Burnout sucks.

It’s an unrelenting exhaustion that has you feeling completely zapped of energy. Your creativity, which has been running on fumes for miles, has officially petered out in the middle of nowhere. You can hardly think about writing, much less get any words down. At this moment, it may feel like you might never write again.

Burnout is something a lot of creatives struggle with—that both Emily and I have struggled with. It’s an immensely difficult and uncomfortable place to be, and while it may feel like you’ll never get out of it, I’m here to tell you from personal experience: you can.

For me, I got smacked in the face with the burnout realization in 2020 when I realized how exhausted I was by everything. I had just started Golden May, became a mom, and was working another full-time job. All with a global pandemic in the background!

It wasn’t just that I didn’t have time to write or hit a creative block—I had completely lost interest. I didn’t want to write, and I didn’t even want to read.

That was the big indicator for me that something was very, very wrong. I’ve always considered myself a mood reader, but nothing made me want to read a book. It sounded impossible. That triggered a big self-examination of what had led me to that point.

Burnout can be the result of a lot of different things: stress in our job, personal lives, the state of the world. For some of us who struggle with our mental health, burnout can also overlap with depressive states. It’s a feeling that is all encompassing.

Even though it’s easy for writers to try and separate out our “writing life” as something that is different from our “regular life”—these two things are interconnected. It’s just our life. Which means, when we’re stressed during our day-to-day life, it WILL show up in our writing life.

So, what can we do about it?

First off, give yourself GRACE. You didn’t do anything wrong to get here. There’s no shame in being burnt out, so you can immediately let go of any guilt that this is somehow your fault. When burnout happens, it’s usually a sign that something in our life isn’t working, and it’s probably deeper than just the circumstances we find ourselves in.

The first thing to examine when experiencing burnout is: What expectations are you bringing to your life as far as work? Productivity? Self-value?

One of the most pervasive ideologies taught in the Western world (and one I certainly grew up with!) is that if you’re not constantly doing something you’re being lazy.

Let that sink in. If you’re not spending every second of your day doing something “productive” then you’re not doing “enough.”

That’s bullshit! How can anyone spend ALL of their time constantly doing? It’s impossible! And yet, we have somehow ingrained this concept into our culture and our livelihood, and in order to fulfill this impossible idea, we are pushing ourselves to the brink.

I felt that. I had to really sit with it and examine my beliefs.

Some of the questions I asked myself were:

👉🏻 What brought me here?
👉🏻 Do I only feel valuable when I’m accomplishing something?
👉🏻 What narratives am I telling myself?
👉🏻 How can I rest, and be more conscious of what rest looks like?
👉🏻 What can I change in my writing life or personal life? Am I trying to write way too much?

I realized in my reflection that I was participating in hustle culture. I gave myself a never ending list of to-dos, and told myself that I couldn’t rest until it was “done” but with new items always making it to the list, it became a vicious cycle.

It wasn’t even the amount of work that I had on my plate, necessarily, that was the problem. Yes, I had a lot going on, but it was also the pressure and expectation that I put on myself that I could never stop doing. And if I did stop, I was doing something wrong. I truly believed that I didn’t deserve rest unless I accomplished something.

In order to stop this whirlpool of guilt and shame, I had to retrain my brain. I had to reframe how I looked at myself. I had to examine what I believed about rest and relearn to claim that space in my life.

It was so uncomfortable! I consciously told myself not to pull out my laptop and check my emails. I had to continually remind myself that I deserved to simply exist without the pressure of doing—I deserved REST, whatever that meant to me.

Because rest doesn’t always have to mean taking a nap, or laying on the couch. (Although it can and does sometimes!) Rest also looks like engaging in a physical activity, like a walk or yoga, to release our stress hormones. It could also be taking showers or baths, deep breathing or other mindfulness exercises. It could be eating healthily or binging your favorite TV show. For me, rest also means scrolling through TikTok!

But the thing is: Resting takes time.

You can’t rush recovery, and trying to “get better” faster to go back to working is a symptom of hustle culture. It takes the time it takes and patience is a must. There’s no official “end date” to burnout that will magically cure you. The length of time it takes to come out of burnout will depend on the severity of your burnout. For some people it could be weeks, but it can easily take months or even years to recover. It depends on the factors of your life and how much you can recalibrate.

I also want to note that we can’t always change our circumstances.

For many of us, taking one to two weeks off can be an incredible feat, much less months or years. We can’t always step away from our responsibilities to give our bodies and minds uninterrupted rest. For me, I had the privilege to take some of that time off, but during that time I was still a mother.

So, how can we actually give our bodies and minds the rest we need when we can’t change the circumstances of our life? We focus on our mindset. All the rest in the world won’t actually fix the root of our burnout if we’re not interrogating what led us to burnout in the first place. And it also won’t stop it from happening again.

Burnout shouldn’t happen all the time. Yes, there are times when we are self-aware that we’re pushing ourselves hard towards a goal and feel burnout start to creep in—but that is a choice. As long as you give yourself rest and recovery afterwards, you can keep it from escalating. But if you don’t know what put you into it, and find that it keeps happening after periods of feeling “better” then we need to go back to: What are your beliefs and expectations for yourself?

You might find that if you’re in a continuous stage of burnout, you need to recalibrate your expectations for your writing life. You might need to do less. In the writing world, that can feel strange, especially when there’s so much advice out there telling you to “write every day,” but if that pressure is causing you to burn out—you might need to change your writing habits.

When we drastically lower our expectations and perform at the “bare minimum” level, we can actually start to rebuild our energy and create habits that prevent burnout. We can’t do that when we’re pushing ourselves to the brink every time.

The most important thing to remember when you’re in burnout goes back to the first thing I mentioned at the top of this blog: Give yourself grace. Love on yourself. Let go of your shame. The same goes with when we’re resting. Check in with yourself: are you actually resting? Or are you sitting there feeling guilty that you’re not working? Whenever you feel shame or hear the voices in your head pushing you to “get over it” that’s hustle culture. Remember, you haven’t done anything wrong.

Treat this period of burnout like you’re learning about yourself and this phase of your life—because you are. The person I was after having a child is different from who I was before my daughter; I had to relearn who I was. In burnout, we have to do that, too.

If you’re feeling like you’re burnt out, or starting to approach it. Here are a few other resources that can help!

✨ Listen to this Story Magic Podcast episode: Burnout with Gauri Yardi

✨ Read Burnout: The Key To Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

Burnout can feel like it’s forever, but I promise you: it’s not.

xo,