Creative burnout

You are probably all too familiar with the dreaded creative block: sitting in front of your computer, your mind as blank as the page you are staring at, hoping that some miraculous burst of inspiration will suddenly rush through your fingers so you can finally get back into the flow.

You also know of the many techniques to deal with creative block. Find inspiration by changing your scenery—maybe going for a walk or packing your laptop to work from a cafe. Just writing whatever crosses your mind, even if it’s unrelated to the work at hand until your mind starts forming interesting connections. Talk to other creatives to brainstorm some ideas.

Experiencing a creative block is always inconvenient and stressful, but it is normally short-lived, and feeling occasionally stuck when working on a project is perfectly normal. Even if it may feel like an eternity, we soon end up finding a way to get our creative juices flowing. But sometimes, the problem runs much deeper.

Creative burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion around creative work. The symptoms can be hard to pinpoint, and the potential causes are many.

When the creativity tap runs dry

Because it’s normal for creativity to fluctuate depending on factors such as sleep and stress levels, creative burnout can easily fly under the radar—masking temporary procrastination, tiredness, or lack of motivation.

For people who genuinely care about their work and for those who rely on creative output as an emotional outlet, the insidious nature of creative burnout can have a devastating impact on their mental health: When you can’t seem to be able to produce any good creative work and you don’t know what’s wrong, you start blaming yourself.

So I put together a list of eight signs of creative burnout:

1. Procrastination. Putting off work for a couple of days because you don’t feel like you have enough mental energy is nothing to worry about. However, if you procrastinate for long periods of time and ignore important deadlines, it may be a sign of creative burnout.
2. Struggle to do basic work. Is your to-do list getting longer and longer, but you can’t bring yourself to check some easy tasks off it? Are you burying your head in the sand and neglecting the growing mountain of little things you ought to get off your plate? This may be another symptom.
3. Constant exhaustion. Sometimes, we don’t get enough sleep and feel sluggish the day after. That’s completely fine. But if the physical exhaustion is sustained over a long period of time despite a decent amount of sleep, you may be burning out.
4. Inexplicable stress. Creative work can be stressful. Deadlines, complicated projects with many moving parts, a pushy client… These factors can cause stress within the Goldilocks curve and remain manageable. But creative burnout may make you feel persistently stressed without being able to pinpoint the exact cause.
5. Unhealthy comparisons. We are more connected than ever, and many creators follow the work of fellow creators online. Some creators are more productive than others, and this productivity usually ebbs and flows. If you look at their output and can’t help but compare their productivity to yours in a negative way, you may be experiencing a symptom of creative burnout.
6. Unbalanced content consumption. As a creator, it’s vital to balance your levels of creative input and creative output. When we burn out, we often find ourselves scrolling endlessly and binging TV shows but not creating much work of our own.
7. Morning dread. Have you ever experienced that feeling of angst, a sense of doom where your mind is racing into the future, and everything seems bleak? Stressful times in our life can make us dread waking up. If this feeling persists, it may be a sign of creative burnout—or something even more serious.
8. Harmful habits. Eating unhealthy food or eating more than usual, abandoning your exercise routine, drinking more alcohol… If you are experiencing creative burnout, you may be coping through damaging mechanisms which will leave you feeling even worse.
9. Irritability. You may be feeling frustrated with your colleagues, annoyed with your spouse, or snappy at your kids. Being more temperamental than usual can be a symptom of creative burnout.
10. Self-doubt. Finally, you may also think that you will never be good enough, that your work is pointless, or that you lack the necessary imagination—despite having produced good creative work in the past and having received praise for it.

In isolation, most of these signs are harmless. However, if you have four symptoms or more, it may be time to shake things up.

Please note that if you are experiencing many of these signs, or even just one of these for a long time, it may be more serious than creative burnout. Many of these signs are also found in mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety disorders, and seasonal affective disorder, or could be caused by sleep problems. In doubt, it can be worth talking to a professional.

How to bounce back from creative burnout

Creative burnout can make us feel powerless. But we can use simple strategies to break the cycle:

• Get support. Because creative burnout impacts our work, our first instinct may be to hide our struggle from our colleagues. However, grabbing someone and telling them you are going through creative burnout can be immensely helpful. You will find that most people are more than happy to help, whether by giving you a hand with a project, brainstorming fresh ideas, or just lending an ear. Voicing your struggle is also a great first step in bouncing back from creative burnout.
• Take a break. Not just a short walk, which may be helpful for a creative block but probably not enough to help with creative burnout. Take a proper break—a few days off, with your out-of-office autoresponder on, where nobody will expect any work from you. Use the time to do things that have nothing to do with work without feeling any guilt: spend time with your loved ones, read books, take naps, cook, watch movies, go on a weekend holiday in the countryside, take care of your plants… Or just do nothing, that’s perfectly fine.
• Make space for self-reflection. Replace destructive existential angst with constructive self-reflection. It could take the form of journaling, discussing your struggle with a friend, or reviewing your current environment and schedule. Burnout can be hard to manage when we can’t pinpoint its exact source. Turn yourself into a self-experimenting scientist and try to uncover the roots of the problem.
• Look at your past work. Because creative burnout often comes with self-doubt, it’s easy to forget all our past accomplishments and focus on our present challenges instead. Browse your past work, both the good and the bad. If it’s good, remember how it wasn’t easy to produce. If it’s bad, look at how much progress you have made. Channel those feelings to fight your self-doubt.
• Start with the basics. Choose the smallest atomic unit of creative work you can do to get started again. Are you trying to write a book? Just write one paragraph. Trying to design a new website? Just work on one wireframe. Instead of looking at the mountain of work in front of you and feeling paralyzed, take your first baby step. And if you’re not ready yet, go back to the previous strategies.

Most of all, be kind to yourself. Creative burnout can stem from perfectionism, external pressure, high expectations, or hypersensitivity. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about your work; it doesn’t mean you are lazy; it doesn’t mean you are not talented. It’s a temporary state, not a permanent condition.

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