Creatively Burned Out? Helpful Tools for a Reset
Creative burnout sometimes feels inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be. Or, if we do arrive here, it’s a place we don’t need to stay too long. With the right tools, we can crawl out, on our hands and knees if necessary, into the sunlight. Sometimes these periods are influenced by external factors (like a demanding book launch or a global pandemic) and other times it’s the culmination of burning the candle at both ends for longer than your system is able to manage. I sometimes refer to this as The Season of Discontent, and find it’s almost always marked by one defining trait: blaming outside forces for your inability to create.
Discontent, Defined
You might be in a season of discontent or creative burnout when you feel like things outside of your control are impacting your ability to make progress in your writing life. You might find yourself pulled to doing a lot of venting, complaining, blaming, generally feeling frustrated about your day-to-day circumstances, and at the worst, just not seeing a path forward and harboring a deep sense of resentment. While it’s healthy to name and make space for these feelings, it’s not something we want to stew in long-term without supporting ourselves to move from one season to the next.
Now, in a pandemic world, there’s another name for the season of discontent which is… burnout. And we’ll get to that a bit later on, but first I wanted to share a story of a pre-covid season of discontent I experienced, and how I got myself out of it.
The Story Behind “Writing in the Margins”
Just before I started writing my first book, I was deep in a period of creative burnout, though I didn’t have the language to name it back then. I had a job that I mostly enjoyed, but the organization I worked for had recently relocated, leaving me with a very long commute. Before this happened, I lived a little over a mile from my office and my commute was only 10 minutes in the car, and some days I even walked to work. Now, I was driving two hours round-trip, or more when there was extra traffic. This eventually started taking a toll on my body and mind, and became a new constraint I needed to navigate. When I finally realized I needed to find my way out, I unknowingly developed a strategy for emerging from creative burnout.
It always starts with looking around. Notice your circumstance. Name what’s hard. Then, make choices based on your reality, not what your ideal writing day looks like.
I’ve found I make the most progress when I focus on what’s right in front of me. Something I always say is you can write a book in 10 minutes a day. If that’s your dream, it’s not insurmountable, we just have to shift what we’re able to control.
So that’s what I did.
My goal at that time was to start working on my manuscript. Even though I didn’t have a book deal and it was still a year or two away, I knew this was my window of opportunity to start writing. I did two things that were immediately helpful. First, I reclaimed my lunch break for writing. Sometimes I went to my car, or a coffee shop. Eventually, I was very lucky to have an office and I just closed it and pulled out my laptop to work.
Second, I utilized my commute to my advantage. I had a thick stack of poems I was considering using for the cookbook, and every morning before starting off, I pulled one out and read it. During the drive, I did a lot of thinking work. I considered the ingredients mentioned, what recipes I might make, and what stories I could tell in the headnotes. When I arrived at the parking lot, I flipped the page over and scribbled down all the notes all I could remember. This was essentially my first draft.
After a few months of this, I remember so clearly sitting down to work on the book one Saturday afternoon. I opened the file for one of my chapters and realized I actually had a chapter. It was messy and still needed a lot of work, but slowly adding to it over the past few months meant that I could see a way through. I was making enough progress to propel me forward, and that’s when my concept of “writing in the margins” really solidified.
I remember there was a moment where maybe a few months had passed of doing this and it was a weekend so I had time and I was sitting down to to you work on the book, and I remember opening one of my files for a chapters and I just was scrolling and looking at it and I realized omigosh, I have a chapter. It was messy and still needed a lot of work and of course it wasn't finished, but I had been slowly adding to it over my over those months and I could see it… there was a shape and I was making progress and that was enough to just propel me forward to keep doing what I was doing, and that’s when my idea of “writing in the margins” really solidified.
Creative Burnout During the Pandemic
My second book came out six months before the global pandemic began in 2020. Suddenly, everything I’d written about in terms of making space for writing and embracing seasonal creative living was put to the test in a way I never could have foreseen. For years, there was a familiar push and pull. A pandemic is probably the most extreme of a period that’s utterly out of our control, and put constraints on our time and energy that most of us hadn’t experienced before.
After moving through the initial period of shock and survival, I had to figure out new routines and systems. How could I work with a child at home 24/7? The first thing I did was pulled down an empty journal from the shelf. Initially, I just needed a place to sort out my feeling and write down some observations, but this ritual became an anchor to my evenings when the day felt quite chaotic.
Then, poetry grabbed hold of me. And very specifically, haiku. My attention span couldn’t extend to an entire poem the length of a page. But three lines and seventeen syllables? That was one very small thing I could do. I wrote haiku for months. I wrote at night before going to bed. I wrote when I took the dog outside in the afternoon. The lines just started coming to me, and it felt like this small gift in the midst of all the chaos. I even hosted a couple of haiku challenges on Instagram, and started reading a few books about haiku. Something important back then was recognizing that the work didn’t need to become anything. It was purely for me. That can sometimes be an important aspect to returning to yourself in a nourishing way is simply removing the sense of obligation.
The 3 Components of Burnout
In Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by sisters Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, they define burnout as having three components
Emotional exhaustion – the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long
Depersonalization - the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion, and
Decreased sense of accomplishment: an unconquerable sense of futility, feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.
How to Heal From Creative Burnout—6 Supportive Ideas
If you recognize yourself in a space of creative burnout, it’s important to take care and explore root causes. That might mean getting to know your nervous system a bit better, or working with a practitioner or therapist. But to support your creative life, here are some places to start.
Acknowledge where you are. Just recognizing that you’re in a place where you might feel burned out, creatively or otherwise, is an important, compassionate step in the process. If you’re a highly sensitive person or are more introverted, you may feel these effects more deeply than the average person. This isn't something you can just bounce back from with the snap of a finger. Reconnecting to those parts of yourself that have been temporarily abandoned, like your writing life, will take time. If you take away nothing else from this post, please know that what you’re experiencing is normal. And know that your own pace is completely fine and right on time.
Take care of yourself. This is a really broad category and will mean different things to different people—in fact we could probably do an entire series on this isn’t the only thing to be said on the topic but if you recognize the signs of burnout in your mind and body, to any degree, it’s important to take intentional steps to support yourself in the ways that feel best for you because ultimately your creative fuel stems from your body and mind functioning well.
Be prepared for it to take some time. Healing from burnout is not a quick fix type of experience. In our instant gratification culture, it can be difficult to remember that healing takes as long as it takes, and it might involve trial and error, figuring out what works for you and what you truly need. You might also find that tending to your needs means less time for writing. This might be true initially, but in my experience, I’ve found that when I address the root causes of not feeling my best, it often makes more room for creativity down the road.
Get clear on what you most want to work on right now. Some of you might know immediately what that project is, and that’s fine. But when you have just a general sense of creative frustration, it can be easier to spin your wheels and stay in that negative headspace longer unless you decide what’s most important. Take some time to think through what’s most important right now. What story is most urgent for you, that will help you narrow it down so when you do find those pockets of time, you’ll be able to utilize them more effectively.
Find your margins. I have an exercise for this inside WILD WORDS, but the general idea is to look at your day and find those little pockets of time that you can utilize. You might not have a two-hour window to sit down and write. You might have 30 minutes sitting in the car before picking up your kids from school. You might be someone who enjoys getting up a little bit earlier in the day. You might be able to walk to a park nearby and sit with a notebook for 15 minutes. You might be sitting next to your kid while they’re on Zoom, and bring a notebook in with you, or print out a few pages to edit. Writing in the margins, I find, works best not only when you embrace those smaller pockets of time that might feel less ideal than what you’re used to, but also when you believe that all the 5 minute and 10 minute writing sessions will actually add up to something. Because they absolutely will, and when you see that start to happen, it’s such an amazing feeling.
Embrace a mindset of reevaluation. A sustainable writing life is not one where you find a routine and stay there forever. It’s a dynamic, living thing that’s informed by the ebbs and flows of your life as well as the ebbs and flows of your creativity. Once I come up with a new set of routines and things to try, I like to check in regularly, maybe weekly at the beginning, and then monthly, to see how it’s working. This doesn’t need to be a formal thing or take a lot of time, but just be mindful that what’s working today, or what works for three months, might need to be adjusted later on. When you have a flexible mindset, you’ll find it’s easier to make those shifts when you need it, and give yourself a lot of grace when things change.
I hope you’ve taken away a few ideas to help make this transitional period a little bit easier.
