Depression, Self-sabotage, & Unused Creativity

Hey fellow humans — welcome to issue #17

Here’s today in a glance:

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What if your anxiety isn't a malfunction?

What if your depression isn't a sign that something is broken, but a signal that something essential has been buried?

What if the heaviness, the restlessness, the low-grade sense that something is missing,  is not your mind turning against you, but your soul asking you to return to something you left behind?

Carl Jung believed exactly this. And over a century later, neuroscience is beginning to prove him right.

For Jung, creativity was never about talent. It was never about art for art's sake. It was something far more fundamental: a biological and psychological necessity.

He wrote: "The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." But in a world that prioritizes productivity over play and efficiency over exploration, this fundamental instinct is silenced before it can ever find its true expression.

He defined creativity as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious realms of the mind, a force that brings what is hidden into the light. And he was clear: creativity is not the domain of the artist, the musician, or the writer alone. It is something far more universal. It is the ability to shape, to imagine, to bring forth something that did not exist before. The scientist who breaks conventional thought, the entrepreneur who challenges an industry, the individual who reinvents themselves after years of stagnation. All are manifestations of the same force.

In Jung's framework, the unconscious is not empty space. It is brimming with memories, instincts, archetypes, unprocessed emotions, and unlived potential. When that material has no outlet, when the bridge between your inner world and your outer expression collapses, something in the psyche begins to stagnate.

Jung saw creativity as the mechanism through which human beings individuate:  becoming more fully themselves. He called this the process of individuation: the journey toward wholeness. And creativity, he believed, was not optional to that journey. It was the vehicle of it.

When we suppress our creative impulse,  when we trade imagination for productivity, expression for efficiency, soul for survival, we don't just lose a hobby. We lose access to a core part of ourselves. And that loss, Jung argued, has a cost. A psychological, emotional, and spiritual cost that accumulates quietly over time.

Nobody in modern times has articulated this more powerfully than Brené Brown.

In her research on shame and wholehearted living, Brown arrived at a conclusion that stopped her in her tracks: there are no non-creative people. Only people who use their creativity and people who don't. And for the people who don't, the consequences are far from neutral.

Her words: "Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes. It turns into grief, rage, judgment, sorrow, shame."

This is not metaphor. This is clinical observation from decades of research. When creative energy has nowhere to go, it doesn't disappear. It turns inward. It curdles. It becomes the very emotions we spend our lives trying to manage; the anxiety that won't quiet down, the depression that has no clear cause, the chronic low-grade resentment, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix.

Brown also found that 85% of the people she interviewed remembered a specific event in school so shaming that it permanently changed how they saw themselves. And of that 85%, half had wounds specifically around creativity. A teacher who mocked a drawing. A parent who said "be realistic." A culture that equated creativity with self-indulgence and impracticality.

Most of us were taught, early and consistently, that our creative expression was not safe. Not useful. Not enough. And so we buried it. And the burial, it turns out, has a body count.

When we consistently suppress creative expression, we are not just ignoring a preference. We are interfering with core neurological processes.

Creativity is deeply linked to dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with motivation, reward, and forward momentum. Research confirms that high dopamine activity is associated with increased creative output, particularly during the ideation phase. When we are in a state of creative flow, the brain's reward circuits light up. When we chronically suppress that flow, dopamine levels drop  and with them, motivation, energy, and the sense that life has meaning. This is the neurological signature of depression.

There is also a Default Mode Network dynamic at play. The DMN, the brain's internal processing engine, is responsible for imagination, self-reflection, and the generation of new ideas. In healthy individuals, the DMN collaborates with the brain's executive control network to produce creative insight. But research published in leading neuroscience journals shows that in depression, the DMN becomes dysregulated; stuck in loops of negative self-referential thought rather than generative exploration. The same network that should be creating is instead ruminating.

Put simply: a brain that is not creating is a brain that turns on itself.

And when we enter creative flow, genuine, absorbed, expressive flow, something remarkable happens. The amygdala, the brain's threat detection center, quiets down. Cortisol drops. The prefrontal cortex comes back online. Positive affect increases. Studies confirm that engaging in creative activity is directly associated with reduced depressive symptoms, lower anxiety, and improved immune function. The Journal of Positive Psychology found that spending time on creative goals during the day is linked to significantly higher levels of positive emotion.

Creativity is not a luxury. It is neurological medicine.

Jung had a phrase that haunts me every time I encounter it: "the unlived life."

He believed that the greatest source of human suffering was not what we had experienced, but what we had not lived. The parts of ourselves left unexpressed. The creative impulse suppressed in childhood and never reclaimed. The dreams deferred so long they became invisible.

In Jungian psychology, these unlived parts don't simply disappear. They descend into the shadow: the unconscious reservoir of everything we have denied or disowned about ourselves. And the shadow, unexamined, finds other ways to express itself: through anxiety, through self-sabotage, through a persistent sense of emptiness that no achievement can fill.

This is why so many high-achieving founders feel hollow at the top. They built the company. They hit the revenue goal. They got the press. And yet something is missing. Something they can't name. Jung would say: it is the unlived creative life calling from the depths. It is the part of you that was never given permission to simply make something, not for productivity, not for profit, but for the pure act of bringing something from within you into the world.

Creativity, from a spiritual lens, is the act of participating in creation itself. It is how the soul speaks when words fail. It is how the unconscious surfaces and integrates. And when it is silenced long enough, the soul begins to wither, not dramatically, but quietly. In the form of days that feel flat. In the form of a life that looks right from the outside and feels wrong from the inside.

You don't need to become an artist. You need to become someone who creates.

The distinction matters. Jung's "active imagination" , one of his core therapeutic techniques, was not about producing beautiful work. It was about entering into dialogue with the unconscious through any creative form: writing, drawing, movement, music, building, cooking, gardening. The medium is irrelevant. The act of expression is everything.

Here is where to begin:

1. Identify what was shut down. Think back. What did you love to create before someone told you it wasn't practical, wasn't good enough, or wasn't the point? That memory is a map. Follow it.

2. Create without an audience. The moment you create for external validation, you've handed the creative process back to the ego. Start somewhere private. A journal no one reads. A voice memo no one hears. Reclaim the act before you reclaim the output.

3. Protect a creative window. Even 20 minutes a day of unstructured, non-productive creative expression begins to shift the neurological baseline. Dopamine rises. The DMN recalibrates. The inner critic, starved of its power, begins to quiet.

4. Notice what you call "wasted time." Often, what we dismiss as indulgent, doodling, daydreaming, playing, is precisely what the brain needs to generate its best thinking. The most creative insights rarely arrive during focused work. They arrive in the in-between.

5. Treat the resistance as data. If the thought of creating something makes you anxious, that anxiety is pointing directly at the wound. The thing that scares you most to make is often the thing most essential to make. Start there.

Depression and anxiety are not always chemical. Sometimes they are creative. They are the sound of a self that has gone too long without expression. The signal of an unconscious that has nowhere to surface. The cost of a bridge between who you are and who you show up as left unbuilt for too long.

Jung said it a century ago. Brown confirmed it through her research. Neuroscience is now showing us the mechanism.

The antidote to your emptiness may not be another strategy, another supplement, or another optimization. It may be simpler  and stranger  than that.

It may be to create something. Anything. Just to remember that you still can.

To your evolution, 

Roya

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Roya Pakzad, Founder @ Human X.0