We all get burnt out.
Honestly, if you haven’t yet, I applaud you. This industry is notorious for creating work ethics and hyper-focused mindsets that can be incredibly unsustainable.
And that inevitably leads to those times where you say “I just can’t create today” or “I haven’t felt inspired in weeks” or “I’m not even looking forward to making music”.
Being there myself in the past, I’ve seen these signs in myself and in other people. Hopefully, if this resonates true with you, you can take a few moments this coming week to give yourself some space from your creative world and fight the burnout!
Feeling Absolutely Drained During “Fun” Tasks
You should be incredibly excited to create or write music. We all (hopefully) make music to relieve stress and work through situations and difficulty in our lives. And I understand not every songwriting session is going to be super fun, creating can be stressful at moments, but overall it should be a personally gratifying experience. At its core, we should get a net positive from creating, and if you are losing that sense of fulfillment in your music something is wrong.
You Lack Focus When Creating
This echoes the above sentiment in a sense. Since making music is a fun process, you should be, for the most part, very focused on that task as you do it. It should be immersive, all-encompassing, and deserve your undivided attention. But constantly as I have felt burnout arise, staying focused on the most enjoyable tasks becomes impossible and every excuse my mind can think of to divert attention will slowly arise.
(Bad) Preoccupation With Music Every Moment
Yes, we are an obsessive group of creators in the music industry, and often times it’s not a negative to be obsessively thinking of a new song you wrote, a new idea you had, or how awesome last band practice was. The line that drips over into negativity arises when the obsessive thoughts turn obsessively negative. Having a distracted and unfocused session, then thinking over how unproductive the session was at your job all day, and unable to get out of these unproductive thought patterns.
I see the connection we have with music as a relationship. It needs to be looked at, managed, discussed, re-evaluated, and modified as you grow as a human. Just like any person-to-person relationship, it can be the best thing in the world, or it can become incredibly toxic and destructive to your day to day life.
What to do with burnout is an entirely different concept and perhaps next weeks topic 😛 But being able to recognize that it’s happening is incredibly powerful. More than anything, commit to a full day away from it. It’s amazing how quickly the passion and hunger comes back with some time away.
I made a video that is balancing the line of comedy and information on this topic, and some of my more personal experience with burnout and how it affected my world. You can check it out below!
JOHN MCLUCAS
John McLucas is a full-time pop/rock music producer, mixing engineer, and content creator in Los Angeles California. He’s worked with professionals from all corners of the music industry, including Grammy Winning Engineer Dennis MacKay (Judas Priest, George Martin, David Bowie), Joey Sturgis Tones, Unstoppable Recording Machine, and Oculus VR. His strength is in coming up with unique creative concepts in both audio and visual mediums for his clients, corporate and personal.
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