar, sit down and open the calendar and think, OK, well, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to design a week of days that I would really like to have. So what that would mean is that you would schedule things that you would consider meaningful and productive, you know, on a daily basis so that you feel that your life is justified by having a day like that. And also to schedule enough of your responsibilities so that you make progress day by day instead of falling farther behind. And what that’ll do is it doesn’t directly affect your neurophysiology, but you know, you’re reacting as a neurotic person, a person high in neuroticism, say you react to uncertainty and the unexpected with more physiological preparedness and more expenditure of energy than the typical person. And so what you want to do is organize your surroundings because it’s a lot easier to organize your surroundings, at least to begin with, than it is to do radical reconstruction on your fundamental temperament, which you might not be able to do at all. So I would say discipline, discipline. And the other thing I would say for creative people, and this is true for people in general, but it’s really important for creative people, is that if you want to be creative, which is very, very dangerous and very, very unlikely to succeed, although absolutely necessary if you happen to be high in openness, is that you should organize the rest of your life, except for your creative endeavors, in a pretty traditional and conservative manner, if you can do that. Because what that does is buttress you against the unexpected and give you some stability on many, you know, along many of the potential dimensions of your life. And that frees you up to take larger risks in the creative domain. Now it’s hard for creative people to do that because they’re sort of blasting out, you know, laterally in all directions simultaneously, but you exhaust yourself that way and you also risk scattering yourself. .