No matter the scale of your artistic endeavours, creative burnout is a frustration that could impair your enjoyment in your craft. Here are some ways to prevent and cure it.

Imagine this — you’re on a roll. The story you’re writing? All the story beats are already set in your head, just waiting for a pen to hit paper. The painting you’ve half done? The concepts are already there, waiting for you to finish. You have a song you want to compose? You have the melody in your mind, just get the notes down.

Then you take a seat, and suddenly you have no idea what led you to the chair in the first place. Every word coming out of your fingertips feels wrong, brush strokes look off and can’t be fixed. The song you’ve written sounds rubbish. So you decide to take a break. But every time you try to come back to creating, there’s an anxious pit in your stomach; the little voice behind your mind tells you someone else can do and say things better than what you’re trying to do, what you are creating is an amateur version of what you want. 

What once gave you the joy to create is now stressing you out. What is happening? You, my friend, are experiencing creative burnout. Creative burnout can be different for everyone, creativity is subjective after all. For many people, it can come in the form of: self-doubt; unhealthy comparisons of your work with someone else’s; or even just noticing you’re feeling off and having difficulty getting yourself to do basic daily tasks. Statistically, surveys have found that 66 per cent of artists have suffered from burnout at least once.

While it might be difficult to tell the difference between a creative rut and a full burnout, the key difference is an overall feeling of shame, as though you aren’t good enough to be this stressed, and can never and should never create again. 

So why do you feel this way? Creative burnout can be boiled down to our personal view of what the project we are creating should look like — a perfectionism we can’t escape. For creatives, we have an intrinsic fear we’re not quite good enough, so we work harder and harder to perfect it. In the process of refining and perfecting, we lose perspective and our sense of self in the project, and ultimately make ourselves unhappy and exhausted because we feel as though we’ve wasted our time since we don’t feel satisfied with what’s being made.

Creative burnout is not a fatality, it’s an injury. So, now you are aware of the problem, how do we address it? Here are some methods you can practice to avoid and recover creative burnout.

1) Take a step back, Take care of yourself

If you are already at the stage of complete exhaustion, accept that you are burnt out. Denial only prolongs the suffering. Taking care of yourself is very crucial and often overlooked when you’re engrossed in your craft. 

Take a step back by fixing your overworked schedule, set some time for yourself. Oftentimes, when you take a walk outside and look at the grand scheme of things, you’ll come to find solutions and ideas to combat issues you’re facing when you can distance yourself from them.

Maybe you feel as though you’ve been creating too much of the same thing. Or you’re not progressing as fast as you’d like. It’s easy to overlook the bigger picture of how far you’ve come to be stuck where you are now. Take a look at old works, look at your growth. Go back to what inspired you to begin in the first place —starting back at the beginning is always a very good place to start.

Most importantly, the step back is important for you to decouple your identity from your creativity. You are defined by who you are and not what you create. 

2) Seek Support

When you’re burnt out, the last thing on your mind would be to reach out to someone else, but I implore you to do it! This is because a different person other than yourself can offer a fresh perspective on you and can look at your work objectively without your insecurities and feelings clouding your judgment. 

Talking to someone else who’s also working on creative projects would be extremely helpful. Chances are, they have gone through or are going through similar feelings for their craft. You are less alone than you think you are. With the internet, online communities on platforms such as discord, and Facebook groups are more than happy to help you through these difficult emotions. Through communicating your feelings and struggles out loud, you’ll come to realise what ideas might work and might not work. You’ll always be able to get through tough spells with a healthy support system, rather than just dealing with it by yourself.

3) Fill up the well

Think of creativity as a well. When a well is getting dry, it’s going to take some time to fill up before we can access it again. When you’re feeling burnt out, you can use the emotions you’re feeling to your advantage. This can be through banging out on music, listening to a thrilling podcast, or watching a sad movie.

Being mindful of how we fill up the well, through consumption and activity of others’ creative mediums and works can ease us back into our projects when we’re ready to step back in. For example, exploring someone else’s work by taking note of what you enjoy or don’t enjoy about their work. Or, we can find an outlet in a different medium —if you’re writing a novel set in a high fantasy setting, watch a movie set on earth to distance yourself from your craft.

If you’re dealing with burnout or stress, this could simply be because your creative well is empty. Taking a break from writing in order to refill the well is the most responsible thing you can do as a writer. Sometimes we just have to wait for the inspiration to find us.

— Keidi Keating (@Keidi_Keating) March 27, 2022

4) Under-promise, Over-deliver

As you slowly start easing yourself back into the creative process, you have to be mindful of ensuring you don’t burn yourself up as soon as you step back in. One way to do it is through the concept of “underpromise and overdeliver”. For example, instead of telling yourself, you’ll finish writing three chapters a day, give yourself deadlines of two pages a day. Any decision you make is better than no decision at all.

We have to remember perfection is an unachievable goal. In trying to achieve perfection, we wind up creating more anxiety and stress as a result. American Radio Producer Ira Glass speaks on this immaculately: As creative people, we have good taste. We will often feel as though there is a gap between what we create and what we perceive to be “good taste”, and the gap will never close up. But what you are feeling is normal, and it’s something we can get past as long as we are willing to put the work in.
The journey we as creatives take is a long one, but it’s important not to lose our sense of self in the process. I can tell you right off the bat this is not gonna be a quick and easy fix. But by being mindful of your thoughts and actions, this feeling of inadequacy will pass and you can continue to find joy in creating. So be brave, remember to take care of yourself, and go forth! I believe in you and your ability to create something amazing.