Creative Work Boosts Mood Today, But Heavy Creatives Feel A Next-Day Dip

Artists, musicians, and writers spend their days doing what they love, so it stands to reason they’d be happier for it. And largely, they are. But a study tracking people’s daily moods found that for people who live and breathe creative work, a highly creative day tends to produce a small but reliable increase in negative emotions the very next morning.

Researchers are calling it a “creative hangover.” The more seriously someone takes their creative life, the more likely they are to feel it.

Published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, the study tracked 355 adults over nearly two weeks, collecting daily reports on how creative each person had been and how they were feeling. On the day of creative work, just about everyone felt better. The differences showed up the morning after.

How Researchers Tracked Creativity and Daily Well-Being

Participants fell into two groups. High-engagement creatives, numbering 202, were people who earned income from creative work, formally studied a creative discipline, or devoted at least 20 hours a week to a serious creative hobby, spanning fields like visual arts, music, writing, dance, and design. The other 153 participants engaged with creative activities at a more casual level.

Each day, everyone completed a brief survey rating how creative they had been and how they were feeling across several dimensions of well-being: things like positive emotions, that absorbed in-the-zone feeling, sense of purpose, social connection, and sense of accomplishment. They also rated negative emotions separately. After removing participants who completed fewer than six of the 13 daily surveys, the dataset included more than 3,700 individual responses.

Creative People Start With a Happiness Advantage

Before looking at daily fluctuations, researchers found that high-engagement creatives reported higher overall well-being from the outset. They scored notably higher on engagement, relationships, and sense of meaning at baseline. People who organize their lives around creative work tend to feel more absorbed in what they’re doing, more connected to others, and more purposeful as a default state.

That part is not entirely surprising, but what happened the next morning was unexpected.

The Creative Hangover Is Real

On days when anyone reported more creativity than usual, they reported higher positive emotions, stronger sense of accomplishment, and lower negative emotions. That same-day mood lift was consistent across both groups, casual creatives and dedicated ones alike. Doing something creative, regardless of how serious a person is about it, appears to be good for the mind in the short term.

But cross-day patterns told a different story. For casual creatives, a productive creative day was linked to a boost in positive emotions and stronger social connection the following morning. Someone who paints on weekends or occasionally journals carried that good feeling into the next day.

For high-engagement creatives, that next-day boost simply did not appear. Instead, more creativity today predicted more negative emotions tomorrow. The authors suggest several possible explanations for this “creative hangover.” At a professional or high-engagement level, creative work requires sustained mental effort, ongoing self-regulation, and the emotional weight of managing frustration, pushing through obstacles, and continuously revising one’s approach. That kind of intensity may leave people feeling depleted the next day.

Importantly, this wasn’t a crash in overall happiness. High-engagement creatives still reported higher baseline well-being than casual creatives throughout the study. The shift showed up specifically as a modest bump in next-day negative emotions. High-engagement creatives also tend to hold themselves to demanding standards, and the gap between creative aspirations and daily output can sting. The authors also note prior research linking intense creative effort to dopamine depletion, though this study did not directly measure brain chemistry.

When Negative Emotions Actually Fuel Creative Output

Another unexpected finding emerged when researchers flipped the question: did how someone felt today predict how creative they would be tomorrow?

For casual creatives, yes, but in a direction nobody expected. Feeling worse today actually predicted more creativity the next day. Researchers suggest this may reflect emotion regulation at work. When people who don’t center their lives around creative work are struggling emotionally, they may reach for a creative outlet as a way to cope. Painting, writing, cooking something new, these become tools for feeling better rather than professional demands.

For high-engagement creatives, daily emotional fluctuations had no meaningful effect on the next day’s output. They showed up and worked regardless of how they felt. Their creative engagement wasn’t being steered by their mood.

What the Creativity-Well-Being Link Means for Mental Health

The split between these two groups matters for anyone interested in mental health and well-being. Creative activities have earned a strong reputation as mood-boosters, and for most people engaging casually, that reputation holds up. But the assumption that more creativity always means more well-being gets complicated when creativity is already the center of someone’s life.

That said, the study does not paint a bleak picture for dedicated creatives. Their baseline well-being was higher than average, and the same-day rewards of creative engagement were just as real for them. The emotional cost appears tied specifically to what follows a demanding creative day, not to the creative life itself.

For people whose days revolve around making things, the rough morning after a deeply creative session may simply be part of the territory.

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Disclaimer: This study is observational and relies on self-reported data. It cannot establish cause and effect. Findings may not apply to all populations. People experiencing persistent negative emotions or mental health concerns should consult a qualified healthcare provider.

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