Do You Have An Overactive Imagination?

Why dialling down the inputs might bring more happiness and healthier creative habits.

Having an Overactive Imagination isn’t necessarily always seen in a positive light. “Mrs Thompson has an overactive imagination when she brags about how perfect her daughter is, but we all know she’s full of shit” might be an appropriate example of using those two words together in a sentence.

I’ve been told that I have an Overactive Imagination, but not like Mrs Thompson’s - mine is more like that stupid robot from the 1986 science fiction comedy Short Circuit, where Number 5 demands more and more ‘inputs’ from Stephanie, so he can understand more about the world he’s escaped to. He literally reads every book in Stephanie’s house, but still insists on shouting ‘Input! More Input Stephanie! More Input!’.

Inputs have become a sort of Crack for me too, which I know now isn’t necessarily that good for me. Finding that balance for someone creative can be really hard. Almost everything I do both at work and for fun involves some form of creativity, which requires a whole range if inputs to get to those all important outputs. 

Sadly, the human brain isn’t built for 24/7 abuse like this - it needs regular periods of down time like the rest of our bodies do. You know, regular sleep and long periods of just chilling the fuck out. It just overloads and crashes if you never give it a chance to file away all that stuff you’ve fed to it, and if you don’t, the things that start to suffer include motivation, decision-making, memory and ironically, the want to learn. 

You often don’t notice how much damage is occurring until others start to tell you. When my depression was taking hold of me, at that point when my wife started to hate me more than usual, a trip to the GP quickly recommended me for sessions with a man who knows how to unpick scrambled minds. It was time for Psychology to enter my world.

The Mental Download

The Psychologist was an older man, paid for by government subsidy, mostly because I was far too tight to pay top dollar for nonsense like therapy, but probably also because I, like many, didn’t think I needed someone poking around inside my head. 

Things hadn’t gotten that bad, had they?

Well, yes, it appeared they had. But, I was assured it was very normal, and by downloading all my problems, this man could start to plan a better existence for me. 

As a footnote, if these sessions have taught me anything at all, it’s that Mental Health is woefully underestimated, even in a post Covid world where it seems almost everyone I know isn’t now afraid to talk about it. It has helped me think of my mind as possibly the most important part of my body, and it’s also helped me think about how others might be struggling in silence too.

Anyway, back to the Psychologist, who’d started to unpick me by asking what some of my challenges were.

The list was endless, and included obviously all sorts of daily life issues - the children, the relationship I have with my wife, paying the bills, worrying about getting ill, or losing my job, being tired all the time, constant feelings of imposter syndrome, feelings of being stuck in a hamster wheel and then, he went on to explore what I did to relax. 

“Relax? Mmm, I don’t really do that - I’m creative almost constantly” I laughed. But it was no laughing matter. 

“You need to rest your Overactive Imagination” he quickly concluded, advising me to meditate to narrated sessions spoken by people who were meant to send me to sleep, aided by wind-chimey music. The problem was, my Overactive Imagination started to think about what the narrator looked like or what she was wearing. I found it harder and harder to keep my eyes closed, breaking the spell, and then just stressing me out more and more because I couldn’t help thinking I could be doing something far more beneficial than laying down to enjoy my own pity-party.

Never before had I felt so tightly wound.

After a few more sessions (mostly of my ranting about how meditation was definitely not for me), the advice was to find a creative outlet that did not require me to over use my imagination. 

The Bus Journey

Enter the hugely challenging 391 piece ‘London Routemaster Bus’ plastic construction kit by Revel, that due to an error in communication with my parents about what I really wanted for my 47th birthday, ended up on my project list. Guilt washed over me, I unlocked a new level of sad old man geekiness, and I started the lengthy process of assembling it.

It took me about 6 months - this thing was insanely complex, meant for truly advance modelmakers, and I remember the shame involved in hiding it away every time someone visited the house. I remember my wife laughing at me as I got all the pieces out on the dining room table as she watched RuPaul’s Drag Race alone. “What am I married to?” she’d constantly ridicule me with, and I could see why. 

Modelmaking the bus did bring a small amount of brain rest - following the instructions was so pre-meditated, but even this glorified jigsaw puzzle started to wind me up thanks to elements like the seats - 72 of those little fuckers, and the pattern on them wasn’t an accurate representation of the beautiful Moquette material designed in the early 1960’s that I’d studied at college. The design of the ads on the sides were another a source of frustration, one being a Jacobs Cream Crackers ad using the wrong font, and the other being a terribly drab ad for the British Museum using an appalling design layout. I’d go on to spend hours of my life researching what was the right ads to include, and then of course designing them, printing them, and carefully applying them so the rivets were still visible just as the real thing had looked when I was a child.

And then of course, there was the destination board on the front - the place that bus was heading to, possibly the most important detail of all - which had to be historically accurate and graphically perfect. 

Suffice to say, I won’t be pursuing modelmaking as a way to relax any time soon, and this likely goes for other creative activities that I had always thought relaxed me, but actually create more stress in my life.

The Plan Moving Forward

Since starting Creative Therapy just a couple of weeks ago, I’ve learn heaps already about how I could (or maybe should) start to reframe what I do with my personal creative work in view to resting my very Overactive Imagination. 

To try and stop me over thinking almost everything I do outside of my day job, I’m going to try and make a pact with myself to just enjoy the ride a bit more, and not worry about the destination so much.

It’ll be hard, and maybe I’ll fail, but I’m really inspired to see others sharing their creative journeys outside of their professional work. People like my good mate Raj Kaur who has the wildest sketchbook shares right here on Substack using a looseness of line and colour I can only dream about. 

And just last week I read a wonderful article entitled How To Keep Your Hobby From Becoming A Job by Carolyn Yoo, who has also created a fabulous Zine on the subject. In it she helps navigate towards either committing to turning your personal creative efforts into business, or simply keeping it for pleasure. 

Clearly the latter is where my Psychologist would love me to land, and I’m finally beginning to see why.

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Your comments are valuable to me and others, so what do you think?

Do you pro-actively switch off from being creative when you’re doing Art as a hobby, and if you do, how?

Or are you someone who finds removing that constant need for inputs really hard?

What do you think is a good balance for being a happy creative, but giving your mental health high priority too? 

Maybe you’d like to share similar pains?