As a blogger, there’ll come a time when you feel burned out. You don’t feel like going further or maybe you do but you’re tired. Burnout can go beyond physical exertion, burnout can be a mental phenomenon in which despite having a good night’s rest, you still feel too emotionally tired to take on the load.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how you can deal with burnout as a blogger.
Table of Contents
1. Slow down on producing content
As long as you’re still making progress, you should be proud of yourself. You don’t have to produce one blog post after another without stopping.
Trust me, I’ve done that and the result is burnout and some time off from blogging (which in itself isn’t a bad thing).
Take it easy. Take it slow. Any progress is good. No need to rush here. Sure, producing more blog posts will take you to full-time blogging sooner but you’ll also have to take into account how much more stress you’d incur if you were to not give yourself enough time to take breaks in between.
When you feel burnout, you don’t have a stop and take a one-month hiatus away from blogging, instead, simply slow down your blogging speed and once you feel a bit better, you can speed it up again.
2. Take a break to do something you like
It’s important to take some time out of the day to do something you like every day so you don’t feel like all you do is make sacrifices.
Sure you may like blogging but it’d still be beneficial to do something else that you enjoy doing when you’re feeling burnout rather than continuing on with blogging.
3. Take a nap or meditate
The idea of taking a nap or meditating is to give your brain a break from being overly stimulated.
When you’re creating content for your blog, you’re thinking a lot. You may be doing quite a bit of research too. All of those activities take energy away from your brain, it clouds your brain and makes you unable to remember what it is like when your brain isn’t actively working all the time.
Taking a nap or meditating can help your brain rewire and detox from all the stress you’ve been getting while working so hard.
Active resting means actually allowing your brain a chance to relax. On the other hand, if you’re taking the act of playing video games and scrolling social media as resting, you’d never actually give your brain a break.
So go ahead, take a guilt-free nap.
4. Give yourself more time if you need to
If you’re like me, you have a schedule to hit with the number of articles to produce by a certain time. Maybe your plan also involves other aspects of blogging such as how many backlinks you should achieve by a specific time or how many emails you should send out by a specific time.
Give yourself more time if you need to so instead of stressing out over deadlines, and feeling burnout because you can’t produce articles fast enough, allow yourself more time to finish.
Some people would give up altogether when they can’t hit their original target. It can feel very disappointing when you realize that you aren’t going to reach your number in time, but it’s important to remember the phrase, “Shoot for the moon, land amongst the star”. Shooting high means landing high so even if you can’t reach as high as you planned, you still did land higher than you would’ve had you aimed low.
Plan all you want but go with the flow. Adjust if you have to. There are days when your plans get derailed and you just aren’t able to produce as many articles as you had hoped.
Maybe you had to run to the store to replace something and it took away the time you could’ve used to write more content for your blog.
Maybe you had to attend to family duty.
Perhaps you have a work assignment you’ve yet to complete so you have to devote your time to it.
You see, we can’t expect what is going to happen. All we can do is try our best to plan and adjust when needed.
Don’t give yourself too hard of a time if you didn’t reach there in time. Give yourself some more time. It’s okay to take a bit longer to get there (or a lot longer if you got valid excuses).
5. Don’t be perfectionistic with your blog posts
It’s easy to get stuck on a blog post because you think it has to be perfect. You may want to prepare the best graph for your blog, make it 3000 words long, and make it the absolute best article on the topic there is out there.
And it is true, that you should strive to have all your blog posts be high-quality but you don’t have to try to get all of them to be the best.
In fact, many blog posts that are found on the first page of Google aren’t the best. They are shown on the first page of Google because they have a high DA score among other reasons. The more external websites that link to your blog posts the higher the DA score would be.
You don’t need to have a perfect blog post, you just have to focus on making it high quality. Don’t go overboard. There are other aspects of blogging you should take care of as well.
6. Go dress up and make yourself look more presentable
The only makeup I wear is my eyebrows and lipsticks but even that seems too much work for me when I’m busy with my blog.
I’d stay up all night, take a quick nap, and continue producing content for the rest of the day among other responsibilities I have.
For a while, I barely look at myself in the mirror or take any selfies (which is very abnormal for someone my age), didn’t really style my hair at all, and mostly had my hair up in a ponytail… I simply didn’t have the time to do all that stuff.
The point is, sometimes we can be so caught up with the work that we neglect to take care of ourselves.
Sort of like many women who used to dress up and make themselves look prettier with makeup, carefully styled hair, and hand-picked outfits every day until one day they stopped caring, and when they finally decide on a night out away from the kids, they’re shocked by what they see in the mirror.
Yea that’s no fun.
You may have other responsibilities that are on your plate that can quickly eat up all your time for you to have any left for anything else such as making yourself look prettier or more handsome.
All I’m suggesting is to take some time when you’re burnout from blogging to do some skincare routine, brush your hair, take a bath, put on some perfume/cologne, maybe style your hair differently, and put on some nice looking clothes. This should be a daily occurrence too.
Taking better care of your appearance can make you feel more energized.
You can then continue on with the work.
Final thought
As I’m typing this, it is 4:27 am. I’ve been up since midnight. Haven’t taken any break at all. You can tell what inspired me to start writing this article.
I have many responsibilities, blogging is just one of them. I try to carve out as much time as I can muster to work on this because it’s important to me. Blogging is my passion and I hope to make it another source of full-time income for me in the near future. Which means a lot of work.
I have to persevere. I have to keep on going. I think you know that feeling and I hope you continue on like I’m planning on doing with this blog.
Good luck!
