One of the most satisfying and enjoyable human experiences is being inspired. When inspiration hits, we feel alive and energized, as though we’ve been transported to a new and more significant plane of existence. Inspiration is the real Promised Land—a place where creative wonderment and creative miracles abound—especially for creative individuals. Inspiration bears a lot of resemblance to romantic infatuation. Both involve a profoundly elevated mood—“sitting on cloud nine”—that confers a sense of potency and invincibility. On such occasions, life is drenched with meaning and we feel psychologically whole and purposeful. Abraham Maslow referred to these moments of overwhelming joy and elation as “peak experiences.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could always feel inspired? Unfortunately, this is not the world in which we live. Inspiration can be fickle and fleeting, abandoning us just as quickly as it comes and leaving feelings of deflation and disappointment in its wake. If we didn’t use its superpowers when it was with us, this can be especially disheartening. For those old enough to remember the Pac-Man video game, it’s like eating a power pellet but being unable to kill any ghosts or chomp more dots afterward. Creatives have long understood that inspiration has a short life cycle. On the heels of its blissful highs can be difficult, at times debilitating, lows.
Artists and creatives aspire to possess the rare ability to cultivate, sustain, and effectively utilize inspiration. Early in life, when idealism is running on all cylinders, inspiration is more abundant. But as idealism wanes and inspiration starts to peter out, we’re faced with the difficult choice of whether to throw in the towel or to dig deep and find new ways of cultivating inspiration.
One way of learning how we might better cultivate inspiration is to study it scientifically. Science typically entails breaking down a phenomenon into its component parts and figuring out what can be done to improve the outcome. The inspiration experience has received surprising little attention in psychological research despite its apparent significance and widespread use. Much ink has been spilled on related topics like motivation and creativity, but far less on inspiration.
To address this deficit, researchers Todd Thrash and Andrew Elliot enumerated a conceptual foundation for inspiration in their paper, Inspiration as a Psychological Construct, which we’ll turn to next.
Inspirational Intentions Early in their article, Thrash and Elliot point out that inspiration literally refers to the process of breathing in. The Oxford English Dictionary says that it includes: Anatomically speaking, inhalation entails a contraction of respiratory musculature which causes the lungs to expand and fill with air. Tension is created in order to draw more energy (i.e., oxygen) into the body. Swimmers and divers naturally take deep breaths before heading under water, allowing them to capture the energy required to accomplish their goal.
Psychologically speaking, inspiration increases our supply of creative or vital energy. Thrash and Elliot, on the other hand, argue that psychological inspiration is not a willful act in the same way that taking a deep breath is. Instead, it’s typically evoked by a trigger. This may come in the form of an inner encounter with a new idea or insight, or outwardly through exposure to art, nature, books, people, etc.
Regardless of the nature of the trigger, when inspiration hits, it charges us with energy and readies us for action. This charge of energy is typically quite pleasurable and often described as magical or divine. Indeed, the concept of inspiration originally referred to an encounter with a supernatural being where the individual served as a recipient of divine truths. Similarly, creative writers and artists often speak of channeling their Muse—the mysterious wellspring of creativity that guides and fuels their work.
Transcendent Experience
Thrash and Elliot go on to characterize inspiration as a transcendent type of experience, one that surpasses “the ordinary preoccupations or limitations of human agency.”
Being inspired has an extraordinary feeling, which is why artists, lovers, and seekers of spirituality are always looking for it. This also explains the appeal of substances like psychedelics which may elicit a similar experience. Nonetheless, cultivating and harnessing inspiration without the aid of drugs remains a worthwhile challenge to embrace.
Inspired Action
The researchers also contend that the feeling of inspiration, however pleasurable, is not the real endpoint. Typically, we aren’t content to merely bask in inspiration’s delightful rays. That’s because inspiration impels us to act—to do something with our newfound energy. Not only is inspiration a high energy state, but also a purposive one. As Thrash and Elliot observe, “Inspiration implies motivation.”
To be honest, the idea of motivation doesn’t really appeal to me. Perhaps because of its frequent coupling with notions like corporate productivity, it fails to move me in the way that the concept of inspiration does. There’s a holistic, even spiritual, connotation to inspiration that motivation doesn’t quite capture. I may be motivated to eat dinner, but I’m probably not inspired. To be sure, feeling motivated is preferable to boredom or apathy; it’s a step in the right direction. But inspiration takes motivation to another level. When we deconstruct inspiration and start using terms like motivation instead, some of its original potency is lost. In point of fact, it could be argued that any spiritual or quasi-spiritual experience tends to lose power in the mind when subjected to structured analysis. That said, I suggested earlier that scientific analysis can provide insight into how something works and how we might exploit it for our benefit. In addition, whereas its application in the physical sciences is evident, its application in human life appears less clear-cut. Even Jung, for instance, saw the potential dangers of undercutting his clients’ religious beliefs in analytic therapy. If religion is meeting a vital psychological need, it’s important to consider what might replace it if it were jettisoned. Anyone who’s played the game of Jenga knows that removing a foundational block puts the entire tower at risk. The same is true of the psyche. We might therefore ask ourselves if and when it’s advisable to dispense with concepts like soul or inspiration in favor of more precise, but less life-giving, scientific terms. In some situations it might pay off, in others not so much.