How to recover from creative burnout
Broadly speaking, burnout may be tackled on two main fronts. For ease of understanding I have presented them separately below, but they are both equally important.
Approach 1: Contributing factors
Identifying the factors that contribute to burnout in our lives and seeing if we can do anything to minimise them is an important way of dealing with burnout.
Contributing factors may be external – that is, they may be stressors related to your life circumstances, such as work, family commitments and relationships. They can also be internal – attitudes, beliefs, conditioning and patterns that cause stress.
Internal factors can be long-standing and may even be rooted in trauma, so they can require help from an appropriately qualified person, such as a psychologist or counsellor, to shift.
Approach 2: The Four Pillars of Nervous System Care
Burnout is caused by chronic stress, which prevents your nervous system from being able to adequately recoup your energy.
Nervous system care is an umbrella term that covers the activities and habits that allow your body to recover from and become more resilient to stress. I created The Four Pillars of Nervous System Care as a way to conceptualise a strong foundation for creative energy.
The Four Pillars are Rest, Presence, Nourishment and Movement. In my experience, making sure these Pillars are as strong as possible can increase your energy while also boosting the amount of joy and pleasure you experience in life.
A holistic approach
In my experience, taking both approaches at the same time is likely to lead to lasting recovery.
Consider that some internal and external contributing factors may take significant time and/or effort to modify, and some may not be modifiable at all.
In these cases, strengthening The Four Pillars becomes an important way to increase resilience to internal and external stressors and regain some of our energy.
In other words, The Four Pillars can act as a strong foundation as we do the longer-term work of addressing our contributing factors.
This is an excerpt from my free ebook, A Creative’s Guide to Burnout, which goes into greater detail on how to recover from creative burnout. To keep reading, click the button below to request your copy.
