Sometimes, a life of constantly creating can start to feel monotonous. You’ve brainstormed ideas, constantly put in the work, and executed them to a point of personal satisfaction. One day, you find yourself hitting a plateau. You tell yourself how much you need to keep working hard on your craft, but nothing seems to meet your satisfaction. As a result, you wear yourself out in an attempt to reclaim your creative mojo only to find out that the solutions to finding the answer is in not looking for it at all. If you’re currently stuck in a creative rut, here are some ways on how taking breaks can actually help your creativity.
1. Taking a Break can help you Reevaluate your Goals
Taking a break can provide you the necessary time to reevaluate your personal, professional, and creative goals. We only have so much time in a given day. Using that time to balance out your personal and professional lives can get cumbersome and lead to burnout, unorganized projects and can even affect personal relationships.
Take a break!
According to Elite Business Magazine, disregarding breaks in-between long periods of productivity can result in “mental-blocks”. This can also cause your imagination to naturally lock down and lead to you to dead-ends when trying to come up with creative solutions.
When you take a break, you give your brain the opportunity to relax and recharge. This helps you come back with a fresh perspective and gives your brain time to process what it has learned over time. It also gives you time away from whatever frustrations that may be plaguing your mind while working on something, allowing them to slip away so they don’t interfere with your work later on.
Finally, taking a break can help you reevaluate your goals whether it be creative, personal or professional. Is this really what I’m aiming for? Is this or that really necessary to do? etc. -Answers to all of your problems can sometimes magically appear from thin air by easily hitting the pause button.
2. Taking Breaks can Benefit your Mental Health
Sometimes we are so immersed in the thing we are creating, that we forget to take care of ourselves. A benefit of taking a break is that it can help improve your mental health. Dedicated people tend to forget to eat, sleep, and sometimes even breathe while they create. The lack of physical health can eventually lead to the breaking-down of ones mental health.
(I’ve been there and done that)
Reward yourself with some time off to care for yourself. This can be done through meditation, going on a vacation or spending a day near the ocean. Whatever way you chose to spend it, do it with an intention of self-love, self-care and pure enjoyment of life.
There’s nothing more satisfying than working on a project with a clear and refreshed mind.
3. Opportunities to Learn Something New
Repetitive tasks can sometimes lead you to stray away from your passions in life. If you’re feeling that way about your craft, take a break to learn something new!
During the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic, I took a break for a few months from photography. It wasn’t because we were on lock-down, but because that anything I photographed didn’t seem to spark that flame that I once felt before.
So, for about a year I decided to learn new things! I finished 1 self-help book a week and enrolled in free online courses to help me with the business side of my photography. I even started to learn how to paint. (To be honest, I almost gave up on my photography because of it.)
When I decided to pick up a camera again, it was as if that feeling I got from the first time photographing something, came back. It brought me joy and excitement again, reigniting that flame I once felt before. Most importantly, it gave me a new perspective on my work, what needed to be improved and they ways that I could do so.
Taking a break can provide you with an opportunity to learn something new. Use it to your advantage especially if this break is from something you were once passionate about. You never know what new skills and knowledge you can gain from it.
Conclusion
So, the next time you’re in a creative rut, take a break! Go for a walk, take a swim at the beach, jump on a plane and fly to another state, or decide to learn something new. Forget about creating, event if its for a little while and you’ll be surprised how much more creative you will feel when you finally come back to it. I hope you were able to take back something from my article on how taking breaks can acually help you creativity. If you questions or comments, reach out to me info@raymondenriquez.com