Three Practical Steps to Recover From Creative Burnout (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: So, your burn tap. The amount of work you need to do feels insurmountable, and the motivation and energy you need to get that work done is completely depleted. What now? When it comes to any sort of work, but especially creative work like making videos, burnout is a super easy trap to fall into. And we can get more into how to avoid burning out in the first place in another video, but for the purposes of this video, the damage has been done. Okay, you're already here. So, the question is, how do you get out of that funk and back into your routine? Psychologist and professor Christina Maslach developed a model on the three dimensions of burnout. Exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. So, if burnout has three distinct causes, it only makes sense that there are three distinct fixes to help you get out of it. And this one, in my opinion, is the most important because you can't really do the work to get back to your routine until this part is fixed. Now, in my experience, there are two main reasons why I tend to get exhausted with my work. One, I either just take on too much work and overextend myself, or two, I don't prioritize rest as much as I should. See, in the world of content creation especially, it's super easy to work as hard as you can to try and please an insatiable algorithm, and if you see any success in that, it tends to make you want to work even harder. Which is why it is vital, and I mean vital, when you are planning your content schedule that you are brutally honest with yourself on what you can realistically put out. I mean, brutally honest, not ideally, not we're gonna try for this, not I think I can do it if I do work hard, no, no, no, black and white honest on what you can do. And if that turns out to be less than you would prefer to do, yeah that sucks, but it's just gonna have to be less than what you prefer to do. Because you have to always, always remember when you're making videos that quantity and frequency are never, ever as important as quality and consistency. So you want to be focused on what you can healthily and realistically make with these two standards in mind. And as much as you might be tempted to, you should not go over what that number is. Now when it comes to rest, you have to be almost drill sergeant strict about it, especially if you're a workaholic. Because when things get a little busy, it's really easy to just sacrifice your free time in order to get things done. Because it's free time, I'm not doing anything anyways, I might as well keep working. But the more you borrow that time, the worse your burnout is gonna be, almost exponentially. You need to have rigid, strict time slots in your day that are dedicated for nothing but rest. That's right, a time where you're not editing, brainstorming ideas, thinking about thumbnails, looking at other videos for inspiration, nothing. You can spend that time laying down, staring at the ceiling for all I care. As long as what you're doing has nothing to do with work, you're golden. You gotta treat this time as serious, maybe even more so, than your actual work. It should be like, sacred to you. Because as painful as it might feel, a better rested you will always, always, always result in better work, and just, you know, overall a better life. Who doesn't want that? So take your rest seriously. It is a prescription from Dr. Marte to you.

[00:03:36] Speaker 2: 5.

[00:03:41] Speaker 1: This dimension of burnout revolves around essentially falling out of love with your work and losing your personal interest or investment in it. And fixing this is one of those easier said than done things, because it involves you reconnecting with why you started making videos and why you love it in the first place. Which as you can imagine, is pretty hard to do when you already feel burnt out. Now this is more of a personal thing, you know, I don't know why you started making videos or love making videos, so I don't know how you would tap into that. But when this happens to me, nothing gets me out of that apathetic space faster than feeling a huge tidal wave surge of creative inspiration. So this is when I actually take a complete and total step back from creating anything, and instead put all my effort and energy into ingesting. I watch a ton of movies either at home or going to the theater. I watch all the greatest shows of all time. I listen to a ton of music. I watch a bunch of YouTube videos around cinematography or just creating in general, film analysis, art analysis. I'm going to museums. I pretty much ingest all the art I can while purposefully creating nothing. I mean I'm talking about I won't even take a picture on my phone. And I find that having that imbalance of ingesting a ton of art and creating no art is a really effective way for me of building up that excitement and yearning for creating again. It almost feels like the same as listening to really hype music before a game or a match. Like it just it gets me really hype and excited and it's just like I just want to make something now. It brings back that romance around creating again. Now this dimension of burnout is arguably the most annoying one, at least to me, because it's not really about being tired or checked out. It's about the loss of self-esteem with your work and the tendency to negatively evaluate it. And if you're any sort of creative, chances are you have very much experienced this at some point. For me, the biggest reason that I struggle with this is feeding into my perfectionism. I become such a harsh critic of my work, just hyper focusing on the negatives and things I don't like about it that making videos starts to feel a lot less like something I actually enjoy doing. And it starts to feel more like you, you know what it starts to feel like? It starts to feel like I have a Miranda Priestly in my own head, criticizing literally every single decision I make. I'm literally the devil wears Prada-ing myself for no reason. And there's many ways to get over perfectionism and just shutting that stupid Miranda voice in your head up. But what really helps me the most is forcing myself to make really small, insignificant, dumb videos. And a great example of what this looks like in practice is my make a video in a day series, where I forced myself to come up with a video idea and have a finished video by the end of that same workday. And the reason this is so effective for me is because it removes the pressure of analytical performance or having a perfect script or getting really meticulous with your editing. And it instead shifts the focus to finishing a video and just accepting it for what it is. Forcing myself to push out all these dumb videos really quickly, it really got me to ignore the parts of myself that hyper focus on the negatives. And it really got me to focus on the positives, you know, what are the things I liked about this video? What did I find fun about this one that was different about making the last one? It reintroduced not only the joy of the process of making a video, but really that strong sense of accomplishment and satisfaction of finishing a video. Listen, at the end of the day, burnout sucks. There's no other way to put it. And once you feel yourself in that zone, it can just feel impossible to get out of. But I promise you, it is something that you can overcome and you'll get right back to being that video making machine that you were. You just have to be patient and understanding with yourself and really, really lean on that creative side of making videos because the logistical side of making videos is important and necessary. But the creative side, that's the side that you fell in love with. So that's the side that you have to reconnect with. And the most important part is when you're out of that burnout phase and you feel like you're ready to start making videos again, that you don't make the same mistakes that you did before that got you back into this spot. Remember, focus on what you can healthily and realistically make, and that should be your new standard. But that's about it for me. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.