Many of us are constantly in need of …

Creativity can bring a lot of joy into our lives — if we let it. As we get older, unfortunately, many of us leave our favorite activities behind, forget to play and instead go through the motions. Wake up. Go to work. Run errands. Come home. Have dinner. Watch T.V. Go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

In The Book of Doing: Everyday Activities to Unlock Your Creativity and Joy, Allison Arden, publisher of Advertising Age, shares a slew of fun and playful ideas to reignite our creativity. More than that, her book shows us how to create and find joy in our everyday lives.

So what is “doing”? According to Arden, it’s anything and everything from creating, making, helping, experimenting, drawing, reading, playing, acting, cooking, tasting, celebrating and loving.

Here are 10 of my favorite ideas from her book. I hope you’ll try them!

Life is hard for everyone. That’s why it helps to have an assortment of tools to navigate life’s inevitable lows.

And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Russ Harris’s book The Reality Slap: Finding Peace and Fulfillment When Life Hurts. Harris is a psychotherapist and renowned expert in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The book is based on ACT’s principles.

The reality slap is a term that Harris uses to refer to life’s various lows, which include everything from losing a loved one to experiencing failure or envy.

According to Harris, after a reality slap strikes, we face another problem: “the reality gap.” The reality gap consists of two sides. One side is the reality we have; the other side is the reality we want.

The bigger the gap between these realities, the more painful our emotions.

Eating slowly is not my specialty — and I don’t think I’m alone.

It’s hard to tell where the habit to rapidly shovel food toward my mouth came from, but I think it may have something to do with 12 years of 20-minute school lunches. Twenty minutes to find a place to sit, buy food, talk with friends and eat a turkey sandwich was hardly enough time, and you couldn’t even take food to your next class (unless you were sneaky…something I’m pleading the fifth on). Those quickfire childhood lunches combined with five years of a career where I routinely eat at my desk have created a monster: sometimes I’m not even tasting my food as I eat it.

Mindful Eating is quite the buzz phrase here on PsychCentral, with many of our wonderful bloggers advocating for a new way to see and experience food. The benefits of mindful eating include: actually tasting what’s in your mouth, easier digestion, lowered consumption and a better relationship with food in general. When we take time to chew slowly and experience our meal without the interruption of television, work or even, at times, conversation, we are able to connect with our bodies on a much more intimate level.

“Too much stress is a creativity choker,” writes Gail McMeekin in her book, 12 Secrets of Highly Successful Women: A Portable Life Coach for Creative Women. But some days, doesn’t it seem like stress comes with the package of living? Like it stalks you as you walk from room to room, out the door to run your errands and back into the car again?

Some days, maybe even most days, the overwhelm sets in like a sweat-soaked stranger sitting oppressively close to you on the subway — suddenly, there’s not enough air, and it quickly gets unbearable. And that kind of state doesn’t exactly support your creativity.

While you can’t completely eliminate stress from your days, there are ways you can create a tranquil environment so you can focus on your craft — whatever that might be.

According to McMeekin, creativity thrives in tranquility. She writes, “Your inner peace and connection with your internal whims and spontaneity allow you to recreate the landscape of your mind and invent the new.”

Here are five ways from McMeekin’s book to promote inner peace and make creativity a priority.

Curious about creativity and how others innovate? “How I Create” is our monthly interview series, which strives to inspire by giving you a glimpse into other people’s creative processes.

We’ve already interviewed everyone from career coaches to authors to photographers.

This month, we’re talking with Tiffany Moore, a life and business coach and co-founder of Teahouse Studio, a workshop space in Berkeley, CA.

(You might remember Moore from her great advice in this creativity piece.)

Through her coaching and writing, Moore helps people transform their lives and find the magic within to live their most sparkly lives!

Stealing is not a crime — at least when you’re stealing ideas from a variety of artists. That’s the basis of Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. (A premise that he, of course, stole from other artists.)

In the book, Kleon shares unique insights on cultivating creativity.

Specifically, he presents the below 10 tips, which he created for a talk at a community college. They represent the things he wished he would’ve known when starting out.

Moving by the seat of our pants isn’t that helpful for efficiency. For one, rushing can mean making silly but time-consuming mistakes, like misplacing important items, locking your keys inside the house or glossing over errors at work.

And we might miss out on life altogether. “When things go too fast, we aren’t cognitively able to process the information, so a lot of our lives literally whizzes by,” according to Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7.

Below, Hohlbaum shares several helpful tips on slowing down and saving time.

Like adults, kids also get stressed out. They stress over school, bullies and fights with friends. They worry when their parents argue. They experience loneliness and have fears about many things from failing an important test to not fitting in.

In her book The Power of Your Child’s Imagination: How to Transform Stress and Anxiety into Joy and Success, child educational psychologist and UCLA professor Charlotte Reznick, Ph.D, shares nine tools that help kids access their inner world so they can better traverse the trials and tribulations of growing up.

Here’s a brief look at Reznick’s valuable tools.

Memorializing a hospital is no simple feat, and yet the most simple and elegant concepts are the most powerful. A perfect example is “Bloom.” Commissioned in 2003 for the closure of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, artist Anna Schuleit filled the hospital with 28,000 potted flowers, creating carpets of African violets and daisies in hallways, waiting rooms, and annexes.

In a facility whose patients saw few visitors arrive with flowers, the statement is especially touching. Colossal features a great article with amazing photos from the exhibit.

Kids are natural innovators with powerful imaginations. And creativity offers a bounty of intellectual, emotional and even health benefits.

One study found that kids’ imaginations helped them cope better with pain. Creativity also helps kids be more confident, develop social skills, and learn better. Below, three experts share how parents can encourage their kids’ creativity.

1. Designate a space for creating. Carving out a space where your child can be creative is important, said Pam Allyn, executive director of Lit World and Lit Life and the author of many books, including Your Child’s Writing Life: How to Inspire Confidence, Creativity, and Skill at Every Age.

But this doesn’t mean having a fancy playroom. It could be a tiny corner with a sack of LEGOs or a box of your old clothes for playing dress-up, she said. Allyn has seen creativity flourish in the most cramped spaces, including the slums of Kenya. The key is for your child to feel like they have power over their space, she said.

Many of us couldn’t imagine our lives without books. We remember the books we read as kids and the books that were read to us. We remember our favorite quotes, our favorite characters.

We remember the books that became our friends, the ones that supported us through adolescent angst, first loves, breakups, friendship or family fiascoes, lonely days and other tough and joyful times.

We remember the books that gave us the inspiration to scribble quotes in our journals, to write stories and to follow our dreams.

Books have the power to open up perspectives, to take us places we otherwise wouldn’t be able to go.

Soaking in their words and fastening our own helps us express ourselves, communicate quality information to others and connect to the world. Words give us the strength and know-how to make smart decisions and chart our own lives.

Thankfully, for most of us, reading is as natural as seeing or speaking or brushing our teeth.

Unfortunately, for millions of people around the world reading isn’t any of these things. At least 793 million people worldwide can’t read and end up missing out on the sheer joy and valuable lessons and opportunities that reading brings.

That’s why I’m honored to share an important upcoming date with you along with an amazing organization.