How 90 minutes changed my life

Sorry for the clickbaity title, but it's actually true

I recently discovered that my studio sessions tend to happen in 90 minute cycles.

Almost like clockwork, after around 90 minutes I feel the energy and sense of forward momentum dropping, and my attention starts wandering. Sometimes I know 90 minutes must have passed because I find myself fiddling about on my phone, taking photos of my feet amongst the painting detritus on the floor, and then posting them to Instagram stories. If I’ve opened Instagram, it’s definitely been an hour and a half.

Turns out, 90 minutes is the length of the hormonal cycle in the body known as the Ultradian Rhythm.

Where the Circadian Rhythm resets every 24 hours, and Infradian Rhythms can be weekly, monthly, or annual cycles, the Ultradian Rhythm restarts every hour and a half.

I don’t generally feel the need for things in my life to be backed up by science, but in this case it was helpful because

a} the way I was managing studio time wasn’t working for me, and

b} I still had a bit of a hangover from shedding the belief that ‘everyone knows real artists would spend all day every day in the studio if they could’.

I’ve talked with enough artists by now to know that while that’s true for some, for many it isn’t. It’s one of a litany of cultural stories that artists contend with every day, which is fine if you happen to line up with those stories. If you don’t, and you haven’t yet developed the experience or the self awareness to see it for what it is {one arbitrary possibility}, being an artist can become more of an inner battleground than a joyful way of being a person.

In my case, I’m far too interested in all sorts of different ways of expressing myself creatively to tie myself to just one, all day every day.

But I also wasn’t getting as much painting done as I’d have liked.

So, armed with #science and my newfound awareness of how I naturally operate, I began factoring in 90 minutes of studio time throughout the working week, rather than allowing my painting sessions to be squeezed into the weekends, while teaching and general life things ate up the lion’s share of my work days.

And it really has changed everything.

More paintings are being completed, my new collection is coming together in a mostly very satisfying way, and having more frequent touch points with the work keeps the thread of connection to it going, so painting is overall easier. I don’t have to plough through the fog of ‘how do I do this again?’ each time. Staying in the flow is easier without long gaps.

And arguably most importantly: I feel better, in the way that actively making your thing makes you feel better.

All pretty obvious really, but that’s the thing about being inside yourself - you don’t always spot the obvious right away.

My work at its core - and really my ‘life theme’ as a whole - has revealed itself to be about cultivating what feels most aligned and true for you, and living it. Allowing yourself your place in the world and letting yourself expand into it.

This work {of course?} comes from a place of not living that way for a long and painful time. But after almost two decades of devotion to that cultivation of self into something True, and as fully self expressed as I can be at any given moment - and witnessing how that has enabled me to do work that supports others in their own unfurling - I know from lived experience that this is worthwhile work.

And it’s often developed in the apparently tiny details. Like noticing that your attention naturally ebbs after 90 minutes, and doing yourself the kindness of working with that knowledge instead of ignoring it, trying to force yourself to be other than you are, or shutting it down and pushing on through because of arbitrary external rules.

My main filter for exploring ideas and discovering life lessons is art - and many other kinds of creative expression that expand beyond the studio - but I do this noticing and adjusting all across my life all the time. I don’t think it’s something you ever finish doing; we are human beings, and beingness is always in motion.

Well, I thought this was going to be a wordless photo diary of a recent studio session, which is ironically apropos.

Apparently I forgot for a second there that when I’m being most myself {outside the studio}, I love words and ideas, and the mind bending pleasure of carving them into another kind of expression. And that I started this Substack because the bitesize nature of social media {not to mention everything else it comes with} does not honour who I naturally am. I like words, and I like a lot of them. So here we are.

See? I’m doing it all the time - forgetting and remembering; veering away and course correcting. Creating space to be just as I am right now, and allowing room to grow into myself the way a tree develops rings, or a dropped stone generates ripples in a pond.

And sometimes that looks like stopping after 90 minutes.