From Burnout to Well-being through Creativity and Playfulness
3 Ways Creative Play Can Improve Your Life
When was the last time you allowed yourself to play? Without a plan, end goal, expectations, or self-imposed limitations? Without restricting your raw curiosity, urges, and aspirations?
Humans are hardwired to play! Play teaches us to invent and innovate. It enables us to connect, create, and collaborate. It can be a rabbit hole to eternal learning, continuous self-improvement, and unconditional joy in multiple areas. Play unexpectedly enabled me to move from burnout to well-being, transform surviving into thriving, and turn my life from a nightmare into a modern fairytale. But it wasn't just any type of play. It was what I call creative play.
What Is Creative Play?
Creative play is a process of open-ended exploration of your natural curiosity and creativity without fixed rules or end goal. It's a fun, non-intimidating, and stress-free way to approach an activity by allowing yourself to enjoy the unpredictability of the process, letting go of control, going with the flow, and experimenting without fear of failure. It's an attitude you can cultivate and adopt at any age, which can unexpectedly lower your resistance, alleviate anxiety, and put you in a state of peak performance.
Why Is Creative Play Important?
Creative play with like-minded people can serve as an educational, bonding, and empowering experience in disguise. It can enable you to develop social skills, strengthen your problem-solving abilities and out-of-the-box thinking, and improve your ability to work in a team.
If done in a supportive, stimulating, and inspiring environment, creative play can help you cultivate resilience, adaptability, and an open mind, which can enable you to overcome unpredictable challenges and solve persistent problems in unusual ways. Based on my experience, creative play can also help you ways during severe mental health struggles and unexpected earthquakes in your personal and professional life.
Additionally, creative play can improve your well-being by making it easy for you to identify and adopt sustainable mental, emotional, and physical self-care habits and practices.
And since play is something humans naturally know how to do since a very early age, being on the same creative playground with others is an excellent way to organically establish meaningful connections with like-minded people, who enjoy playing in similar ways as you.
Whether you like cooking, drawing, building things, dancing, playing music, giving new life to old textiles, making glow-in-the-dark body art, or just want to embrace a new activity without fear of failure, intimidation, and anxiety, creative play in any context can be an unexpected path to learning, self-care, and meaningful connections.
Introduction to Creative Play
My professional and personal fascination with creative play as a context for human empowerment in multiple has led me to work with thousands of people on 5 continents since 2013. In the following lines I share learnings and ideas on how creative play can help you improve your eating habits, keep good mental health hygiene, and engage in enriching playtime at any age and environment.
As children, we don't need instructions on how to play. We don't need agendas, briefings, or stand-up meetings. We don't need any structure for playtime. We show up on the playground and figure out what to do. We're masters of creative play.
Growing up often makes us forget how important playing is for our well-being and development. Unfortunately, our society often views play in adult life as a waste of time and resources. Being a part of schools, organizations, and companies helps us learn to follow rules. But, it also makes us unlearn to follow our natural instincts to play.
Hitting rock bottom opened my eyes to the power of creative play. It helped me reconnect with my inner child, unleash unexpected potential, and unlock unsuspected superpowers.
From Burnout to Well-being through Creative Play
One of the perks of having a degree in journalism and mass communication is that it allows me to easily and consistently capture my personal and professional milestones, everyday life and creative explorations. On top of that, I generate tons of multimedia content with timeless value. As a by-product of my compulsion to document moments of my life since 2013, I have built a huge digital knowledge base of multi-disciplinary content, which I use to tell stories, inspire, empower, and educate people around the world.
The diversity and intensity of the unexpected challenges and changes that I have experienced on my personal and professional path over the last 2 decades combined with the unique lens, through which I engage with my circumstances, enable me to share learnings and guidance with like-minded people with similar experiences. My goal is to enable them to use their creativity and playfulness to enhance their well-being at any age, regardless of their specific circumstances - just like I have!
Burning out from my corporate tech job combined with massive earthquakes in my personal life between 2015 and 2021 made me desperate and powerless. Creative play gave me hope on the edge of suicide. It allowed me to re-sculpt my identity, re-design my reality, and write a new story about my life. This is what inspired me to share my story and invite people on a unique journey of self-empowerment through creative play.
Enhancing Well-being and Improving Everyday Life through Creative Play
Creative play in the kitchen helped me turn food from an enemy into a friend and transform my eating disorder into the Bulgarian social enterprise Foodie Boulevard, which has enabled thousands of people on multiple continents to embrace food as a superpower on and off the dining table. It also made me a TEDx speaker and Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneur.
Creative play enabled me to fall in love with movement and turn my body dysmorphia into an obsession with exercise, which together with my eating habits since 2015 is why at 35 I have abs and can do 3 sets of 10 push-ups.
Creative play enabled me to turn my suicidal depression into abstract art that I sold as NFTs on OpenSea, which is how I traveled to 4 countries and funded my life in the alien city of Eindhoven for the first 6 months after I moved to the Netherlands after an unexpected separation from my partner of 9 years.
Last but not least, creative play enabled me to turn from a homeless woman into an international community empowerment designer, multi-disciplinary artist, and model in less than three years.
My path from burnout to well-being unexpectedly took me on a journey of learning about the pillars of well-being through open-ended explorations that looked and felt a lot like childlike play.
Allowing myself to experiment with a variety of activities in a creative way without fear of failure has given me an opportunity to cultivate various skills from different domains that consistently simplify and improve my everyday life. This approach has also helped me overcome anxiety, insecurity, indecisiveness, and self-sabotage in multiple areas of my professional and personal life, and has helped me expand my business and social network, and establish meaningful connections with unexpected people.
How to Embrace and Benefit from Creative Play in Your Everyday Life?
Simplify Cooking and Improve Your Eating Habits
Creative play in the kitchen enables you to make cooking simple, fun, and easy. Having an open mind and playful attitude in the kitchen allows you to prepare delicious and nutritious meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in under 30 minutes by spending as much as you want on ingredients and using basic cooking skills.
Creative play with food is about engaging with your favorite ingredients as if they are LEGO bricks and combining them in different proportions and combinations based on your taste and goals.
This approach enabled me to stop overeating with junk food, reprogram my brain to crave healthy food, cultivate sustainable cooking habits, and turn myself from a chubby woman in my early 20s into a fit international model in my mid 30s by leaving dieting behind and turning food into my creative playground and self-care partner.
The same approach got me invited to lead workshops for students of the most prestigious international school in Bulgaria and for employees of the most forward-looking tech companies in Sofia.
As a certified Mind-Body Eating Coach by the Institute for the Psychology of Eating in Colorado, a recipe designer, commissioned by the most well-known health food brands in Bulgaria, and awarded cookbook author with international impact, I have learned a thing or two about using food as a superpower on and off the dining table.
If you're ready to experiment with new ingredients or with familiar ingredients in new ways, explore simplify grocery shopping, meal prep, and cooking, create unique dishes in less than 30 minutes with basic cooking skills by following your natural curiosity, and explore bite-sized creative cooking ideas and edible artworks tutorials - join my community on Patreon and go down the creative rabbit hole today.
Detox Your Mind and Keep Good Mental Health Hygiene
Everyone who identifies as "creative" swears by the therapeutic role of creativity. Having a creative practice of any type can be a healthy outlet for processing difficult emotions and overcoming trauma. Adopting a playful attitude and allowing yourself to experiment with a creative activity without expectations and fear of failure enables you to identify and adopt a creative practice that is easy to sustain, can change and evolve as you do, and feels relaxing, refreshing, and rejuvenating.
During my most severe episode of major depression, free-flow open-ended doodling unexpectedly enabled me to express and process complex inner experiences that I didn't have the words for.
This unexpected creative practice I organically adopted during a difficult episode felt liberating, relaxing, and enjoyable in a way that was unfamiliar to me. The more time I dedicated to it, the better I felt, and the more intentional and disciplined I became about my creative practice. As a by-product of my therapeutic creative activities, I built a signature visual language and a global art career from scratch with no former experience or training in less than three years. Allowing my hand to move freely with a black marker on an empty, white page enabled me to use my depression-related cognitive decline in the summer of 2021 as a catalyst to teach myself to doodle. Eventually my initially timid and insecure creative practice led me to develop a recognizable and prolific body of work, which has been displayed in venues in London, New York, and around the Netherlands, and is owned by collectors on multiple continents as NFTs and physical artworks.
Establish Meaningful Connections and Nourish Your Inner Child
Kids have a natural defense system against social anxiety. Even though some of us experience discomfort around others at an early age, most kids find it relatively easy to have a great time with complete strangers as soon as they get on a shared playground or engage in the same activity.
As we spend less and less time in open-ended playful experiences while growing up, we tend to forget how easy it can be to connect with someone over doing something playful and fun with no specific agenda or end goal in mind.
Whether it's through sharing cooking adventures with a fellow foodie, joining a textile upcycling workshop, participating in a pottery class, or just going to an open day at an interesting venue to experience and explore different types of art and creativity, there are unlimited ways to use your childlike playfulness combined with your innate creativity to connect with like-minded people with shared interests and tastes.
Organizing and hosting dozens of community empowerment events with global participants since 2015 has taught me that humans love to learn, meet people, and have fun with others in ways that lower their stress levels, make them feel seen and appreciated, and give them encouragement to discover unexpected talents they hold.
From creative cooking and edible art masterclasses all the way to glow-in-the-dark body art and textile upcycling workshops, and most recently - a full-blown 8-hour creative festival - my experiments with using creative play as a common theme in all the events I organize has been the most successful community empowerment strategy I ever adopted. The people who have visited my events, and gone down the rabbit hole of creative play, have started important friendships, discovered mentorship opportunities, and found creative collaborators.
To stay tuned about my upcoming creative adventures and events for community empowerment through creativity, sign up for my newsletter, follow me on Instagram, and join my membership community on Patreon.