Do you remember Britney circa 2007?

Poor Britney. After a pile-on of drug abuse, broken hearts, show glitches and raising two kids, she lost it. She went postal.

Burnout is America’s favorite spectator sport. We regard it as justice. It’s the price people pay for flying too close to the sun, for daring to toe that line between greatness and madness.

But for those possessed by the creative spirit, whether you be an artist, writer, designer, hacker, company builder—what choice do you have but to try? As much as you might fear the fall, you are tantalized by the riches, by the truths you might discover.

And so it seems we are destined to live a life of risk: rise up as geniuses or shave our heads and smash things with a green umbrella.

The big lie we all buy into

All of this sounds natural, yin and yang, good and evil, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. The universe must have balance and we are but paltry strugglers under Mother Nature’s heel.

Except nature doesn’t want us to conform to one solution. Nature wants us to try weird and novel things that might work better. Do you think if we were supposed to maintain a status quo that she would have arrived at these animals?

We are not struggling against Mother Nature when we try to make great things. She’s on our side. You have to believe that she is watching, delighting in the fact that you may be making the blobfish of payment systems. Absurdity is a state of nature.

But even with her blessing, you’re probably struggling in a different way. Nothing comes for free. If you’re doing it right, what you are trying to do is not for free. It only appears effortless when done correctly, after hours and hours of trials and tears. Ballerinas look like they are hovering in space on their elegant little pinkie toes. Have you ever seen a ballerina’s feet? I’ll spare you the visuals, but a quick Google search will tell you all you need to know.

Those who haven’t been all the way through the gauntlet derive the easy illusion from all of this. You are born to paint, born to lead. Nineteen-year-olds spend a night coding and make billions overnight. In creating our beauties, our truths, we create our demise. We hide the ugly struggle, so everyone else forgets what we go through.

And so burnout usually manifests:

Life is dandy and I’m doing awesome stuff!

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Hmm. I feel weird, but life’s still good. Who am I to complain?

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HOLY SHIT THE HOUSE IS BURNING DOWN RUN RUN RUN

You’ve caught me on a good day. Today, I’m an optimist. I think it’s possible to ride the first two steps of this roller coaster without teetering into full burnout.

How to recognize burnout earlier

The scary thing about burnout is that it only manifests as an epic meltdown after you’ve clicked past the sanity marker.

I quit my job this year to go freelance. I’m very happy and I’m blessed with wonderful, clever clients. I’m writing this post at 1pm on a workday and I don’t have to ⌘-tab if anybody walks by. By all accounts, I am free.

But I have this strange urge to run away. I dream heavily of hiding in the woods. I have to choke down my lizard brained flight response when a friend asks me if I want to co-work, reminding myself that they’re not trying to own me. And so, despite being happy and doing work I’m proud to put my name on, I realize I am still burned out.

What are some ways to recognize burnout early?

You spend most of your free time on cures

Do you depend on any of the following for your sanity: Caffeine, vacation days, heavy drinking, venting to friends, hoarding electronic gadgets, gorging yourself, womanizing/manizing, frequent massages, videos of cute puppies, recreational drugs…

Note the for your sanity bit. Power to you if you light one up once in a while, but if you’re doing it to escape, to cure yourself of something, you should take note.

Cures mean something is wrong. You don’t take a cure for a bad heart unless you fear you have a bad heart. If you find you’re getting out of breath climbing the stairs, you can reach for a pill or stop eating hamburgers for every meal.

You are terrified that you’re going to fail

Recall the noble blobfish. I like to imagine that Nature evolved it and then laughed her ass off. And then she moved on and was like, okay, I learned something, better luck next fish.

She’s still Mother Nature.

The reality of our comfy first world situation is that we can bounce back from most failures. You lost 15% of signups by changing something on the homepage? Well, I hope to God that you learned something. Take note. Try again.

We are afraid to fail when we believe we don’t have much gas left in the tank. Afraid that this time could be the time that ruins us, because a comeback’s not in our cards.

That pessimism, my friend, is deep burnout.

You are too busy to be present

There are two kinds of busy. There’s anxious busy and what I like to call Katamari busy.

Anxious busy is when you put in more hours and it seems to have no effect. When you’re too scared to go out for dinner because you should be cramming extra productivity into every waking minute.

Katamari busy is when you are alive with the love of your craft, and every new little thing seems a wondrous detail to integrate into your being. It’s when you can’t stop talking about how exciting your work is, and are curious about others’ work because it inspires you to roll up another cow or ferris wheel.

Anxious busy is eating at your desk. Katamari busy is eating at a cafe and then staying up til 3am because you thought of something exciting to take your project to the next level. Anxious busy reduces you, Katamari busy makes you bigger and stronger.

What to do about burnout

Don’t panic! Burnout is totally natural, and it doesn’t have to destroy you. There’s no shame in recognizing that you are close to hitting the wall. Caught early, it can be a great reminder to cool your jets a little and assess what’s really important.

Remember what drives you

Burnout comes with insecurity. How did I let this happen to me? Why doesn’t anybody else have the problems I’m having? Am I so shit that I was driven so easily off the path?

Nahhh. You’re golden. Every person has a kernel of truth in them that is ever-evolving. There is something that drove you this far. Beating burnout is not so much an act of discovery as an act of remembering.

For me, it’s stories. If you tell me a good one, I’ll suspend all disbelief for a while and get swept up in it. It’s the reason I went into design and why I like to write things. It’s important to me to be able to use images and words in a way that speaks to people. So I am interested in many ways of making. Logos, interfaces, writing, illustration...

But I get caught up sometimes. At low points I let the talk of long shadows, flat vs. skeu, UI vs. UX and metrics distract me.

Treat all these things as tools. They are fun to learn and deserve respect, but you have something higher you’re trying to get at. Maybe you are very unlike me and want to specialize. Maybe you want to be the best visual artist because you believe beauty is the only thing that separates us from the animals. Maybe you let the wireframes and sitemaps fall away a little bit.

If you don’t know what that kernel is, you need to spend some serious time by yourself, thinking about everything you’ve done and what’s made you happy. This is grueling work and there isn’t a shortcut. But you need to know what motivates you, and the ultimate decision is yours alone.

And remember that you’re ever changing. This can be the kernel for now. Try it on.

Swallow your pride and talk about burnout earlier

Burnout starts creative, but it will bleed into how you interact with your kids, your friends, your parents. Keeping silent won’t help anybody. I know, we all want to play the stoic pioneer, but that’s not always in our cards.

By talking about burnout, you give others permission to recognize their own burnout. We all help each other become a little less focused on being bulletproof. It’s part of the process, and you have to talk about it to conquer it.

Start a burnout fund

A burnout fund is as important as a rainy day fund. As no one in history ever said, the latter keeps you from dying, the former keeps you from crying. You want to give yourself as few excuses as possible for not addressing your burnout. Not being able to take an unpaid month off to explore the Pacific Northwest or build a giant Burning Man art car certainly slows things down.

And if you discover your job is burning you out, you need the freedom to fix that situation without worrying if your cat or kid will have supper on the table.

Do this far before you are burnt out. You never know when you’ll need it.

How do you know when it’s over?

Sometimes it’s sudden. Sometimes you are laughing at a joke and you realize you’re back on top. Other times, the blend of good to bad shifts day by day until you’re out of the woods.

The main thing you’ll notice is that you’re not on defense anymore. You won’t spend time thinking about protecting what you have, but rather, creating the new.

And because you can never get enough Britney, remember: