Balance, Boredom & Burnout
EPISODE 038: BALANCE, BOREDOM & BURNOUT
Balance is over-rated. Very few of us achieve ever really achieve it; I know I don’t. I tend to fall to one extreme or another with alarming frequency. Two of those extremes are boredom and burnout. But rather than feeling guilty (or scared) about either, is there a benefit to them, and how do we get back into flow when we’ve been bored and burned out for too long? I see boredom and burnout as part of the creative rhythm and they can signal one truly important thing. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
The year after my mother gave me a straitjacket for Christmas, she gave me a unicycle, and it’s fair to say there were a few years in my early twenties when the holidays were a little weird at our place. I spent the following year learning to ride that unicycle before it became my daily transportation to and from class in my college years, the rubber chicken impaled on the seat post giving rise to my eventual stage name: The Rubber Chicken Guy.
The year it took to learn to ride my unicycle was not without its incidents. I’m deaf in my right ear so balance doesn’t come easily to me and if I wasn’t falling forward I was overcompensating and falling backwards. If I started to fall left, I’d flail about in an effort to correct myself and usually fall to the right. That I ever learned to ride that thing, let alone juggle flaming torches while doing so was no minor miracle.
Balance, it turns out, is not my strong suit. I like the idea of balance, and think highly of the kind of people that strive for balance in their lives. I’ve just never found it easy to live in balance for very long before I tip to one side or another before doing the weird dance of over-correction and landing on my face in the other direction.
I’m David duChemin and this is Episode 38 of A Beautiful Anarchy, a mostly weekly podcast about the joys and obstacles of the everyday creative life. What’s my lack of balance got to do with it? Let’s talk about it.
Intro/music
The most obvious metaphor in my story about the unicycle would be to draw a parallel with the creative life and to suggest it’s all a matter of balance. And maybe it is, I don’t know. But that’s not been my experience. If balance is achievable then I’d have to focus so hard on it that I’d get nothing else done.
Balance for me has always felt like a code word for playing it safe. Never reaching too far in one direction without being really careful not to fall over. In fact I think when the focus of our creative lives becomes the maintenance of balance and never falling over, we’re taking steps in the direction of risk aversion, and playing it safe, and our work begins to lack the kind of spark it can only take on when we do not play it safe, when we’re generous with that work, and vulnerable. There is probably no more direct route to mediocrity in what we do than the pursuit of balance for balance sake. Not too much of one thing, not too much of another. Just right in the middle.
I don’t mean to imply there is no room in our lives for healthy balance. Of course there is. I think what I’m getting at is there are a lot of ways we can lose that balance everyday, and it might not be the worse thing if we wobble a little from one extreme to another every now and then. Or even daily. Two of those extremes are creative boredom and creative burnout and, being a glass half full kind of guy, I thought it might be interesting to look at why falling into one or the other might have its benefits, and how to get out of both of them when you’ve been there long enough.
When I was writing my recent book, Start Ugly, I stumbled across an idea that intrigued me. I was writing and I kind of blurted the idea onto the page before I even knew that it was an idea that I knew. I was writing about both boredom and burnout and wrote that both were a form of emptiness. I had never thought about either boredom or burnout in these terms and looking back I wish I had explored the idea more, so perhaps now is my chance to do that.
The creative life is one of inflow and outflow. It’s not unlike breathing. You breath in and you breath out, and you really kind of need to do them in the same amounts. I don’t know if it’s possible to breathe in more than you breath out, certainly not for long. We depend on getting the old air out and bringing fresh air in. Creatively speaking we need to be drawing on new influences, learning new skills, and exploring new ideas but in order for that to bear any kind of fruit we’ve also got to do something with those things. They are the raw materials for what we create. They are the fuel, but we’ve got to burn that fuel in order to create any heat or move forward.
I’ve mentioned the idea of Flow several times in past episodes, all of it based on the research and writings of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His book Flow contains ideas that are, I think, incredibly helpful to anyone that wants to lead not only a creative life but a fulfilling one. In that book he says we are at our happiest and our most creative, when we are doing things that challenge us and when the level of our skill matches that challenge. When that tension is achieved we are forced to keep our skills sharp and learn new skills in order to take on greater and greater challenges. When we fail to stay on this line that balances or keeps skill and challenge in growing tension, we tip into two possible areas at which we are not our best.
When we engage in activities for which we have plenty of skill but not enough challenge, we get bored and there is no growth. When we engage in activities for which the challenge is too high for our skills, we experience anxiety which is also a state in which we are not learning, creative, or very happy.
What makes this model so helpful is that it acts as a diagnostic tool.
In my creative life, which I suppose is really just, life, if I am feeling bored it means I’m not challenging myself enough, relative to the skills I have. It means I’m not taking risks, that I’m probably repeating myself, and it’s time to create something more interesting or challenging, something that’s not so safe and comes with fewer guarantees of success. Something that draws on all my skills and attention and the ways in which I bring them to bear on a project.
That boredom is an emptiness. It’s a lack of challenge and everything that comes with trying to meet that challenge or solve that problem. In other words, if we can recognize the hole that we feel when we feel bored, we can fill it. Learning to actively recognize that hole and fill it is our way back to the state of flow and greater creativity. We cannot get back to flow, from boredom, without increasing our challenges.
In a similar way, when we are anxious and struggling with creative efforts that feel overwhelming, the Flow model tells us what we lack is the skill or experience to pull it off and the way out is to either reduce the challenge enough that it brings skill and challenge back into tension with each other, or you can level up on your skills and learn what you need to know in order to meet that challenge on a more level playing field. Being overwhelmed creatively signals an emptiness, and an opportunity to learn new skills and to walk forward into being better than you once were at whatever endeavour you pursue.
Both boredom and creative burnout arise because of a lack. But if either of them are new and hasn’t always been there, it tells us that lack or area of emptiness is new too. So what happened? Something changed, what was it? Well, you’ll have to answer that for yourself but for me it’s become predictable and I can give you an example from right now. I’ve just finished 2 books and the effort to put them out into the world. I’ve also spent the last 7 months building 2 courses for photographers. Before that it was another book. It’s been a wonderfully busy year and I enjoyed more than my usual amount of time in Flow, but I am now both bored and burned out. I’ve got nothin’.
The burnout was predictable. The more output I demanded of myself, the more creative calories I consumed and didn’t replace, the greater the challenge and need for fuel that wasn’t replaced, I flamed out with nothing left. Now with my reserves empty I’ve got nothing to meet my next challenges which are the antidote to boredom and I’m here I am, bored and burned out at the same time.
So why doesn’t this information freak me out? Because I’ve been bored before. And I’ve been burned out before. I’ve experienced the emptiness. And I know not only how to jump those two ruts, but I know that they signal something more important to me: that I’ve held nothing back. That while I was making the projects of the last year I was being generous with my work and not hedging my bets. I was keeping nothing in reserve. And I think that’s important. And now I’ve emptied myself and while there’s a resounding echo internally right now, it means there’s room to fill that space back up and start fresh. To gather the raw materials for new work, whatever that will be, without the musty old stuff I saved for a rainy day getting in the way.
It’s understandable to want to pace ourselves. People keep suggesting I might want to slow down. But the thing is, this IS my pace. It’s not important that our pace be fast or slow, but that it be ours. I’ve learned that my pace is not usually one of constant simultaneous inflow and outflow. For example, when I’m writing a book I am not also reading voraciously. But I think that’s OK, I mean, you don’t often see a competitive cyclist riding the Tour de France while also wolfing down a plate of spaghetti. There’s a time for input and a time for output. There’s a rhythm. And right now the twin emptinesses of boredom and burnout are part of that rhythm. A temporary part, and one in which I will not dwell for long, but they’re necessary if I’m to give things my all and empty myself into my work now and then.
I mentioned, too, that boredom and burnout were diagnostic tools. Never afraid to mix my metaphors I want to throw something else into the mix for your consideration.
When I was in my early twenties I spent most of a winter in Russia. The whole time I was there I was listless, had no energy, and was losing weight. When I came back I got sicker and lost more and more weight and was finally diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes for which there is no cure but there is a treatment, a means of maintaining my health. Aside from eating more carefully and staying active, I inject myself 4 to 5 times a day with insulin. By my math that’s about forty-five thousand injections so far. There’s no cure for diabetes yet, only daily maintenance or treatment. When I was first diagnosed it meant I could finally begin the regular treatment I needed to get healthy again.
If boredom and burnout are diagnostic tools I think they point to something that, like my diabetes, isn’t so much curable, as treatable. It’s about maintenance. It’s about sensitivity to my own rhythms and what works best for me. Sometimes I need food, sometimes I need insulin, sometimes exercise. All at the right time.
Unlike diabetes, the creative life is not a problem to be solved, and its challenges are not states of being in need of a cure. But we do need regular maintenance. We need the regular fuel of learning new skills and drawing on new influences and ideas. But we also need to be challenged, to go to the edges of those skills and the explore the deepest parts of those ideas and - here’s where I think I’m going with all this - to explore and embrace the emptiness that lies just beyond those and to not be afraid of it. And we might have to do this over and over again, according to our own rhythms, just as I have to keep injecting insulin.
Could it be we’re being so frequently reminded of the benefits of balance, never going too far in one direction or another, that we don’t push ourselves to be the kind of people we would become if we stretched ourselves a little and risked a little imbalance? If we emptied ourselves frequently enough that we needed to take a break to catch our breath after we finished something great, signed our names to it and shipped it?
You’re not the only one that finds balance hard, and finds themselves falling toward either boredom or burnout, if not both at times. But rather than freak out about it, take a deep breath. Neither are fatal. They don’t signal anything more than an emptiness that is now yours to fill as you like. With new ideas, new skills, new challenges and new directions. And if you’re truly empty now and then you can fill that emptiness knowing you gave the last efforts everything you had.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying boredom and burnout are good things, per se. I’m saying maybe they are just regular extremes to which most of us bounce when we’re more concerned about making our art or doing our best creative work, and yes, both of them keep us temporarily out of Flow. But their gift is in showing us the way back to Flow, pointing out the need to fill one or both of those emptinesses we feel, with new skills, new ideas, or new challenges, which in their turn do get us back to flow. And it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the rest and the clean slate that is now ours because we held nothing back.
I know I can’t be the only one that ends up on empty now and then. But I’m tired of beating myself up over something that happens with such predictable regularity. Figure out your rhythms, friends. Go at whatever pace works for you. Embrace the empty and learn to fill it. But don’t be so scared of it that you never go there. Do whatever maintenance you need to do, when you need to do it. But don’t chase balance at the cost of doing your best work, and being generous and going all-in.
Don’t worry so much about the over-corrections that you not only never fall to one side or the other but also never learn to ride the unicycle.
You’re not alone if you find balance hard, and if your creative life is a bit herky-jerky at times. But, listen, one day–like all of us do–I’ll come to the end of my life and if I’m ever given the kind of eulogy I hope my life makes possible, the last thing I want said is that I sure was balanced. I want my single tire track to be wild and hair-brained, a hot sacred mess of an effort that goes everywhere but in a straight line. I’m not afraid of the empty, or the imbalance of my efforts, I’m afraid of holding back and not giving it my all.
Thanks so much for joining me today. If you want more of this kind of thing to fuel your everyday creativity and freedom, my 2 new books were written for you. Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, and The Problem with Muses can both be found in all the usual places, like Amazon, or through the links at StartUglyBook.com, and both will support this podcast and help you get more reliably to Flow.
If you’re only just discovering A Beautiful Anarchy I post new episodes 3 out of every 4 weeks but there’s no reason you should take a break on those 4th weeks so I‘d like to send you a monthly issue of On The Make which is basically an email version of A Beautiful Anarchy and you can get it by going to StartUglyBook.com, scrolling to the bottom and telling me where to send it. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and once a month I’ll draw the name of one reader to whom I’ll send a signed copy of one of my books.
Thanks so much for being part of this. I’m so humbled by your reviews and feedback. If you’d like to get in touch with me you can email me at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com and I’d love to hear from you. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0