Fighting creative burnout in your career
Getting paid for your creativity really is the dream. You get to wake up every day and make money harnessing the inspiration around you, doing the things that make you feel happy and fulfilled. But, if you’re a career creative, you know that it’s not always as rosy as you may be lead to believe on social media and movies.
The main drawback: creative burnout.
Whether you’ve been at it for 30 years or 2 years, you’ve likely experienced some adverse side effects of being a career creative. Sometimes gratitude about getting to be creative at work turns into being stressed out that you have to be creative at work. Slogging through a project when you feel creatively tapped can be grueling and discouraging.
While the good far outweighs the bad most days, knowing how to minimize the possibility of creative burnout is a definite priority. It’s the best way to ensure that you keep the joy in your creative processes.
So let’s get into how to know if you’re experiencing burnout and how to avoid it. All of this makes it possible to build a sustainable creative career.
Disclaimer: decide if you really want to make creativity a part of your career
Sometimes, when we’re starting to feel burnt out, it’s an indicator that we’re not doing something that fills us up. So check in with yourself and determine whether this is a temporary burnout that you can overcome, or a sign that you should just keep your creative passion as a hobby.
There’s no shame in this — haven’t we all had a hobby that we ruined by trying to monetize it?
You may come to the conclusion that these problems won’t go away, and you need to re-route your career. This is a bigger task at hand, but I would recommend starting to find ways to keep work and your creative hobby separate.
My hope, though, is that you are in a space where you love what you do, you’re just running on fumes right now.
If that’s you, then keep reading!
You have your “dream” creative career but things are feeling a little off — how do you know if you’re experiencing creative burnout?
It’s a Monday and you’re tired and unmotivated to use your brain. Is that burnout?
Likely not. Burnout is a longer process that typically builds up over time. It usually doesn’t look like singular moments stifled by a lack of motivation. It may start that way, but eventually, it will lead to consistent difficulty getting your creative juices flowing if left unchecked.
Here are some signs to look for to identify creative burnout:
Procrastination (or increased procrastination if you’re already prone to this habit)
Dreading getting up in the morning to start work
Intense creative block
Irritability with coworkers, friends, family after or during a work session
Increased self-doubt and feelings of imposter syndrome
Consuming a lot more content than you’re creating, consistently
Increased physical exhaustion
An overall resentment of a creative process that used to bring you joy
What’s the difference between creative burnout and regular burnout?
It’s like a rectangle and a square; all creative burnout is burnout, but not all burnout is creative burnout. While creative burnout is underneath the overarching umbrella, it has more specific outcomes.
Regular exhaustion may lead to a lack of motivation, emotional distress, and exhaustion, someone experiencing creative burnout experiences all of this through the lens of creative productivity. They have the added stressor of being unable to consistently tap into their well of inspiration.
So you’re experiencing creative burnout — how do you deal with it?
The best way to deal with creative burnout is proactively.
Put safeguards in place before you reach burnout, or once you start to notice beginning symptoms. This can be done through intentional time blocking, saying no to work that doesn’t fill you up (if possible), establishing a healthier work-life balance, and staying in tune with what you love about your craft.
That being said, if you’re here, you may already be in the midst of creative burnout.
All hope is not lost!
There are plenty of ways that you can work to combat creative burnout once it’s already arrived.
Put a process behind your creativity
Sometimes the most stressful thing about creative careers is feeling like you need to generate magic every day. As if creativity is all about having a stroke of genius that seem to “magically” come out of nowhere.
But as one of my favorite podcasts about creativity (Creative Pep Talk) talks about, actual creative geniuses rely a lot on the processes they put in place. They identify where these moments of magic happen, and curate processes to nurture them. This is what creates sustainable creativity.
When you handle all of the logistics, you allow yourself to channel your energy into the fun, artistic work that fills you up.
Once you do this, you may find that it wasn’t the creative part that was draining you, it was actually all of the little details that distracted you from the parts you love.
Some tips to create processes:
The easiest first step to creating a more sustainable creative career is to break things down into smaller pieces. It’s well-known that breaking big, daunting tasks into separate little chunks makes them more approachable, doable, and less procrastinate-able.
So sit down and map out every step it takes to bring your project to life — whether that’s creating a video, launching a new art print, or writing a novel. And get granular.
This makes it easier to take it one step at a time. For written content, for example, this could include steps like topic selection, research, interviews, outlining, drafting, proofreading, design, landing page promotion, setting up the email nurture, and promotion. There may even be steps within those steps as well.
You can also use this to inform how you want to break your time down; you don’t necessarily have to work in a linear fashion. If you’re just not feeling very creative one day, pick up some of the logistical tasks. If you’re feeling inspired and ready to get in your creative flow, take on a couple of creative tasks.
Give yourself a break
You can’t process burnout away, though. Sometimes, you really just need to rest.
If your body is telling you that you need to stop, then stop. Your brain will not be at peak performance if it feels like it’s running uphill with the wind pushing it face.
Even if you’re only able to take a quick, 10-minute break to walk around or grab a coffee, take it and let yourself decompress as much as possible.
But give yourself a break emotionally as well.
Perfection is an unreasonable goal to chase in creativity; there is no such thing because it’s all so subjective. So don’t beat yourself up over anything you perceive as failure. Or for any times you can’t seem to muster your peak creative flow. It’s all part of the normal creative process.
Rediscover your passion
Sometimes the biggest cause of creative burnout is that we get so caught up in the pressure of creative output that we forget why we started doing it in the first place.
A great step towards resolving this is to reconnect with what first made you fall in love with your practice. Think back on the things you did, learned, thought, and consumed in those early moments.
Perhaps you’re a graphic designer, and you recall creating collages when you were younger as one of your first positive creative memories. Or you’re a videographer who grew up doing silly little interviews that no one ever watched but you loved creating them.
Find some way to recreate these moments or adapt them to a modern context.
And don’t feel compelled to monetize these projects. In fact, I would highly recommend against it so that you can really use this time to reconnect with your passion.
