7 Habits That Dull Creativity, and How to Overcome Them

Have you noticed how often people are speaking about creativity these days? Or, more precisely, about the lack of it. We see the signs everywhere: as the world shifts from an innovation-first mindset to a profit-first one, companies drift away from daring ideas and lean toward safer, near-interchangeable solutions.

A well-known tech company once launched a smartphone so revolutionary it reshaped an entire industry: a reminder of what genuine creative impact can look like. Yet years and countless iterations later, that same spark feels dimmer; the boldness that once defined them has softened into small, cautious refinements.

Andy Walker explores this phenomenon in his article Why Companies Stop Innovating, echoing a sentiment many of us quietly recognise: that the world may, in some ways, be growing less imaginative.

So if you’ve felt creativity slipping (in organisations, in culture, even in everyday problem-solving), you’re not imagining it. At Scriveiner, we remain endlessly curious about human creativity, learning, and self-expression. We invite you to join us on this brief exploration. And as every journey deserves, let us begin with the basics.

What is Creativity?

Many people use “creativity” as a synonym for “art”, but these are two very different things. I invite you to think of creativity as both the ability and the courage to bring together concepts, objects or ideas that do not typically belong together. Through that lens, art is simply one expression of creativity: a visible outcome of this internal process of recombination and exploration.

But art is not creativity’s only child. Another is innovation: though the word has been so overused in corporate settings that it risks losing its meaning. Let’s set aside the buzzword and look instead at the essence: innovation is a new, useful outcome born from connecting the unexpected. And such outcomes are only possible when creativity is alive, nurtured and allowed to mature into something tangible.

In this sense, we arrive at a simple, human definition: creativity is the practice of seeing new possibilities, and the willingness to pursue them.

7 Things That Kill Creativity

Suppose you type “how to be more creative?” into the Google search bar. In that case, you’ll be served an overwhelming number of results: animated videos, scientific papers, discussion threads, essays, toolkits and more. We’ve reviewed around a hundred of these sources, spanning every format imaginable, to distil the advice down to five simple ideas. We hope you’ll find them helpful and easy to digest, even if they’re not always easy to accept. Some may feel like a bitter pill.

1. The Desire to Create Great Things. Always.

In the modern era of unending information flow with social media, news feeds, notifications, and the constant hum of updates, we’ve all adapted to survive the stream. And at the same time, we’ve adapted to be seen within it.

The internet’s tiny windows force us to compress our achievements into polished outcomes:
Here is my best-selling book.
Here is my art exhibition.
Here is my new app.
Here is my spring–summer hat collection.

These accomplishments are undeniably worthy. They sit on years of effort, skill and repetition, the quiet grind that leads to mastery. Yet because the space to show them is so small, we only see the end result, never the slow, imperfect becoming.

And so a subtle shift happens.
“I see people practising for hours and gradually getting better” becomes
“People around me are constantly producing great things”.

From this, we begin to believe we must create only great things. The small, rough, playful ideas are dismissed before they take shape. Everyone carries a private cemetery of projects abandoned too early, ideas buried because they didn’t seem grand enough.

The desire to create only masterpieces suffocates creativity. It leaves no room for exploration, experimentation or gentle beginnings.

2. You are Not Bored Enough

In 2025, boredom is treated almost as a moral failing. It feels uncomfortable, even anxious. The sense of doing nothing while knowing you could, theoretically, be doing something. And with today’s endless informational flow, our brain has been conditioned to exist in a state of near-constant stimulation.

We commute with music.
We run errands with a podcast.
We eat while watching YouTube.
If a moment of emptiness appears, we reach instinctively for short-form videos “just to kill time”.

Every one of these inputs is a form of stimulation. And if an average Londoner examined their last week honestly, they might realise that the only time their brain was not receiving external information was during sleep. Hardly restorative.

Think back to the time you felt most creative. Most people will land in childhood. You had ideas, ambitions and an imagination that seemed limitless. Where did it go? Nowhere. It simply has no quiet space to form. As a child, boredom was common. You had to use your brain to entertain yourself. That mental idleness created room for ideas to grow.

Boredom, then, is not the enemy of creativity but its incubator. When external stimuli quieten, your internal world becomes audible again.

3. Depending on Your Comfort Zone

After thousands of years of fighting predators, enduring hunger, weathering storms and navigating every harshness imaginable, a portion of humanity finally achieved the comfort our ancestors could only dream of.

We live in warm homes.
We travel swiftly and safely.
We buy food from stores offering every option we can imagine.
Life, in many ways, is smooth.

This stability is wonderful. Until it begins to rule us.

There is a saying: If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Comfort zones are not limited to homes, cars or supermarkets. They show up in how you organise your workspace, how you plan your day, and how you approach decisions and tasks.

Creativity often requires stepping into the unknown. Not dramatically, simply enough to unsettle the pattern. New ideas rarely appear on familiar paths. A tiny disruption is often enough.

Small steps, consistently taken, create the conditions for creative growth.

4. Neglecting Your Inner World

Creativity is not produced by a machine; it grows out of your inner landscape. Yet modern life rewards speed, efficiency and output, often at the cost of reflection. We spend hours consuming content but very little time processing it. Our days become outward-facing, and the inner world, where connections, insights and imaginative leaps form, is left unattended.

Neglecting your inner world looks like

• never sitting with your own thoughts
• always choosing input over reflection
• ignoring emotions, intuition or curiosity
• filling every pause with activity
• forgetting what genuinely interests you

When the inner world is dry, creativity has nothing to draw from. Ideas need material: memories, emotions, questions, contradictions, unspoken thoughts. Without tending to this internal garden, innovation becomes almost impossible.

Protecting your inner world is not indulgence; it is maintenance.

5. Outsourcing Your Thinking to Algorithms

We live in an age of extraordinary convenience. With a single tap, algorithms curate our news, entertainment, music, shopping, and even our opinions. At first, this feels helpful, almost like it knows your tastes better than you do. But the hidden cost is subtle and steep.

When we let algorithms decide what we see, we gradually lose touch with our own curiosity. Our world shrinks to what the system predicts we already like. New genres, new thinkers, new perspectives, with all the unexpected sparks that fuel creativity, appear less and less. Instead, we are given more of the same.

Algorithms are designed to keep us comfortable. Creativity grows only when we wander beyond comfort.

Outsourcing your thinking might save time, but it weakens the mental muscles that generate originality. To stay creative, we must reclaim our agency: choosing books without recommendations, visiting places we didn’t plan, exploring ideas without being guided by a feed.

6. Treating Creativity as a Talent, Not a Practice

There is a common belief that creativity is a gift bestowed on a lucky few, a mysterious trait some people are “born with”. This misunderstanding may be one of the greatest creativity-killers of all.

If creativity is seen as talent, we stop trying when the process becomes difficult. We think, perhaps, I’m simply not a creative person. But if we see creativity as practice, something shifts. Suddenly, every attempt, every small experiment, every imperfect draft is part of the path, and not evidence of failure.

Creativity is not magic. It is a method.
It is the repeated act of trying, adjusting, observing, and trying again.

Treating it as talent turns creativity into an exclusive club. Treating it as practice makes it accessible to anyone willing to make space for it. The more you do, the more you can do, and the more your brain learns to spot unusual connections, patterns and possibilities.

The least creative people are not those without talent, but those who have stopped practising.

7. Doing too much, too fast

Modern life rewards speed: faster responses, faster projects, faster growth. We are expected to multitask, deliver instantly, react immediately, and maintain an almost superhuman availability. But creativity does not function on these terms.

Creativity requires incubation: the slow, invisible stage where ideas settle, combine, dissolve, rearrange, and form into something new. When we rush from task to task, meeting to meeting, screen to screen, this essential stage simply doesn’t happen. The mind becomes a conveyor belt rather than a workshop.

When everything is urgent, nothing creative survives.

Doing too much, too fast, leaves you mentally full but imaginatively empty. The schedule dominates, and the reflective, drifting, associative thinking (the kind that leads to new insights) is pushed to the margins.

To protect creativity, you must slow down on purpose. Leave gaps in your day. Walk without purpose. Allow thoughts to wander. Only then can the mind begin its quiet work, the work that speed will never allow.

Nurturing Creativity

Creativity is not a rare gift. It is a practice that grows when we give it space. Slow down, embrace boredom, tend to your inner world, and let ideas unfold without pressure. By choosing curiosity over convenience and practice over talent, we reclaim the imagination that makes both life and work richer, bolder, and unexpectedly alive.

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