Hey, my name’s Estefano and I’m actively pursuing YouTube content creation and Filmmaking. For a while now though, I haven’t been able to complete the tasks I wanted to and had no idea why.
Recently I’ve found myself in yet another creative slump. Hooray me!
For context, I have been creating content since I was around 14 years old, (I’ll be 22 later this year) and have never been the most consistent with it. Something I’ve wanted to change for the longest but had not figured a way to do so. Generally, in the past I would tend to ignore my emotions and moods as I was solely on a hell-bent mission to create content no matter what.
I wanted to see if it was possible that my moods were affecting my creative learning and output. Surely not… right?
The image you see above is a data visualization keeping track of my moods throughout a set of 6 days, and how much I got done those days compared to what I ideally would’ve wanted to get done. The thought process behind this experiment was to see if I could log how I felt throughout the course of those 6 days, and by analyzing the data, optimize and see how I can avoid these creative slumps I enter more often than I’d like to admit.
Collecting this data confirmed what I’ve already know for years but honestly avoided in an effort to just produce, produce and you guessed it… produce more content. The data in front of me was saying, “hey, slow down buddy”, and I decided enough was enough.
Something I’ve come to learn through this project and honestly, just being a creative my whole life is that our brains don’t work the same way other people’s do. Naturally, we are more sensitive people, and are more back and forth when it comes to our moods and emotions.
This project taught me to not necessarily attempt to super optimize my days in an effort to become the world’s most consistent and effective creator, but to accept myself for who I am and that is enough. That what I really need to be doing is just taking care of myself, taking breaks when I feel overwhelmed or demotivated so I can quickly come out of these slumps, rather than force myself to constantly work when I am already not having a good time doing it.
I’ve found that experiencing these negative emotions isn’t necessarily the worst thing either as I can use them as a creative catalyst.
For example: the day where I spent all day editing, feeling sad and demotivated but then the day after, I was suddenly inspired to work on my short film in the morning? It doesn’t really make sense on paper, but I used those emotions I was feeling the previous day to further develop some parts of the short film that required a darker, sadder tone and they came out pretty naturally! Something I probably would’ve struggled with more if I didn’t experience those emotions.
If you’re reading this and are an aspiring creative like me, struggling with creative slumps and burnout, I encourage you to take a look and ask yourself: “I am setting unrealistic expectations for myself?” and “Am I really doing the best thing I can for myself?”.
Taking the time to understand this can help you to become a better creator, leading you to more happiness, and by accepting your imperfections, you’re just that one step closer to perfection.
Whatever that means.
