How to Burn Out Productively
A love letter to momentum, exhaustion, and learning to pause before you implode.
Lately, I’ve been writing. A lot.
Not the polite kind of writing you can squeeze between Zoom calls and passive-aggressive Slack messages. I mean the obsessive kind. The feral kind. The kind where the characters are screaming at you from the shower curtain and you’re half-wondering if this is inspiration or a psychotic break. Chapters are moving, dialogue is sharp, plot threads are snapping into place like it’s divine intervention and not just me, slightly manic at midnight with a Google Doc.
And it feels amazing.
Which is a trap.
Because the part of me that’s been in survival mode for... let’s call it forever... is addicted to this. To momentum. To production. To performing and proving and earning my own damn oxygen through output.
But here’s the inconvenient truth I keep trying to tattoo onto my nervous system:
We are not machines.
(Though capitalism would love us to forget that.)
Push ≠ Sustain.
Momentum is not the same as endurance.
And creativity isn’t just a faucet you leave running—it’s a well. You’ve got to fill it or it goes dry, and when it does? It doesn’t even go out with drama. It just... fades.
You don’t even notice at first. A sentence that doesn’t hit right. A scene you keep rewriting like you’re trying to summon a pulse that isn’t there. Then one morning, you open the doc and feel... nothing. Not blocked. Not broken. Just—blank.
Burnout doesn’t always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like silence.
And silence, for someone who writes to make sense of the noise, is terrifying.
The Double-Edged Sword of Flow
Right now, I’m finishing my third novel.
(And if you just thought, “Oh wow, third? Where are the others?”—good question. Ask the graveyard of unpublished drafts in my Google Drive.)
The writing is finally flowing. And it’s intoxicating. So, of course, the last thing I want to do is stop. Because what if it never comes back? What if this is the window? What if resting is the thing that kills the magic?
But here’s what I’ve learned—kicking, screaming, and coached within an inch of my stubbornness:
Creative flow is not a reward. It’s a rhythm.
And like all rhythms, it includes a pause.
Rest isn’t a luxury. It’s a load-bearing beam in the creative structure. Without it? The whole thing starts to sag and then collapse, and no amount of caffeine or positive affirmations will hold it up.
What Refills the Cup?
For me, refilling the creative cup looks stupidly simple.
Things that don’t sound “productive” at all:
Sleep that isn’t guilt-laced.
Music that stabs me in the chest in the best way.
A movie that makes me want to punch the screen and write something better.
A meme that makes me laugh so hard I forget I’m a Serious Artist™ for 30 seconds.
Reading used to help—until it didn’t. Because nothing triggers imposter syndrome quite like being reminded that someone out there already wrote the thing you’re trying to write... and did it better, faster, with a book deal and better skin. So I pause reading when I’m deep in a draft. Judge me if you want. I’ve made peace with the tradeoff.
The 5% Rule (a.k.a. The Sanity Hack)
There’s a quote from Mara Glatzel—coach extraordinaire, delightful human, and author of Needy—that hit me like a velvet-gloved brick to the chest:
“We often think our needs are too big, too complicated, too abstract. But what if we started with this: what can I do to feel 5% better?”
Not fixed.
Not healed.
Not transformed into some Pinterest version of ‘balanced.’
Just… 5% less like you’re unravelling.
So I tried that: a snack, a nap, a hot shower with zero purpose except existing, putting on socks that don’t have holes, breathing like a human instead of a malfunctioning productivity robot.
Turns out, that’s often enough to keep writing from turning into self-harm with a word count.
Final Thought (Because I’m Tired and Still Debating That Nap)
If you’re chasing a wave of momentum right now, hell yes—ride it.
But don’t forget that even the ocean pulls back before it hits the shore. You’re allowed to pause. To exhale. To not destroy your body for the sake of your art.
You don’t have to “earn” rest.
You just need it.
Because you’re not a machine.
You’re a storyteller.
And storytellers?
We need to feel something before we can write anything worth a damn.
💬 What helps you reset creatively? Tell me something that makes you feel 5% more alive. Or 5% less dead inside. Either works.
—Nicky
(Probably taking that nap now. Definitely still opening the doc later.)