How to Overcome a Writing Burnout
By: Cosmin Angheluta
Tags: Life Lessons, Lifestyle, Productivity, Writing, Writing Tips

How to Overcome a Writing Burnout

Practical tips from someone who did it before

Photo by Marco Djallo on Unsplash

It happens to everybody to run into burnout. Performing the same task every day of your life makes the job strenuous, and it is typical to feel overwhelmed and exhausted. Writing every day, for example, can become a struggle. But the same can happen with working, studying, or any other action that includes a physical or a mental effort.

Burnouts happen, and we cannot escape them. We are a curious kind, always on the hunt for new experiences, jobs, and ideas. We need new people in our life. We seek changes, or we feel stuck in the same experience, and it scares us. Still, changing means starting from ground zero, which can become painful.

If writing makes you happy and fulfills you, don’t abandon it, even when it gets hard. The ideas will lack, the willpower and the determination will drain your veins, still don’t surrender. If you give up, it will be tough to restart and write as you once did.

When you don’t want to write, your brain can find hundreds of other things you could do instead. In the beginning, you will trick yourself into thinking that new experiences will get you new ideas, and you deserve a pause, but you are only building excuses and barriers towards writing. If you want to break that barrier, you need to understand first why you are striving.

Why are you striving to write?

The first time I ran into a writing burnout, I didn’t know how to manage it. I read about the writer’s block; I learned about the burnout phenomenon, but none of those tips worked for me.

Most of the advice included waiting and living new experiences until the writing fire would have burned again, but for me, it never worked. The more I waited, the more I lost motivation and ran into other habits and interests. But the pressure of having stopped writing was always with me, and it was painful to let it go.

Then, one day, I started writing again for a podcast I created with a friend, and I liked it. I still didn’t enjoy writing books and weaving the plots between the characters, but I loved the process, so I started doing it more frequently.

I set up a daily schedule so, from that moment, I never stopped writing. In those two years, I learned what helped me to defeat tough times. So here are my suggestions on how to write, even when you don’t crave it.

Change environment and tools

The first thing I noticed when I strove to find motivation is that a lack of impulses was dominating my mind, so I needed to gain refreshing perspectives and nurture my brain with novel impulses and ideas. What I found to be useful in those circumstances is to change my working environment.

My morning writing routine includes getting up, preparing coffee, and sitting in front of my desktop, searching for an idea to illustrate. But doing it every day prevents my mind from meeting external inputs from which I could take inspiration. So the first thing I do to change my environment is to take my laptop and move somewhere else from the living room, where I often write.

Moving to another room, or in a more comfortable place, may be enough. Still, sometimes I have to take my laptop and go outside, or I can’t write anything, and I keep procrastinating.

Some other times, I give up on the digital world to write on paper. A study by Virginia W. Berninger showed how composing essays by hand helps an author express more ideas, produce more words, and be more prolific than using a keyboard. For this reason, once a week, I pack a journal and go outside for a walk, trying to focus on the fresh and rejuvenating air while my mind generates new ideas.

Change topic for a day

Writing about the same topic every day is exhausting: you need to come up with new ideas to express the same concept repeatedly and also have to think about it regularly.

If you wake up one day, and you don’t feel like writing, the first thing you should do is to ask yourself: what is the reason behind my lack of motivation? Is it because of your daily mood? Did an external input that overwhelmed your routine? Or is it because of the topic?

If the problem is one of the first two, then you only have to write, as you do every day, and you will soon find your motivation. It is a simple problem of procrastination, so once you overcome the block, it disappears.

Otherwise, you need to change the topic for some days and write about different things. Creativity is a work of invention and imagination, but you cannot generate concepts around the same subject forever. Eventually, you will drain your pool of arguments to discuss, and it will need time to regenerate.

Something you could try, if you want to change the topic for a day, is to do some creative writing exercises. You can find some examples on Masterclass, or some others on Reedsy, where you can also choose the genre. Creative writing exercises will refresh your perspective, to enhance and nourish your mental pool with a vast range of inputs for the future.

Experiment new hobbies

If a pattern of writing-eating-sleeping is your daily routine, something is wrong, and you want to stop before burning out. Whenever you can prevent something horrible, you don’t think about it: you do it. Still, if you are already there, focus on developing a healthy writing routine to avoid it.

To develop a healthy writing routine, think about writing as a pool filled with water.

The pool is your brain, while the water is the ideas, personal experiences, and life lessons you know. When you write, you open the sink of the pool, and the water fills your paper with ideas. But if you write constantly, without putting water back into the pool, eventually it will dry up, leaving you without topics.

Prolific and consistent writers never dry their pool. Instead, they search for continuous impulses to add up to their pool and strengthen their style and ideas. They seek fresh experiences, go to unknown places, and develop other creative hobbies, even distant from writing. They consume information through articles, books, podcasts, and music until they fill the pool. So when it’s time to write, they are always ready, because of the enormous pool filled with water they have on their back.

If you want to become a prolific writer, follow their path. Meanwhile, if you are still striving to exit the writer’s block, or a minor burnout, try to change the topic or environment for a day, and see how it goes.