Every artist knows the feeling of emptiness that follows the completion of a project. You can’t imagine doing it again, but you also can’t imagine leaving art behind. A newly published study led by kailesmith in The Journal of Positive Psychology now has a name for this sort of artistic whiplash: “creative hangover.” Researchers split study participants into two groups: creative practitioners (people who earn income from creative work, formally study a creative discipline, or devote over 20 weekly hours to serious creative hobbies) and comparison participants (individuals who engage in creative activities at more typical levels). They found that professional artists tend to experience negative emotions the morning after their most creative days, even though creativity, while in the process of making art, reliably improves their moment-to-moment feeling states. Meanwhile, the comparison group experienced “lower intensity and less frequent sustained creative demands,” since they’re crea...