Preventing Musical Burnout
Musical burnout Is a very real and unfortunate problem you could face as a musician. Burnouts can make creating music significantly less enjoyable. You may find yourself with a diminished work drive. If you find yourself facing issues like nothing seems “good enough”, tasks (even simple ones) take you longer to complete than they used to, or you find yourself becoming more impatient over time you may be suffering from musical burnout. Luckily there are ways to prevent this from happening.
Musical burnout can occur for a number of reasons such as overloading yourself. While it’s good to strive and work hard to achieve your goals, if you push too hard, or essentially allot music to completely envelop your entire life it could lead to a complete and total burnout. In this case, music can be thought of as a spice, it should be used to flavor your life not overpower it. The amount of this ‘musical spice’ a person can handle in their lives differs from person to person, some people can take the maximum heat while others prefer it mild. It’s important to know yourself and your limits.
Burnout can also occur because of others. If you put all your energy into trying to make something (like your band) work without the desired results, eventually you may find yourself not caring anymore. Relationships (even those between band members) work best if all parties are working together and it can be difficult to sustain if members are unhappy or uncooperative, but that’s where communication comes in. And not just surface conversation. All parties need to be able to speak openly and honestly with one another, as well as compromise if needed, to solve the underlying issue.
Preventing Burnout is all well and good but how do you cure it if you’re already going through it? This will be a challenge that you may face at some point in your career, however, it’s completely possible to overcome. Firstly, find some other things you enjoy, take up a new hobby this may help balance you out. To help conceptualize it think of it like you scraped your knee, it’s bleeding and hurts. All of your attention is on that knee. Now let’s say that you get your wound dressed and someone hands you a tasty treat to snack on for being such a trooper. Suddenly you start to forget about the pain as your attention is shifted to the tasty treat you’re eating. Before you know it, you don’t notice the pain as much and little by little it starts to heal. You have to address the issue of your burnout (dressing the wound). Leaving your wound (burnout) to fester will only make it worse in the long run.
Another thing you can do that will help is finding something about music that you genuinely enjoy. One of the problems with having a career in something you love is motivation. Basically, humans have two different types of motivation, one is self-driven (because we want it) and the other is driven by outside forces (like social expectations or earning money). When you started learning music, creating beats or whatever you did, it was probably really fun but that fun may have started to dwindle when it became your livelihood. It is possible to fix this but it essentially entails altering your thinking of what you’re doing doesn’t seem like work.
Hopefully, you never experience musical burnout, but if you ever do we at Quality Key hope it’s short-lived and you’re able to do what you enjoy.