Student Blog: I'm Watching It Burn(out)

Hi everyone! For those who are new, welcome to my blog. For those who are returning, thanks for coming back! 

This month, I want to talk about burnout. I deal with it a lot. It’s hard to keep chipping away at a project and not get tired. My biggest advice is to take breaks. Make sure you’re allowing yourself time to rest, so that you don’t get burnt out as fast. 

Chunk your project up into bits and schedule them ahead of time. This way, you’re not cramming six hours of work consecutively, which would burn you out faster. 

Bring yourself back to the root of why you love to do what you do. This will reinvigorate your passion and help you get rid of burnout. What I like to do is go see a show, because watching a performance reminds me what my goals are, and that my projects are helping me achieve these goals. 

It doesn’t have to be a big and expensive thing like taking yourself to a show. It can be listening to a song sung by a role you want to play. I’d advise making an anti-burnout playlist. This can be anything from songs that get you pumped up to songs that you like in the background while you work to songs that inspire you. Tailor it to your needs.

Sometimes you just need to take a self care day to reset. Do a face mask and ban yourself from thinking about work. Not only will you get rid of burnout, but coming back to work refreshed will give you a better quality of work than if you had trudged through. Do an activity that you enjoy that is also totally unrelated to your work. Make sure it’s low key so you can still recharge your work and social batteries.

I experienced a lot of burnout this summer. I was memorizing line after line for a scene I had to do the next day, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I hate memorizing. I thought that I was losing sight of my original goals because of it and that I couldn’t do this for a living. However, I took a break over the weekend and reset myself. I realized that I still love acting, but I needed to stop doing work at the last minute because it causes burnout for me.  What I needed was to breathe, take things one day at a time, and schedule my time better.

Know that burnout isn’t the end of the world. It’s a perfectly natural feeling that everyone gets. You’re not losing passion for your art, you simply need a break so that you can come back more creative than ever. Like any other part of the body, the brain gets tired when you use it a lot, so you have to rest it sometimes to keep it at peak performance.

Thank you for reading and remember to take care of yourself this month. I’m sending all my love!