How To Fuel Creativity, Find Balance and Stay Inspired

Positive Creativity, the idea that design can connect people, foster wellbeing and support planet-positive choices, is what creative director Emmi Salonen centres her work on; a philosophy she has honed following 20 years of running her London-based Studio Emmi. The following is an extract from new book The Creative Wellbeing Handbook: How to fuel creativity, find balance and stay inspired (BIS Publishers, November 2025) and is printed with permission from the publisher.

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I’m a designer, a nature lover and a traveller. I love stationery, plants and spotting how the sky blue of my jumper perfectly complements my morning coffee mug. I’m at my happiest when I’m playing around with things I gather in the forest and losing myself in dance. I can spend hours chatting about life with someone I’ve just met, or staring at the light falling through a sunlit tree.

Like all of us, I am many things. But there was a point in my life when I lost touch with a lot of who I was, and what brought me joy. I was burned out.

From the outside, my career had all the hallmarks of success. I was channelling my creativity into work that mattered, and getting the opportunity to work on a constant stream of varied, intellectually stimulating projects. But I started noticing a new level of exhaustion after work each day. I stopped seeing my friends and started 
neglecting exercise. Over weeks that became months, I realised I felt increasingly unwell. More worryingly to me, I realised that I no longer wanted to create. The spark was gone – the thrill of new ideas felt like a distant memory. 

Frightened, I thought: If I’m no longer a creative, who am I?

Answering this question took me all over the world – and, eventually, right back to my design studio. Happily, creativity is a flame that can be diminished, but not extinguished.

Finding balance
The answers began revealing themselves to me on a long solo trip that I took to connect with and learn from creative people in different places, from different cultures. My journey across continents took me to unfamiliar landscapes – to the volcanic Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, where it takes only a small leap of imagination to see dinosaurs roaming; on a pilgrimage to Shashamane in Ethiopia; to the striking Pink Sea of Colombia; and to Norway’s turquoise Arctic waters.

One hot day, I cycled to the edge of Fakarava, a Polynesian atoll where the ground is made of dead white coral but life below the water is fluorescent, lush, magical. I couldn’t be further from my London home, the safe familiarity of the friends and cafés and grey streets that I know. I sat down, and I listened. First the wind told me its business, then the slow waves lapped their thoughts. The sky was quiet and the flora still.

Then, I heard a question I hadn’t asked of myself before: 

How are you?

My reply: I’m not ok.

Why is that?

My answer: I have not given myself what I need to keep going.

It was a simple opening to a conversation that continues to this day. What it revealed to me was profound – that I had lost touch with what I needed, and forgotten to give it to myself. 

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I am fortunate to have grown up among the vast green forests of Finland. Childhood summers were spent tucked away in a hidden cabin, with no running water. Days started with shared family chores: chopping wood for the sauna, pumping water and picking wild blueberries for breakfast. Then I would venture into the archipelago woods – discovering its creatures, listening to its sounds. The evenings brought ‘white nights’ that never saw the sun leave the sky. 

In winter, we experienced the opposite – long, dark days marked only by the sun’s quick visit to the horizon. Dark, light; snow, sun; hibernating, awake. Stark seasons like Finland’s are a reminder of how nature finds balance, even in contrasts. It was this balance that I had lost.

My solo journey took me back to the Finnish archipelago forests, where I spent weeks at a time exploring my home, seeking the unfamiliar in the familiar. I noticed how mushrooms had sprung from fallen pine trunks, breaking them down to nourish the forest floor, where wood mice foraged for food in the blankets of moss (and one poor soul, panicking at my approach, scampered over my toe!). A woodpecker pecked at a pine cone, gathering seeds and scattering the forest’s future. I saw that nothing lives in isolation, rather, every creature depends on many others for food, shelter, procreation. Each being takes, and gives. 

I realised that creativity, too, exists as part of a bigger web. It is a force that can feed us, but must also be fed. 

The Creative Ecosystem model
I began to form a new concept: the personal Creative Ecosystem. What inputs does a creative person need to keep their ecosystem in balance? What support, resources and opportunities will feed them?

It is these questions that this book explores, and helps you answer for yourself. For creatives, the demand for output can be constant. It’s not often that we take the time to pause and give ourselves the inputs we need.

​​The Creative Ecosystem model is a way to think about what balance looks like for you. It covers five areas that act as fuel for creativity: Connection, Wonder, Pause, Movement, Joy.

The experience of each of these – their source, their importance, their availability – is as unique as your creativity. Which is why, in this book, you’ll have the opportunity to explore each idea in a way that is personal to you. I’ll walk you through prompts and exercises that will help you map out your Creative Ecosystem, and guide you to activate it in your own life.

Inner joy
I’ve found my happy place. It’s not a sandy beach, or a spa, or even the island in the Finnish archipelago I talk so much about. It’s actually not a place at all: it’s anywhere that I’ve got the time and space to play and create. I take my happy place with me – to the forest, where I photograph mosses up close; to the shoreline, where I scout for shells and corals to sketch; to my home studio, where I cut shapes out of coloured paper and get excited when the forms accidentally become complementary.

My happy place just calls for a window of time and a material to create with. There’s no room for self-doubt or scrutiny, only the simple pursuit of curiosity, for its own sake. If the outcome is pleasing, that’s a bonus – but it’s not the point. 

Being in this place gives me access to joy, a feeling that is both a reward and a guide. Because moments of joy give us clues: they tell us about what we like, what motivates us, what feels fulfilling. What keeps our Creative Ecosystem wheel turning.

In a world that has taught us to obsess over results and achievements, the act of creating purely for joy can feel like swimming against the current. But it’s worth doing. 

If you don’t know where to start, try the exercise below. When you do, notice 
how the experience of joy ripples into other parts of your day. 

Activity: Unearth joy by revisiting activities you once loved
List up to five of your favourite things to do when you were little, before you were 13 
years old. During these activities, you’d be so completely engaged that you lost track of time and awareness of yourself. They could be anything – building with blocks, making up stories or playing an instrument.

How could you do a version of the same activity today, or this week?

The Creative Wellbeing Handbook: How to fuel creativity, find balance and stay inspired by Emmi Salonen (November 2025, BIS Publishing)

Preorder before 1 November 2025 and receive an exclusive 40-minute soundscape, New Morning, New Page, recorded by Emmi in the very forest where the book was written. A restorative backdrop of birdsong for your next creative session. Receive your creative gift on the book’s website after ordering

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