Why Creativity Matters More Than Ever on Thanksgiving

Creativity and Curiosity Are Essential for Your Mental Self-Care

By Kelly Penrod, LCDC

At 4 a.m. this morning, I found myself listening to a podcast interview instead of getting up to start prepping for Thanksgiving. Alex O’Connor’s interview with Dr. Lain McGilchrist, is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, Oxford scholar, and one of the most influential thinkers today on how the two hemispheres of the brain shape our perception, culture, and meaning.

Something he said caught my attention. Not because it was shocking, but because it was so quietly true: when the left hemisphere dominates, cynicism becomes the operant. I see this often in my counseling of my clients with addiction. McGilchrist wasn’t talking about personality or attitude. He was describing the brain’s tendency, under stress or repetition, to slide into narrow certainty. The right hemisphere ... our doorway to context, meaning, empathy, imagination, and perspective, goes quiet, and the left steps in with its clipped efficiency, declaring that it already knows how everything works. To me, this makes sense in understanding how someone who is dealing with stressful life issues tend toward using escapes such as substances or process addictions like sex, love, gambling, or gaming. Their life becomes smaller, flatter, more suspicious. Listening to McGilchrist, I realized again how easy it is to let the part of our brain that makes life feel alive slowly drift into the background.

What struck me was how preventable this drift is, AND how often we forget that creativity isn’t optional. It’s necessary. Biologically, psychologically, even philosophically. Creativity keeps the right hemisphere awake. Without it, the mind folds inward, repeating the same conclusions, the same judgments, the same tired narratives. Curiosity is a practice. I find it a bit humorous that politics uses the labels “left” and “right,” as if the political right automatically holds the virtues of empathy and compassion or the political left automatically owns rigidity. Or as if being on the “right” automatically means you are right. If only our neurology cared about political branding. The truth is simpler: whichever hemisphere we practice is the one that leads, and the one we neglect will eventually fall silent.

This is why making something, anything, matters. Creativity is not about talent. Creativity is necessary in keeping our inner world flexible. When you doodle, write, sing, imagine, experiment, or follow a spark of curiosity, you feed the networks that help you stay open. You strengthen the part of your mind that resists the slide into cynicism. Creativity keeps your emotional system supple. It keeps you capable of learning from your experiences instead of locking onto the first interpretation that feels safe. It prevents the mental contraction that turns everything unfamiliar into something threatening. And empathy works the same way. Sympathy stays at a distance; empathy steps inside the moment with you. Empathy is a right-hemisphere act, and like creativity, it must be practiced. Otherwise, the quieter functions of awareness fade, and the louder functions of certainty take over.

I started thinking about this in the context of the holidays, when family stories and old patterns wander back into the room just as predictably as the cranberry sauce. These are the moments when our brains are most vulnerable to shrinking into their familiar grooves. So bring a notebook. Truly. Slip it in your bag next to the dinner rolls. When the room gets full or loud or complicated, open it and doodle: circles, triangles, lines, dots—the ABCs of drawing. This tiny gesture gives your mind a way to breathe. It activates the hemisphere that sees nuance instead of threat, possibility instead of inevitability. And no one needs to know why you’re doing it. You’re simply keeping yourself awake to the moment instead of collapsing into the story your body wrote before you were seven.

Let’s shift this myth about creativity, you know that one that says you’re not creative because you can’t draw... think of creativity as your brain’s food. When you don’t feed it curiosity or exploration, it shifts into survival mode, and cynicism takes the wheel. The practice of creativity restores spaciousness where stress tries to compress. And especially on days like today, when being with family may become stressful, a practice of being curious and creative is how you keep your conscious awake and aware in your life. So bring the notebook. Draw a few shapes. Let it be your quiet act of self-preservation, your small rebellion against reactivity, your way of tending to the part of your mind that still believes in possibility. If the right hemisphere needs practice to stay alive, then consider this your Thanksgiving exercise routine: doodle a little, breathe a little, and keep your perception open just wide enough to see the whole story, not just the fragment that hurts.

Happy (and creative) Thanksgiving!