7 Ways to Fix Your Writer Burnout

Feeling meh about your writing? Is that lack of inspiration seeping into your regular life? You might be burned out. Read more about this condition, and learn seven ways to fix your writer burnout.

First, what is burnout in general? From the Cleveland Clinic:

According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, burnout is defined as “physical, emotional or mental exhaustion, accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance and negative attitudes towards oneself and others.”

You might think it’s similar to writer’s block, but writer burnout is different. When you’re blocked, you have the energy to write, you’re motivated, but you just can’t seem to find the words.

With writer burnout, you may or may not want to write, but either way, your body and brain just won’t let you. Your well is drained of the energy necessary to do the thing. You’re unmotivated, uninterested, uninspired. You feel tired, angry, negative, just . . . blah all around.

What are other signs that writer burnout has a grip on you?

• You’re always tired, but you’re especially fatigued when you think about writing
• That feeling of joy you had when you worked on your WIP has vanished
• In other areas of your life, you feel constantly anxious and overwhelmed
• You’re not sleeping well
• Interacting with writing-adjacent activities or your usual writer community feels frustrating, pointless, hard

That, my friend, is burnout.

So how can you take care of yourself during a period of burnout? How do you find ways to cope until the sun breaks through and your energy and motivation return so you want to write again?

Here are a few ideas taken from my own struggles with burnout in my life—including recently, when the world’s craziness and my editing workload have conspired to burn me right down to ashes. As I’ve felt that happening, I’ve been incorporating these things into my life (slowly!), and it’s helping.

Go for a walk

If the thought of opening your WIP and adding words makes you want to curl up into a ball and cry . . . walk away.

Yup. Get up, shut your laptop, put on some shoes, and go for a slow, leisurely walk. Don’t track your steps or measure your heart rate; in fact, don’t count this as exercise at all. And leave your earbuds at home. This walk isn’t for catching up on podcasts or drowning out the world and its problems with music.

This walk is for remembering how to be inspired.

Just wander. Look at the trees. Notice birds flying by or hopping around. Observe the people you pass.

Breathe slowly and deeply, and just . . . be.

Burnout can be exacerbated by that nattering, unending voice in our head reminding us of all the “shoulds” in our life. I should be writing. I should be farther along by now. I should have stayed late at work to finish that project.

Walking without distraction, with our full attention on what we’re doing and where we are, can help shut out that voice, giving us the space (and grace) to just do one thing in that moment: put a foot down, then another, and another.

I guarantee, when you return home from a mindful walk, you’ll feel worlds better.

But your burnout isn’t going to be cured with just one walk.

So . . . do it again. And then again. Make it a daily practice to get in at least ten minutes of walking. Not only will your physical health improve but your outlook and energy levels will as well. (Studies back this up.)

Is walking difficult due to a disability or illness? Get some sunlight on your face. Sitting outside for five to fifteen minutes will boost your vitamin D levels, which also helps you break out of a fog.

Go somewhere new

Writing routines and day-to-day life and even darn old winter can be pretty isolating. We’re stuck inside, staring at a screen, following well-worn, familiar patterns. Sleep, eat, work, write. Over and over.

One effective way to break up the doldrums is to challenge your brain with something new. Novelty shakes tired brains awake, it challenges them to think in a different way. Plus, it’s just darn fun⁠⁠⁠⁠—that feeling of discovery and adventure that accompanies even the smallest hint of “new thing” is real and amazingly effective at interrupting even the most stubborn ennui.

But before you plan that always-wanted-to-go-there trip to Madagascar or sign up for an afternoon of skydiving, know that “new” doesn’t have to mean “big.” Especially if your energy levels are low.

Try taking a new route to work. Or order a new item on the menu at your favorite coffee shop. Maybe go to that park you always pass by, thinking you’ll stop in someday (it could be a great place to take a walk). All of these things will trip the same circuits of “new” in your brain without requiring energy you might not have.

Go screen free

Speaking of staring at a screen⁠⁠⁠⁠—

Human eyes can only take so much of that. Some of us (ahem, okay, me) go from eight hours+ in front of a laptop to hours of television to phone time before bed. Some days this winter, I’ve clocked nearly every waking hour of the day glued to some screen or another.

And I feel that in my body: blurry eyes, double vision, headaches, fatigue, disrupted sleep patterns.

Whether it’s the light coming from a screen or the content matter we’re consuming on one, excessive screen time can affect our well-being.

The simple solution? Shut off that screen. Look at something else (see Go for a walk above). Close your eyes (more on that in the next suggestion). Make reducing screen time, in whatever form, a priority.

The last couple of weeks, once I’ve finished with my editing work for the day, I’ve developed a new evening routine of putting on something from my growing vinyl collection and reading an actual paper book. Then, at bedtime, I place my phone in another room to keep myself from scrolling before sleep. (It helps that I’ve ditched almost all forms of social media.)

While I can’t say this new routine has cured me of my burnout (a combination of all these suggestions is going to be most effective, I think) I know I feel better when I end the day this way. My anxiety before bed has lessened. My sleep is better. So I think it’s helping.

Go to bed

Along the lines of better sleep, I think this is the most chronic issue I hear my friends and clients struggling with: “I just can’t sleep anymore.”

A combination of anxiety and stress and the demands of life has us all wired to the gills. Sleep is designed to help with that, but what if we aren’t getting the rest we need? Burnout town, my friend.

A well-rested writer is a productive and creative writer. Getting that rest might be the most important tool in your box for getting yourself out of burnout.

I get it. I stopped sleeping well sometime around age forty. So telling me to “get more sleep” is hilarious.

But what I’ve found effective, maybe even as effective as getting more hours of actual sleep, is this:

I give myself permission to rest.

That might just mean curling up in bed in the middle of a busy day and shutting my eyes for twenty minutes. That might mean choosing a night in rather than going out with friends when my body feels exhausted, even if all I do instead is sit on the couch instead.

The key is that I’m giving myself permission. If I’m tired, I rest, rather than pushing through. Even if it means deadlines are in jeopardy, or I disappoint people who’d like to spend time with me.

So when I say “go to bed” as a way of easing burnout, what I actually mean is give yourself the A-okay to prioritize rest over other things. Maybe not for forever. Maybe just until you feel your energy levels recovering and your burnout lessening.

Go get some culture

I’m extremely lucky to live in a city with a world-class symphony, amazing art museum, beautiful botanical garden, and so many other exciting cultural opportunities and events (St. Louis, Missouri, a highly underrated place). Spending an afternoon gazing at art or attending a symphony performance fills me with joy and refreshes my soul.

I’ve noticed that when I start feeling burned out it’s usually after a long period of time when I haven’t taken in anything that feeds my spirit culturally.

Culture can mean different things to different people. It doesn’t have to be art or music or nature⁠⁠⁠⁠—it could be a sportsball game or having a beer at a local dive bar (hey, that’s still culture of a kind).

The point is to open up your experience of the world to different avenues of creativity and human expression.

Think about something that always makes you feel amazing, and then go do that thing. It will be so hard to force yourself out of your cocoon of burnout, but I guarantee, taking in a cultural event of some sort, a product of another human’s inspiration and creative output, might just relight your own spark.

Go to therapy

Wait! Don’t run away. This isn’t the stock answer you might think it is.

“Therapy” conjures up a variety of reactions, but I don’t necessarily mean “go get a therapist” when I suggest that therapy might help pull you out of creative burnout.

What I mean is this: find someone you can talk to about your struggles and make sure that’s a person who is willing to simply listen rather than one who jumps to trying to solve your burnout.

Yes, a trained professional has the tools and skills to do just that, but the right person for you might also be a trusted friend, or your mother, or even your beloved cat.

Sometimes all it takes to lift the burden of depleted creativity and a deep soul tiredness is to tell someone else about how we’re feeling. Someone who can hear it without judgment or reaction.

The telling part is the key. Getting your feelings (or lack of them) into verbal expression helps you process whatever you’re struggling with subconsciously. It gets your struggles out of your head and lets some light into the gaps.

Don’t have a cat, or a therapist, or anyone to talk to? Try journaling. Start with a series of prompting questions (try these: https://korrashay.com/2022/07/28/30-journal-prompts-to-help-you-recover-from-burnout/) for guidance, or simply write down how you feel. Make it a regular habit, and you might just start feeling the urge to go beyond writing about your burnout to writing about your characters again.

Go do something with your hands

I’m not a huge crafter. Thanks to ADHD I have a million interests but not much follow through when it comes to hobbies (you wouldn’t know it from the metric ton of craft supplies I own).

But this winter, in the middle of the worst of my own creative burnout, I found myself digging through the supplies I’d bought during a recent fascination with book binding. The next thing I knew, I had made a couple of notebooks from scrap paper and built a new hard cover for a paperback I’d been meaning to rebind for months.

And at the end of it, I felt . . . pretty great. I had . . . ideas. For more bindings and notebooks and even journals I wanted to make. It almost felt like . . . inspiration. And while it didn’t cure my burnout, for a few hours I felt the fog lift.

That, magic writer, is something called flow. And the science shows that arts and crafts, or really any kind of body-based creative practice, can help alleviate burnout.

Making things with your hands, whether it’s an art piece or a loaf of bread, invokes that same flow state of creative expression that writing does. Only, because it’s a different form of creativity, it doesn’t feel like the source of your burnout, so it’s easier to approach and get into.

And once you’re into it, one thing leads to another thing, and before you know it, your energy is surging and that well of creativity is once again overflowing.

Final thoughts

If you’re experiencing burnout, whether its writing-related or because of your job or from your responsibilities, please know that this isn’t a forever state. I’ve had many similar periods of burnout in my life to the one I’m in now, the one you might be in also, and one thing I know about it, the benefit of my experience coming out of burnout again and again, is:

This, too, will pass.

It can’t rain all the time. There is always the clearing. After the dark, the light.

You will get through this patch of burnout and back to writing again.

I promise.