The Psychology of Inspiration

Sorry this blog post is a day late. I just got back to university and everything is a bit hectic. I promise, from now on, I will be on time. 

I’m sure I’m not the only one to have noticed how great procrastination is for creative writing.

If there’s something else I should be doing, that’s when I get most of my best writing done. Whereas, when I have to write a story for my coursework or for the uni newspaper that’s when I get complete and utter writer’s block.

Inspiration is all about psychology. For my first piece of creative writing coursework last term I had one of the worst cases of writer’s block I’ve ever had. And it got worse and worse the closer I got to the deadline. Luckily, my university allows us one free extension every term. I told myself I would use it and as soon as I was under the impression that I had at least one more week to get it done, I instantly thought of an idea for my story.

During exam time when I should be revising, I get more inspired than I ever do in my spare time.

I don’t think inspiration through procrastination is a bad thing. At least you’re doing something productive. But it did start me thinking about the psychology of inspiration. And I did some research.

There is surprisingly little psychological research into inspiration. But I did find one study entitled Inspiration as a Psychological Construct by Todd M. Thrash and Andrew J. Elliot that produced some interesting results.

According to this study, inspired individuals are more engaged with their environment and are more likely to be pursuing majors within the humanities (which is very good news for me). Inspiration also correlated positively with work mastery and creativity (as character traits) but negatively with competitiveness and fear of failure which explains why deadlines seem to sap our inspiration.

Inspiration positively related to perceived competence, self-esteem and optimism and also self-determination.

So in order for us to become inspired we need to believe that we can do well, we need to be creative people, engaged with our environment and optimistic. But we can’t be afraid to fail or judge our levels of success by comparing ourselves to others because that will introduce the competitive element which is apparently so bad for our inspiration.

So that’s the psychology behind inspiration. It wasn’t exactly what I expected to find when I started my research but I hope it can be in some way helpful.

Thanks for reading!