Creator burnout: what it is, why it happens, and what you can do to heal from it

Updated: September 05, 2024

17 min read

What is creator burnout?

Creator burnout is a deep mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion that creators face due to prolonged stress related to running a business.

It’s complex and shows up in many different forms and layers: depression, anxiety, distractedness, dread, pain, and detachment. And it can make running a business feel intolerable at times.

Our State of the Creator Economy report shows that 63% of full-time creators have experienced creative burnout in the past 12 months.

And this burnout looks vastly different from person to person.

Podcaster Tara McMullin’s burnout experience

For Tara McMullin, a podcast host and community builder, emotional labor is the biggest contributor to burnout. She tells me that her creator burnout comes from “projecting a happy, confident, in-control demeanor that’s not aligned with how I actually feel or what I’m doing in the moment.”

Her burnout is enough to cause panic over minor things. Like crafting positive replies to messages:

Part of my lived experience of burnout right now is feeling like any time someone emails/texts/Slacks me, I’m not going to have the capacity to respond positively and help them with what they need. It’s enough to cause a panic attack about the smallest stuff.

— Tara McMullin

YouTuber Charli Marie’s burnout experience

Charli Marie, a designer with a thriving YouTube channel, podcast, and blog, says that for her, creator burnout is a deep exhaustion “where all of the things I usually love doing—making videos, writing, talking to my audience—feel like a chore or even a burden.”

She mentions how heavy that feeling is when centered around something you created for yourself. She says she feels guilty about feeling like she’s letting down her audience and herself for not being able to keep up with her regular schedule.

Consultant Josh Garofalo’s burnout experience

Josh Garofalo, a consultant and copywriter for SaaS companies, told me his creative burnout isn’t what he would describe as typical because it’s not from working too hard or having too many things on his plate.

He explains, “My burnout is a product of comfort and repetition. For six years, I’ve been head down mastering my craft with amazing clients; I’ve done great work, and made more money than I thought was possible. I know how fortunate I am.”

But something changed:

I began to feel annoyed when prospects would email me because they needed copy. And now that I’ve taken some time to think about my business, I realize that I was annoyed because I’ve outgrown the position I gave myself in 2015. I’m overdue to give myself a promotion, but I don’t yet know what that looks like. It’s one of the main questions I’m grappling with during my break.

Burnout doesn’t always come from overworking yourself—you might still experience burnout with a balanced schedule.

Coach Rob Hardy’s burnout experience

Rob Hardy, the creator behind The Forest, describes some of his experiences with burnout as wanting to run away and live in the woods. Nobody knew Rob had these feelings; he’d put up a great façade.

But he adds, “Other times, the burnout would hit me like a depressive tidal wave. I’d disappear off the face of the earth for weeks at a time—buried beneath takeout boxes while binging The Office for the sixteenth time.”

Burnout—like other mental health ailments—can look deceptive from the outside. For this reason, it’s important to recognize the symptoms within yourself since others might not.

Why do creators burn out?

Creators burn out for many reasons, with the top four reasons being they:

Let’s take a closer look at each one.

Reason #1: Constant pressure to post 24/7

Post to X/Twitter every day. Craft a perfect Instagram post. Show your face on Stories. Be funny on Reels and TikTok. Send a value-packed newsletter. Educate on your blog. Record, edit, and publish a YouTube video.

Even just listing these is painted with exhaustion. It’s the idea that you need to be everywhere, all the time, and with your best face on so you can do your dream job and have all the freedom.

And the fear of losing followers or income if you don’t show up regularly can be a tough load to carry.

Tara McMullin calls this fear content debt:

Content debt is a lot like financial debt in that it weighs on the decisions that we make and the strategies we choose. Imagine if your paycheck depended on what you posted to Instagram daily, the funny Reels or TikToks you make. The videos that you upload to YouTube, perfectly suited to what other people are searching for, (…) all to satisfy an algorithm. Pretty bleak, right?
— Tara McMullin

The platform algorithms certainly don’t help. With the exception of your blog and your email list, you’re supposed to show up every day or every week to show Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that you’re worth being shown in people’s feeds.

Reason #2: The “your business = you” equation

Creators make a living by showing up as themselves online. Your name, face, and personality traits make up your business.

There’s a beautiful advantage to it: no one will ever be you.

But there’s also a downside: the emotional labor of having a personal brand and being authentic.

Yes, you get to choose how you show up and present yourself.

But the internet is ruthless and quickly tells you which ideas work and which don’t. An article by Tara McMullin explains why this emotional labor can be detrimental to a creator’s well-being:

My personal brand is a way of externalizing what I believe makes me worthy of others’ attention. Putting my best foot forward isn’t a problem in and of itself, of course. But it becomes a problem when I start to see the only valuable parts of me as those that can be traded on the open market.

Reason #3: Fear of losing everything by taking a break

It’s challenging to separate yourself from your business when you are the business. Things like financial pressures follow you around, even on your days off.

Can you afford to take a break for a couple of days? Will you lose clients and customers if you do?

When you have a family that relies on your creative business, with rent or mortgage to pay and mouths to feed, stepping away from your work seems impossible.

This is different from the pressure to keep creating content across multiple platforms mentioned earlier; technically, you can batch content creation, outsource non-fun parts of the process, and schedule it to go live whenever you want.

Instead, it’s about not being able to mentally disengage from your work. It materializes as looking at your inbox 40 times a day, working 12-hour days, working through weekends, and never taking a vacation.

It’s about working from a place of scarcity and the fear of losing everything you’ve worked so hard for if you take a short break.

This leads to emotional exhaustion, which is a leading indicator of creator burnout. It happens when we lack quality sleep, don’t self-reflect, and don’t take regular breaks (especially from negative momentum).

When our emotional health suffers, our ability to handle stress diminishes.

Reason #4: Content fatigue

Fio Dossetto, the creator behind the contentfolks newsletter, calls the pressure to constantly keep coming up with variations of a topic you know your readers, viewers, or subscribers enjoy ‘content fatigue.’

The same term also describes what an audience might go through—feeling exhausted from all the content around them—but Fio specifically talks about content fatigue as a creator.

“It’s an unpleasant feeling that shows up when you spend weeks, months, or even years thinking/talking/writing about the same topic. If left unaddressed, it can morph into burnout—and you might eventually even want, or need, to quit jobs or clients over it,” she says.

Content fatigue feels like you really can’t do it anymore—’it’ being creating content about your topic.

It’s a strange place to be—after all, you’ve taken a creative path because you wanted to think, write, and talk about that topic. But it happens, and I hope this serves as a reminder that that’s okay and that you’re not alone in that feeling.

Because once you know that, you can do something about it.

How do you recover from creator burnout?

Healing from creative burnout is about digging deep into what brought you to burn out and rewriting that script.

Use these tips to build resilient, sustainable routines for your creative work. They’ll take time to implement, but the effort will be worth it.

Learn to close the stress response cycle

The stress response cycle, as described by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski in their book Burnout, implies that our bodies are wired to have a physiological, neurological, and hormonal response to what we perceive as a threat.

From our muscles and cardiovascular system firing up to quicker breathing and a spike in endorphins, this is our body’s reaction so it can keep us safe.

Many years ago, this threat came in the form of a lion that wanted to eat us. Today, it’s caused by an overflowing inbox, a stressful interaction with a customer, or a collaboration that flopped.

The issue is that even when we’ve dealt with the stressor, we often haven’t dealt with the stress. Our bodies are “soaked in stress juice, just waiting for some cue that you are now safe from potential threat and can now relax into celebration,” the book explains.

The solution? Closing the stress response cycle. Here are a few ideas:

Physical activity (20 to 60 minutes)
Deep breathing
Positive social interactions (even a simple compliment to your local barista counts)

Make deep rest a part of your daily routine

Deep rest is when you allow yourself to rest physically and mentally, and it goes beyond your typical sleep at night.

Deep rest can look like:

Dedicated lunch breaks
Daily meditation
Pausing for 10 minutes after an intense work session
Weekends free of work

Essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider wrote about the ‘busy’ trap back in 2012 and emphasized the importance of rest in the form of idleness:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, (…) it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Don’t hesitate to take a vacation and longer breaks

When you’re a creator, switching off for a week or two might seem impossible.

But there are several ways to go about breaks—even while juggling a busy schedule:

Dave Nemetz, the co-founder of Bleacher Report, suggests taking a seasons approach like TV shows and podcasts do. Plan your season in advance and take scheduled breaks.
Rob Hardy, the creator behind Ungated, used the concept of seventh-week sabbaticals to build longer breaks into his work. The idea is simple: you work in a focused six-week sprint, take the seventh week off, and repeat.
Khe Hy, the creator and coach behind RadReads, took a two-month break from his weekly newsletter in summer 2021 when he began feeling exhausted

Khe Hy’s email announcing a two-month break.

The lesson? Experiment with different approaches to taking time off and find one that works best for you, your business, and your mental health. Both planned and unplanned breaks may be needed to help you feel your best.

Seek human connection

Human connection is the deep and meaningful bond between people that occurs when someone feels supported.

Strong social connections lower anxiety and depression, increase self-esteem, boost the immune system, and improve our overall emotional and physical well-being.

And while online businesses have many positives, they, unfortunately, lack the built-in communities that traditional jobs have, making it easy to stay in your bubble and lose a sense of connection to a community.

The remedy for this is intentionally connecting to other creators and building a support system for each other. Here are some ways to do that:

Start a text message group
Create a community on Facebook or Slack
Schedule virtual coffees
Join a coworking space

Regular self-reflection and taking on projects you love most

Engaging in self-reflection is when you examine your thoughts, behaviors, and actions. You can self-reflect on every aspect of your life, but when it comes to your business, ask yourself:

Do the projects you work on feel too challenging? Not challenging enough?
Do they fulfill you, or do you complete them because you feel like you have to?
Do you enjoy the projects you work on? Do you feel excited to get started, or do you have to drag your feet?

Regularly take time—every month or six weeks is a good check-in point—to look back on your recent projects and answer the above questions. This way, you can shift your goals before you’re emotionally exhausted.

And if an area of your business leaves you feeling unfulfilled, you might need to let that area go. Tara McMullin reminds us in her TEDx talk that this is okay. She says that as creators, we’re incentivized to create more and more forgettable content, but suggests an alternative way:

As business owners and creators, we can instead focus on the remarkable. (…) If creating remarkable experiences, results, products, or content can actually create the stability that you’re looking for, what’s preventing you from doing that?

Offload tasks from your plate

If there are certain tasks that don’t light you up—and you have a budget available—hand them over to virtual assistants, freelancers, or contractors.

To identify what you should outsource, you should first identify what you love, what can only be done by you, and what would be inauthentic if done by someone else. Then, begin brainstorming tasks to pass on to someone else.

Ideas for tasks you can hand over

Admin: meeting scheduling, inbox management, collecting testimonials, customer service, etc.
Accounting: bookkeeping, invoicing, tax preparation, payment collection, etc.
Operations: community management, website updates, monitoring comments, newsletter sending, video upload, social media scheduling, etc.
Content creation: research, outlining, editing, keyword research, social media captions, voiceovers, graphic design, etc.
Public relations and partnerships: pitching publications and podcasts, managing sponsors, etc.
Email marketing: general setup, automation set up and testing, tech stack integrations (check out Kit’s Certified Experts to find a VA who can help with email-related tasks)

Outsourcing has the potential to remove a significant chunk of mental load from your mind and free up space in your schedule.

Repurpose content several times

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create content. Instead, make it easier on yourself and take a piece of content you already have and turn it into several pieces of content for other platforms.

Here’s an example of how you can take a YouTube video and turn it into multiple pieces of content with AI:

Transcribe a YouTube video with AI
Turn the transcription into a blog post (light editing required) and embed the video within the blog post to direct readers to your YouTube channel
Extract the audio from the video for a podcast
Turn the YouTube video into several small video clips for platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn
Ask AI to create a summary of your blog post and use that summary for your newsletter to promote your YouTube video or blog post

After doing this process enough times, you’ll even have enough content to combine into bigger assets. Like multiple blog articles to make an ebook or multiple videos into a course.

Put your creator business on autopilot

Building a strong tech stack can defend you against burnout and keep your business online even when you need to unplug.

For example, social media schedulers let you schedule content to maintain an active presence without being glued to your phone.

And email marketing tools, like Kit, let you connect with your audience, even if you want to take days—or weeks—off.

Some useful Kit features include:

Landing pages to promote opt-ins and paid products
Creator Profile that acts as a website and showcases your brand 24/7
Kit Commerce to sell and promote products
Email marketing to schedule and send newsletters and email sequences
Automations to make certain tasks hands-off. Like this automation that handles upselling:

Plus, Kit integrates with many different tools—making it easy to incorporate it into your existing digital business tools.

You can do this—we promise

Healing from burnout doesn’t come with a tidy checklist you can work through when you have some spare time. Neither does burnout prevention.

Instead, it’s about understanding the mindset, schedule, and pressure that leads to it. It’s about rethinking and rewiring your approach to creative work so you can keep doing it, burnout-free, for many years to come.

Kit’s range of tools and automations can reduce your mental load so you can prioritize things like rest, reflection, and connection.

Give Kit a try for free, today.

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Dana Nicole

Dana is a freelance writer who works closely with B2B SaaS brands to create content people enjoy reading. When she’s not working, you’ll find her sipping on a warm cup of tea and reading a good book (the scarier, the better). See what she’s up to at www.dananicoledesigns.com (Read more by Dana)