Creativity & self-reflective thoughts.

As an assignment for one of my courses at school I had to write a review of an empirical journal. I was free of choice to pick whatever I wanted, and therefore had a great opportunity to write about something I find interesting.

The journal was about the links between depression, self-reflective rumination and creativity.

There were some great points about how and what self-reflective thoughts(introspection) etc actually are. E.g it's usual in most science literature about psychology that rumination is something bad linked to depression, and there's alot quite alot of studies trying to figure out if there's a valid link between being depressed and being creative.

The main arguments for creativity and depression having nothing in common is that the sympoms of depression aren very fruitful for creativity. It's pretty common knowledge that someone who's tired all the time, doesnt care about anything etc would produce a whole lot. But still there's some correlation between creativity and depression. - Hence creativity and depression has to have something in common most of the times. The hypothesis as said in this journal is that it's selfreflective rumination. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/emo52226.pdf

As Nolen-Hoeksema (1991) says, self-reflective rumination might not be characterized as a symptom of depression, but rather as a style of thought.

What this means is that you can have a self-reflective style of thought, and still not be negatively focused. I think many people might get professional help, or read self-help books where there's quite alot about the self-reflective rumination (There's different words for the same thing, e.g some people may describe it as self-worrying, overly worrying. etc.)

Anyways, instead of maybe tryin' to exclude this kind of thinking, it might be better to just alter it, focusing in a slightly more positive way, rather than trying to terminate the whole behavior.
After all, if it's the key for creativity; Why'd you wanna lose it?