Call it what you want, writer's block, artistic impotence or a bad mood, an artist's inability to work is often no more than simple anxiety.

Having dealt with it myself, I've formulated an analogy for how anxiety takes over my ability to create.

It feels like a balloon in my mind, one that crowds out or smothers the ability to move forward. It takes over until all you are doing is living with the anxiety. For some reason, my anxiety balloon is orange.

So overwhelmed, the artist can sometimes barely do anything besides laundry or washing the car - any distraction besides the real work which your anxiety dissuades you from approaching.

I've read that writer's block is usually a case of expectations set too high, resulting in paralysis that comes from feeling unable to meet unreasonable standards.

So one way to deflate artistic anxiety is to start small - to determine, let's say, that you are going to write 500 words, or practice the violin for 15 minutes. Once you get started, it usually follows that you are more centered in a proactive mindset, rather than paralysis.

My new website is a good case in point. I actually put it off for a couple of weeks, unable to figure out how to make it perfect.

The first time out? Ridiculous, of course. So I launched, with a couple of things not perfect, but now I'm tweaking it here and there, and am quite happy with how it's going.

Another way to deal with artistic anxiety is to clearly identify it for what it is - and then keep an eye out for when it starts to inflate. And then, deal with it as soon as it appears, either by talking yourself through it, or getting to work.

While I haven't tried it myself, it might be fun to visualize said orange balloon and also to imagine deflating it, maybe even kicking or batting it around a bit. Since this just occurred to me, and I'm laughing while writing this, I'll give it a go and report back.