Experiencing Creative Burnout? Bounce Back With These 6 Tips

Jun 02, 2021

Creative burnout is a condition that business owners and craftsmen experience when they’re mentally drained. The usual symptoms include losing passion for their work and getting stuck not being able to finish their usual tasks.

You might think that you’re “beyond recovery”, but the truth is that anyone can bounce back from creative burnout. To start, you must stay hopeful and keep an open mind. Read until the end.

1. Identify your limitations and take advantage of them

They say that creative burnout happens when the demand of your career exceeds your available resources. Two good examples are time and focus. If you have a crammed schedule leaving little to nothing for creativity, you should set limitations on doing other less important tasks. This gives your creative mind more resources to function properly.

Avoid procrastination by setting a time limit on your phone or computer usage. That way, you’ll find it easy to practice good time management and do more.

2. Move on to something else

As much as we hate to admit it, creativity comes and goes. We cannot force our minds to be creative at will. Doing so will only exhaust our brains to the point that thinking about new concepts is impossible to do.

By doing something else, you allow the creative part of your head to rest. Once you return to your brainstorming session, that area of creativity is refreshed and will reach its peak to formulate new ideas and concepts. If you’re lucky, your mind can also take inspiration from a different task that it can use.

3. Take a break

For some people, doing something else won’t work. If you relate to this, you can choose to take a break instead. Creativity also comes from relaxation and plenty of people experience their “Eureka!” moments when their minds are wandering.

Here’s a good example: An app developer runs out of ideas for a new app and goes for a coffee break. The problem is that the shared working space he’s in doesn’t serve coffee and there are no coffee shops nearby. So he decides to buy water and sit under a tree instead.

Suddenly, he comes up with the idea of making an app that locates coffee shops. That new idea is totally out of nowhere and if the developer kept focusing on his brainstorming session, he wouldn’t have thought about it.

4. Say no to things that suck the creativity out of you

Aside from procrastination, there are plenty of other things that reduce the ability of your mind to be creative. They are stress, vices, and following trends. Stress comes from sleeping late or taking responsibilities that are more than you can handle.

Vices are excessive alcohol drinking, cigarette smoking, and drugs. These substances severely affect our brains. In terms of following trends, a creative person needs to always think outside the box. Adopting a herd mentality is a great hindrance to a person when formulating new concepts. As much as possible, avoid these things at all times or take some things like drinking moderately.

5. Go back to the basics

Knowing too much can get in your way of thinking creatively. Now, why is that? It’s because once you’re too knowledgeable of your craft, your thoughts tend to race and overthink. And that takes you nowhere. To fix this type of creative burnout, you need to go back to the basics of your work, adopt a step-by-step way of thinking, and progress slowly.

For example, if you’re a painter and have no idea for your next piece, go back to the basics of visual arts. Recall what you learned about the concepts of colors and strokes. This is a good way to imagine your next new painting before making the first draft.

6. Increase your skill level

On the contrary of knowing too much, you’ll also find it hard to be creative if you only have limited knowledge. Because how can you design something that’s curvy or round if you only know how to draw straight lines and shapes with multiple sides?

To up your craft, you need to keep on learning. That’s what life is about. It’s a never-ending learning process so be open-minded. Talk to your peers, colleagues, or attend seminars about your career. Ask for tips and strategies. Learn the secrets the experts use.

Once you do, you can combine basic, intermediate, advanced, and expert ideas to create something that’s new to this world.

All great ideas come from both brainstorming and daydreaming sessions. When conventional tactics no longer present beautiful concepts, try to adopt left-field strategies. The world doesn’t run out of ideas and solutions. What matters is that you have your will intact to face challenges - even if the challenge is yourself.

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