In today’s fast-paced world where you are expected to produce your creative work continuously without a break, it can become difficult to create quality work and fall victim to creative burnout, a situation where you just don’t know anymore how to do that thing again which you once loved. In this post, I will share how you can avoid creative burnout and keep up the creative life energy within your heart.
What is Creative Burnout:
Creative burnout is a situation in which you no longer feel creative enough. You find your creative energy becoming weak each day and you no longer can produce satisfying work. As people who are making a living in this world through our creativity and spirit, we often find ourselves not being able to produce the type of work we are proud of. The world which prioritizes instant results and gratification, it becomes difficult for the body to cope.
As a content writer, there are times when I can write the whole day not being aware of the time, but there are other days as well when I just cannot seem to keep up my spirits to write a good paragraph. The days where I feel as though this paragraph is just not worth being written, the days where the words just don’t flow. Have you ever felt this?
This type of situation where you just don’t feel creative enough, where you think you lost the skill that you loved doing before is what we call “creative burnout”.
Reasons for Creative Burnout:
There can be a lot of different reasons for creative burnout to happen for someone. From not getting enough sleep to having some problems in personal life, many things can cause someone to not be able to be creative. But some reasons that are common to most people are described below:
Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines:
What creativity meant to us when we were young:
When we are young, we love to do creative activities. Kids become happy when the teacher gives them time to draw after their usual mathematics, science, history, etc, classes. When studying science, mathematics, and history, the student is grasping information, learning information, and taking in information. It is only when the teacher or parents give freedom to the child to write, draw, sing, and play whatever they want, they express themselves. By indulging in activities that make us express ourselves and be creative, we find joy and meaning.
So as children and teens, we loved to write, draw, and sing because that made us happy. We did creative things for the sake of doing them only. But as we stepped outside our homes and into the world of businesses and corporate we started to associate our creativity not with joy but with the economic growth of others.
What being creative means now:
Because now we are using our creativity to make a living, it is the outside forces that dictate how we should be creative, how much we should write (for writers), when we should write, and so on. Also, as the trends change quickly in our world, we are expected to create content with a speed much greater than that. Not being able to produce content on time means lagging and missing out on opportunities to make more profits for the companies and us.
But trying to produce work continuously soon drains out one’s creative spirit and falls victim to creative burnout.
Perfectionism:
When we were young, we took our time to complete our projects. We were satisfied with it most of the time because we were doing it for ourselves and no other people to see and judge. But when we are trying to make money from our creative talents, we rely on other people’s feedback and their views on our work. We want them to feel what we feel about our work. That is why we try to perfect our work as much as we can. We make sure we do our best in every piece of work we produce.
But this tendency to always strive to achieve perfection can also make one lose their creativity, as there is already so much pressure to submit your work on time. And if you delay your work submission, it already becomes a bad thing in the eyes of the supervisors that the next time to sit to create you feel stuck and don’t know where to start.
We want to produce work that is just “perfect”. But as the clock ticks, our submission date comes closer, and we have to submit our less-than-perfect work. This makes us kind of freeze and your creativity becomes weaker.
Stress:
We can lose our creativity when we are in stress. There can be many situations in our lives that can make us feel stressed. Problems in relationships at work or home, financial issues, health issues, lack of sleep, poor diet, all these things can make one feel stressed. And when we become stressed, it becomes difficult to do the creative work.
So, we can say, that physical and emotional stress is one of the most common reasons that makes one feel like they are not able to do any creative work.
Not getting recognition:
Many creatives can relate to this that many times employers and clients fail to recognize the value and depth of their work. Situations like when a client accepts your work and never publishes it, can make you feel not appreciated enough and lead to lesser creativity next time.
The world where slowing down and taking time to produce a good creative work can seem as being lazy, it gets hard to produce good work.
Tips to avoid Creative Burnout:
1. Take breaks: take breaks whenever possible. Just stop thinking about doing that work and do other things that make you happy.
2. Don’t feel bad when it gets difficult to create: There will be times when you feel a weak sense of creativity but that is okay. Do not beat yourself for it and soon you will start to feel creative again. Most of the time, this lack of creativity will be short-lived and you will be able to do your work again.
3. Comparison: Avoid comparing yourself with others and know that their journey is different from yours.
4. Eat good sleep good: Make a habit of sleeping on time and waking up on time. Also try to avoid junk and processed food, and eat more and more healthy foods.
5. Monitor what information/content you consume: It is also important to manage what information you feed your brain. Taking in trash content can make you lose your inspiration and deplete your creativity levels. So, try to manage and monitor what information you consume.
Thank you for reading.
Also Read: How to deal with stress and avoid burnout at work.
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