Video Games Show Us the Way -- Respite

For the next several weeks, our Wednesday posts will focus on lessons learned from 18-year-old Kevin Birrell, a Grand Master at the exalted game of Tetris.  You can read all about Kevin and his accomplishment here.

We all know the feeling of working on something too much, too hard, for too long.  Your brain gets fuzzy and your thoughts don't quite seem to connect like they should.  You find yourself getting physically weary, even if what you're doing has almost no physical component.  What once was a source of joy starts to become something you dread.

It used to be called burn-out; I don't know, it might still.  I've felt it on numerous occasions, and despite knowing full well what I ought to do to fix it, I -- and I think a great many other people -- fight it and do just the opposite.

Whenever the burn-out happens, the absolute best thing to do, hands down, is to take a break.  Depending on what it is you're doing and how long you've been doing it, it might be a break as short as five minutes or as long as several months or years.  It's a simple, simple think to do -- whatever you were doing before, just don't do it for a time.  Yet we fight this not-doing tooth and nail.

Here's how the thinking goes.  You've been working on something for a while -- say composing a piece of music -- and things have started to go stale.  You're having trouble figuring out where the melody should go next, the harmonies just don't seem right, and, in a very telling moment, you realize you've just included a note-for-note transcription of the theme song for The Office.  What you should do is take a break.

"But," your brain says, "I'm so close!  If I just keep going, push past this, fight it, I'll get through to the other side."  That's like swimming underwater and thinking that if you just keep going, stay under the water a little longer, you'll stop needing oxygen.

Breaks allow our brains and bodies time to regroup, to get things sorted out, to get ready for us once more to do ... whatever we're doing.  If breaks weren't important, why would our bodies need to take one every 16 hours or so, one that lasts for a full third of every day?

Still, knowing you should take a break is one thing; taking it is something else entirely.  From a creative standpoint, what should you do?

• Get up and walk away.  I can compose really well for about an hour at a time, maybe a little bit more.  At that point, all my ideas start to go south and my mind starts to wander.  So, I get up from the computer, go into the kitchen, maybe grab a snack.  Or I go out to check for mail.  Or I read for five or ten minutes.  Just this brief break is enough to let my mind recover from what I've been asking of it, and when I come back, the ideas will come once more.
• Work on a different project.  Many times, I'm working on two or three or more projects simultaneously so that, if I grow tired of one, I can jump to another.  Especially if they're very different sorts of projects, I can still be productive while giving my brain a break from a specific piece.
• Take a vacation.  Vacations are important, even when you don't go anywhere.  I'll talk more at some point about the importance to your creativity of taking an actual vacation, but the sort of vacation I'm talking about here is just a short break -- a day, a week, a month -- away from the creative pursuit of your choice.  Every year, I find times where I'm forced to take just such a "vacation" from my composing, and when I do, I always find myself itching to get back to the keyboard to start working again. 

As you look at your creative projects -- and even your non-creative projects -- see if you're feeling burnt out and if a little break or change of scenery would make things better.  If you think it would, don't fight it -- just take a break.  It's one of the hardest things you'll ever do, but also one of the most rewarding.