◆ THE NEW CHAPTER · 2026-09-28

Regulating Your Nervous System to Do Better Creative Work

There is a version of me that sits down to do creative work while carrying the full weight of whatever is happening. Inbox loaded, mind racing, still half-inside the last conversation. And I have learned, slowly and painfully, that the work I produce from that place is almost never the work I actually want.

It is not a willpower problem. It is a physiology problem. When your nervous system is in a threat state, your brain is doing exactly what it is supposed to do: scanning for danger, running fast loops, prioritizing survival over exploration. That is not the creative mode. That is the opposite of the creative mode. You cannot force insight out of a panicked body. The ideas do not live there.

The Years of Running Hot

I spent a long time running hot. Building ArtResin from a small idea into a company people all over the world actually used, and then navigating an exit in 2024, meant living inside sustained pressure for years. Some of that pressure was exciting. A lot of it was just stress. And I watched my creative output suffer during the worst of it, not because I lacked ideas, but because I could not settle enough to let them surface.

I have been a lifelong artist. Making things with my hands is not a hobby for me, it is something closer to a baseline need. But during the most intense stretches of building a company, I would sit down to draw or design and find that the part of me that does that well was simply not available. The signal was there, somewhere underneath, but I could not get quiet enough to receive it.

That gap between having creative capacity and being able to access it is worth taking seriously. It is not a character flaw. It is a state problem.

Getting on the Mats Changes Everything

One of the clearest lessons I have ever gotten about nervous system regulation came from Jiu Jitsu. I train at Valeo Performance Lab, and getting on the mats is one of the most reliable resets I have found. Not because it is relaxing (it is not), but because it demands complete presence. When someone is trying to submit you, you are not thinking about your inbox. You are not replaying a difficult conversation. You are just there, in your body, fully occupied.

That kind of forced presence does something. By the time I am done training, the mental noise has been physically moved through. I walk out lighter. And I have noticed, repeatedly, that the creative work I do in the hours after training is often my best. The connection is not subtle. It is obvious enough that I plan around it now.

I wrote more about what Jiu Jitsu has taught me on the business and creative side over at this piece on the site, if you want to go deeper on that thread.

Hands-On Making as a Reset

Movement is one way in. Making things with your hands is another. I have come back to this again and again. When I am stuck or scattered, opening a sketchbook and drawing something without an agenda, or working with actual physical materials, pulls me out of my head and into my body in a way that is different from just going for a walk (though that works too).

There is something about tactile making that is intrinsically regulating. It is slow, it is sensory, it requires just enough attention to crowd out the spinning thoughts without demanding the kind of high-level cognitive work that suffers when you are dysregulated. You come out the other side of an hour of hands-on making in a different state. Calmer. More available.

This is one of the reasons I never fully let go of art as a practice even during the most demanding business years. It was not just creative expression. It was maintenance.

State First, Work Second

I am not suggesting a rigid protocol here. I am not big on those, and I am definitely not qualified to give anyone medical advice. What I am describing is something I have noticed experientially, across a lot of years of creative and business work: the quality of what I make is tied directly to the state I am in when I sit down to make it.

So now, instead of just forcing myself to the desk and grinding through dysregulation, I try to do something first. Get on the mats. Make something with my hands. Move my body in some way that requires presence. Let the noise settle before I ask my brain to do something subtle and original.

It sounds simple, and honestly it kind of is. But simple is not the same as easy, especially when you are used to treating creative work like another task to muscle through. The shift is learning to respect the state you are in as a real input, not a soft excuse.

You can learn more about where I am now and the kind of work I do on the other side of that company exit over at davidzak.com. And if you want the fuller picture of who I am and how I got here, the bio page lays it out.

The nervous system is not separate from the creative work. It is the ground the creative work grows in. Treat it accordingly.

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