thoughts on design burnout.

(and how I'm managing it this time round).

It’s time to sit down at the computer for work and there’s a pit of dread in my stomach. I feel nauseous. The oximeter on my finger is reading at a “resting” heart rate of 102. Too high. I can feel it. The anxiety is all consuming and I have to push through it to be able to get any work turned in for clients.

Have you experienced anything similar? This was all too familiar to me over the second half of last year, when I was required to work through long covid. It’s the purest manifestation of my burnout on design and being a designer, especially a designer that can handle “high-level” branding/packaging/web projects on my own. And now, after nearly month of being incredibly sick, I’m experiencing it again.

Recovering from burnout isn’t linear and I have no doubt that being so acutely ill over July dredged up a lot of the baggage of long covid. And so I once again find myself in a place where the act of designing gives me a physical reaction of anxiety. I’m writing this essay both in hoping to find some catharsis from writing it out but also to share some of the toolkit I developed for myself to help myself get out of this state. It’s different now from when I had long covid: I feel I have coping mechanisms to draw on to ease my stress.

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I wrote this first introduction when I thought I was well for the second time (so, in between my second and third round of antibiotics) and now, as I’ve been sick for approximately 40 days, this draft has been in my Substack for weeks. I’m (embarrassingly!) finding it even hard to talk about my burnout. It feels intimidating not just to do design work, but also to write this first Substack back from my impromptu hiatus. It feels scary to send an email again, to try and achieve a sense of normal when my last month and a half have been anything but.

It’s hard to lose a routine. I’ve been writing weekly essays here since February or March and now I’ve opened and closed this one more times than I can count. Nothing’s changed from the introduction: I still feel pretty damn burned out, now I’m just struggling to find the words to share about it too, as I know that actually getting back into a routine, trying to get on the bandwagon again of sending weekly Substacks is actually more likely than not a step towards not feeling that way. Substack has been a place of joy and I love writing these essays, it just is a bit harder right now. The gears are a little rusty, but it’s time to get them turning again. Hiding away from this draft won’t help me feeling any better about being gone so long!

It’s hard to fall out of the little routines of your life: before getting sick I was working out regularly for the first time in my life and it feels like a personal failing to have been wrenched away from those routines, even though I couldn’t control it at all.

Which I suppose brings me to some of the things I’ve been trying to implement even before feeling 100% better (antibiotics are funny that way where you start feeling better right away, just as long as it’s the right one).

Practical Realities of Managing Burnout

Too often the advice for getting over burnout is “Outsource!” or “Only do what you love!”, which is all fine and dandy if you have a comfortable amount of money to spare on outsourcing to pay someone fairly and sustainably. I honestly don’t have the money to do that. I’m the sole breadwinner for my family of my husband and our cat and I don’t have much luxury to take an extended “finding myself” leave and it involves managing balancing enough work to pay the bills while being able to take more time than myself. And this in itself can feel and did feel exhausting and overwhelming.

The idea of working on more than one client project or request at once felt like an absolutely impossible task mentally and emotionally. I had to turn a lot of work away during the last month as I knew I was at my limit with two projects as it was (even though one was just a powerpoint design). I don’t regret doing that at all; a previous version of me would have tried to work through the illness and suffered deeply for it. I had the confidence and clarity this time to be able to turn away work I knew I couldn’t sustainably handle.

Toolkit #1: Morning Pages

One of the best tricks I picked up while trying literally everything to feel like myself again post-covid was doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Everyone recommends this and I decided to give it a try. I can’t say I was a huge fan of the work as a whole, a lot of the prompts and questions felt repetitive, unrelatable (as the author has a lot of rich person privilege of being in rich ppl circles in big cities), or too consumerist focused (a lot of them wanted you to buy stuff and I did not want to do that). But I absolutely loved the concept of morning pages.

Every morning first thing you write 3 pages of stream of consciousness writing. It doesn’t matter what you write: whatever is on your mind. To-do lists, complaints, worries, anxieties, miscellaneous thoughts, no matter what, just keep writing for three pages and brain-dump everything onto the page. And then you never have to look back on it or read it again. But I found this practice extremely therapeutic when I had long covid for bringing clarity to both my individual days and my general outlook and goals. I could feel the difference when I skipped a day: I was agitated, unfocused, and prone to more distraction or upset.

I’ve brought out the morning pages again during this time and it’s again helped me sort my feelings on how to return to Substack, how I need to be kind to my body that’s struggling against a bacterial infection and how pushing it won’t work out well for me. If you’ve never given it a try, I highly recommend it with any notebook you have lying around. It feels uncomfortable at first, but I find the mental-load I carry is hugely relieved by just writing and venting and rambling about whatever shit is bouncing around in my brain first thing in the morning.

Toolkit #2: Quitting Social Media

I did it. I finally did it. I quit Instagram. Without much fanfare honestly. Before, I wrote a long post on how much I was hating Instagram but was scared to leave.

I hate Instagram. But I feel I can't leave...

Shortly after writing that post, I tried to do some more posts on Instagram but it felt like the algorithm changed YET AGAIN to make any post reach to my followers AND new viewers nearly impossible (I started reaching 50-80 of 2,300 people.) After a few experiments and then a reel that also performed like shit, I decided to just straight up leave it be and wrote in my bio I moved to substack.

I regret nothing. I deleted the app off my phone. I don’t have TikTok. I barely have Facebook and now that the Canadian government banned news on Meta (lol), I see no news now (other than what I look at on my preferred leftist news outlets). I feel gloriously oblivious to so much of the doomscroll and fuckery of the internet that brings your mental health down.

Toolkit #3: The Help of a Friend

This one’s perhaps unrelatable in some ways as it’s not accessible to everyone and is unique to my situation, but I want to mention it anyway. I’m doing branding subcontract work under my dear friend

Gabrielle Merite

where the pressures of interacting with the client and selling the concept to them, processing revisions etc, is not on my plate. I’m doing strictly behind-the-scenes work for her and she’s been absolutely the sweetest and kindest. We’re doing work in Figma together and she comes over and comments things like this on my designs.

me, being kinda emotional bts cuz so nice

It feels very safe and she was really encouraging even when I told her I was scared to work on the project (and lowkey tried to reject it first from anxiety). She believed in me, and her trust was everything. I still don’t know that I could do a brand project on my own right now, but her unshakable confidence in me and support has been invaluable to helping ease the anxiety.

There’s a lot of ways to be a freelance designer or “business owner” and I’ve realized that what’s best for my mental health and comfort isn’t always about being the one who’s shouldering the responsibility of large, high-stakes projects like brands or websites. Sometimes the right option for me is just help out behind the scenes. It doesn’t have the glitz and glam of taking on these projects yourself, but I’d take a happy co-design relationship with a supportive friend who needs assistance any day over the “prestige” of stressing out over complex projects on my own.

And of course, it would be remiss not to mention just simply how a supportive friend can make scary things feel not so scary anymore.

She writes a lovely substack herself, I highly recommend giving it a follow.

Toolkit #4: Prioritizing Joy

This one might seem a little oversimplified or cheesy, but I find when I get burned out it’s hard for me to even make the time for what brings me joy because I feel a crippling pressure of responsibility to complete [x] task that is required of me before I’m “allowed” to do something fun.

I’ve been trying to do things differently this time being sick. I’ve been allowing myself fun first instead of tiring myself out doing the obligatory thing first and not having enough energy left over for the thing that sparks joy.

This has looked like making time to go to the museum to sketch and see a behind the scenes tour on a workday, writing for my personal publication, The Strandline before returning here, and taking a lot of time to read fun things like romcom shoujo manga and picking up A Court of Thorns and Roses which is objectively badly written but very fun in my current state if I turn off my brain.

I’ve also been superbly enjoying the “Seek” app by iNaturalist that uses your phone camera and an AI to live-ID creatures, plants, and more as you see them! It’s really neat watching the ID come up right away and you can save the photo and catalogue that creature or plant into your iNaturalist account and Seek species library. It gives you little challenges to find nature in your area and broader challenges you can participate in along with others too. I used to have no clue what any of the plants around me were on walks, and now, through continued usage of Seek, I feel like I have a much deeper and more nuanced understanding and relationship to the environment around me. Not that I’ve been able to go out on walks that much while sick, but when I have, it’s brought a lot of joy.

Anyone that hangs around me long enough knows that I love anime and manga. I always have since I was a teenager and discovered it and then spent time in my later young-adult years feeling that this hobby was embarrassing and cringe and I had to kill it to be a “proper adult” and tried to hide this part of myself for a long time. This recent year I’ve started to really embrace my joy of this hobby again and it feels freeing and wonderful. Like I’m really able to reconnect with a part of myself again honestly and authentically. While I was sick, I was reading manga on my phone and discovered a manga entirely around deep sea marine biology. Each chapter features a storyline around a unique creature and the whole experience was honestly so joyful it was a hugely bright spot in a very rough period of time. And the art is just stunning:

In this season of my life, I’m embracing what I love even if that’s cheesy romance stories, japanese manga, awkward, tentative amateur watercolour art or being a huge naturalist nerd. Noticeably, none of these things sparking joy are about design, but that’s for another ramble ;)

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to resume a weekly pace in August. I’m going to make a good faith effort towards it, but after being sick for so long, I want to give myself also the space I need to not go into the fall and seasonal depression time in a better head space.

I have more thoughts on this space, the course I developed and how my feelings have developed around that experience, and what I think might make sense for my design and educational content going forward, but perhaps I’ll save that for another letter.

September seems absolutely lovely for weekly emails again, but I’m going to take August as it comes: it might look like weekly emails or perhaps just one more this month. All I can promise is that I’m working on things, and I will return to a weekly schedule in Fall as I loved the routine and being engaged here and know returning will bring me great joy over the long-term.

Thanks for being here and supporting this publication. It’s the first time I’ve really been “writing” as a core portion of my career. And I’m really loving it. Seeing people follow this space gives me a huge amount of joy, and I’m really looking forward to how this space will evolve in the second half of the year.

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What are your best toolkit pieces for recovering from burnout? What have you learned from previous or current burnout experiences?

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Essays I’m working on (or at least, attempting to chip away at):

• A close look into ecobrutalist architecture and design: What it is? Is it truly sustainable? How might it help us re-envision a sustainable future?

• An honest discussion of business finances and expenses and the peer-pressure around buying design assets often found in the online design community. (ie: No, you don’t need that font!).

• Some thoughts/rambles about whether or not it’s possible to be an “ethical” or “sustainable” brand designer for product-based businesses and how dizzying the world of brand design can be at times.

• Plans for the Green Graphic Design course for this year.

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Thank you for reading!