S3 E24: Moving Forward Creatively in Low Power Mode
Whether your creative energy is depleted after a big event or you’ve been swimming in burnout for a while, this episode will help support you in moving forward at whatever pace feels sustainable, practicing compassionate productivity. Listen in to learn some quick and easy-to-implement ways to take some of the physical and mental load off while you’re recovering, so you can get back to feeling like your best self and channel that energy into moving forward with your most important creative projects, even in low power mode.
If you need some encouragement, you can always send me a note. I'm always here for little pep talks, and I'm rooting for you!
RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Sign up for the Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge
Beware the Digital Munchies
Plant Nanny app
Self compassion meditations from Dr. Kristin Neff
Insight Timer meditation app
MORE FROM REBECCA
Rise Above the Overwhelm - laser-focused 1-time coaching sessions
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Season 3, Episode 24 of Being A Whole Person. Today we are going to talk about moving forward when you feel like you're in low power mode. Moving forward might mean moving forward with a big creative project. It might mean trying to rekindle a creative practice, it might mean trying to grow something that's already happening. There are all kinds of things that moving forward might mean to you. But I know that a lot of us are really feeling depleted right now.
Before I get into it, I have a quick request. If you've been enjoying this podcast, would you be willing to write a review on iTunes?
This is an amazing and free way to support all the podcasters and creators whose work you enjoy and benefit from, and taking that couple minutes goes a long way in helping this podcast reach more people, and help more people. So, if you do that, you'll have my eternal appreciation. Thank you in advance!
There are a lot of reasons that you might feel depleted right now, and like you're in low power mode. as this is airing in January 2021, there's some pretty big stuff going on, like COVID surges, instability of the US government, all the uncertainty that comes with these things. Plus, it is winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, and this is just often a time of less energy with less daylight, colder weather.
But no matter when you're listening to this, you also might have circumstances that make you feel depleted, like recovering from a performance, a show or a launch, when you don't quite have the luxury of taking enough time to rest and replenish your energy afterward. And what I'm going to talk about, say works for any season, any low power mode that you find yourself in.
First, I want to talk about the need to feel safe, and I'm not just talking about physical safety. If you're feeling anxious, your brain probably doesn't recognize the difference between actual unsafety of your physical body and just perceived lack of safety. Your brain is just saying, “Aaaahhh, what's going on, help us! Protect, protect,” and that can really deplete your energy further, if you feel like you're resisting having those feelings.
I know, a lot of times, safety and staying in your comfort zone are framed as a negative thing, like staying safe and staying small is not allowing you to think bigger and reach further to achieve your goals. And perhaps that is true, sometimes that is true, but if you're consistently having a vulnerable and unsafe feeling, that's something that you need to tend to.
We all need this feeling of safety and comfort, at least enough for a baseline and a foundation to enable us to feel comfortable in our lives, and feeling vulnerable doesn't always lend itself to creativity. It's a vulnerable act to create. If you're already feeling very activated in that way, it can be really tough to put yourself in the place to be even more vulnerable and create. I talked about this a lot in Season 3, Episode 5 about nurturing your relationship with creativity. You can definitely go back to that one to hear more about how you can do that.
When I'm feeling tender, I really want to be alone to create, and if I'm not, sometimes my nervous system feels more activated, wondering if I'll be interrupted, if someone is listening to me play the piano and judging me, which is very unrealistic. The people in my house are not paying attention to me, and even if they are, it's friendly, but I'm sure you can relate to this feeling that maybe someone is judging you, and that might be holding you back from that freedom of creating.
So, I just want to affirm that doing things to make yourself feel more safe during a time when there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of stress. Creating that feeling of safety can be part of healing, and doesn't have to be a negative thing. We might feel that way some of the time, and we might feel great some of the time. There might be a really big roller coaster of moods throughout your day, and correspondingly, maybe energy levels. You might be surprised about how much energy you have during short pockets of time, and then a couple hours later, you can even handle life, and you just want to take a nap. That happens to me a lot, for sure.
It helps me a lot just to be aware that that kind of thing is normal, and that we can just choose to accept how that wave is forming, rather than fight against it and say, “Why am I so tired?” I love trying to explain to myself why I'm so tired, to justify it in some way. When really, does it really matter why I'm tired? It might matter if there's something I can do to make myself less tired, like sleep more, or stop doing things that deplete my energy, but often I waste more energy than I need to, analyzing the situation. So the more acceptance, the better, probably.
You can try setting an intention for how you want to feel that day, which will help make you feel more grounded, less likely to get sucked into the hamster wheel that just contributes to you feeling more depleted, or perhaps seeking distraction, via digital munchies, social media, scrolling, doomscrolling, etc. When you set this intention, I think it's important to hold it loosely. It's not something you have to pressure yourself to succeed at, like, “I set an intention to be happy today, and I'm not happy. Oh, no.” You know, that's, of course, going to expend more energy and just make you feel bad about yourself. Just knowing what you're aiming for is great. Or maybe it's not something so black and white, like happy or sad. It's like, “I want to feel more comforted today,” if you're feeling kind of tender, or “I want to feel more energized today.” So you can take actions that support that.
Then, of course, check in with your body and mind. How are you feeling right now? What needs your attention? And then how can you give it that attention in a tiny way, or a bigger way if you have the bandwidth for that? But start with a tiny way. If your neck hurts, you can massage it for 10 seconds, and maybe that will make you feel better than you expected. It's also just good to have a handle on how you're feeling, so that you can make space to feel your feelings. I know in the middle of a work day, you might not want to make that space, especially if you feel really tender and on the verge of a breaking point. But knowing that you have some space for that, just to feel what you're feeling, to process is so important.
When we're under constant stress, there's often not any time or space to process your feelings or your needs, and they just get pushed to the side again and again, for a really long time, and they're gonna come out somehow later on, and maybe in a way that you don't like. Maybe in the way of physical pain or anxiety, depression, burnout, all of this stuff. So the more attention you can give to it in small ways, throughout, as a habit, it's much more sustainable.
Sometimes when I don't know what I need, because I just feel kind of crabby, I try to ask my inner child what she wants. It's often something kind of simple or silly sounding, but it's really not silly to do things that make you feel good, especially when you're feeling deprived of fun, and just depleted.
I've said, “replenish your energy” and “depleted” a lot. But really, that's kind of how I frame things. Knowing what depletes you and what replenishes you is such good information. Because then you can do more of the things that replenish your energy and less of the things that don't. What can you do to reduce your physical and mental stress? And again, listening to your body is going to be a great way to tap into this knowledge.
Maybe you need to go back to basics. Maybe it's exercise, water, food, sleep. These really fundamental things seem obvious, but that doesn't mean they're always easy to implement. It might be hard to sleep, and you might need to prioritize that for a little bit. You might just need to drink more water, so that you don't feel as tired and dehydrated. It's easy to forget the basics when you feel overwhelmed or exhausted, and you're just really distracted. Obvious reminders are great. There's nothing wrong with that. I really like the Plant Nanny app for drinking water - you water a little plant, and it kind of makes it into a game. And you know, you set your goal for water for the day, and if you don't keep up with watering your plant that amount, your virtual plant will die. It's like the Tamagotchi, next level, for any ‘90s kids out there.
Don't get down on yourself for missing this stuff, if you are having trouble with the basics. I know lots of you are like me and are achievement oriented, and tend to feel bad about yourself when you don't feel like you're succeeding. Just restart kindly, know that you're doing something good for yourself, and you're planting the seeds of feeling better in the future.
Going along with this replenishment theme: taking more breaks. I will never stop talking about taking more breaks, because I don't think most of us take enough breaks. I always advise my creative wellness coaching clients to plan ahead for some extra rest time after a busy or depleting period. But we all know that life happens, sometimes your plans don't work out. What you consider ideal may not be possible. During a long haul stressful situation like a pandemic, it just might be feeling like a slog, because it has been going on for a long time. So, all the more important to take breaks to sustain yourself along the way. It is not frivolous to take short breaks to do things that feel good - not at all. Because that will improve your mood, and make you more productive, ultimately.
Some of my favorite short feel-good break activities are taking 5 deep breaths, to put my hand on my chest and just breathe. I don't even have to move from my desk to do that, or the piano, depending on where I am. I'll look at some cute animals, take a cat break with Rusty the Cat, my relaxation mentor. Sometimes I'll take a break and go eat a square of dark chocolate. A quick stretch. I've been doing a lot of puzzles lately, so a puzzle break is a really nice way to sort of get my brain in a less overloaded zone. Reading, sitting in the sun, playing a little fun music, anything that sounds like it's appealing, and it's going to feel good - give it a try for five or 10 minutes.
A break does not have to be long to have a replenishing and refreshing effect. And when you feel like you don't have time for a break, that's probably when you need the break the most. So remember that. You might actually be saving time by taking breaks. Because you're more effective and more refreshed afterwards.
You also might want to identify places where you can choose to take a slower pace, or a more intentional pace. I know this might feel counterintuitive, because you might feel like you're behind, or like you're trying to catch up. But when you're not at 100% energy level, rushing probably is just going to stress you out more, and prolong you from feeling like you have a handle on things. It's not fun to drag yourself through day after day feeling like a zombie. If that's where you're at right now I see you, it's okay.
That might be a great time to make different versions of your to do list, like the absolute bare minimum version, the pretty good version, and then the ideal version. If you're at bare minimum for a while, cool, you're doing bare minimum, which I know for my recovering perfectionists out there does not feel good. It feels like failure, perhaps, but I think in this time, just making it is an achievement, and if you are typically an overachiever, your 80% is probably a lot better than a lot of people's 100%. Even if you're at bare minimum, you might not like it, but it just might be good enough for now, in this season. We might just have to relax our expectations of functioning at that 100% capacity, because if you're feeling depleted by external circumstances, that just might be the way it is. It's normal to be depleted when there is a lot of stress.
Even if you're not feeling 100% you can still feel like you're taking steps in the right direction toward what you want to be doing creatively, toward having more energy, whatever your big goals are. You might just need to accept that you're gonna feel a little bit behind, because your capacity doesn't match your expectations. So, you may need kind of a structural shift in expectations, they just may need to be lower for a while, and that's okay, too.
This may just be a time to exercise patience, and practice patience, which is something a lot of us have a hard time with. I certainly do, especially when it comes to myself. I find it easier to be patient with other people than I do with myself, usually.
So with that, I want to affirm the power of taking baby steps. Even baby steps, tiny little steps are going to move you where you need to go - it just might take longer than you think.
You may remember me talking about my 100 day projects that I did in 2017, where I composed 8 measures of music a day for 100 days. I did two of those projects in that year. I didn't feel like I was making much progress while it was happening, but I actually wrote a bunch of songs that ended up on the album that I recorded the next year, because I didn't stop, I kept going. I didn't do a lot. But I didn't stop.
While you're in the middle of it, it's hard to think that it's amounting to anything, but it absolutely is. If you can make a space for creativity every day, or at a regular interval, whatever amount of time works for you, it will add up, it will have an impact.
Lately, my practice plan has been: practice piano every day, show up at the piano every day. And there are obviously goals within that, that I would like to be doing. I've been working on a lot of jazz improv stuff, and you know, there are various areas of learning that I want to be working on, but I don't do them all every day. It hasn't been realistic for me to do them all every day. But if I show up, and I play, that is a success.
When you have that habit in place, you can always keep building it from there, because it has a place. You may just need to take what ideas come, have a way to collect them whenever they're available to you. And if that is just little drips of ideas, that's okay, collect them. You can build them into something later on.
So I think the best thing to focus on, in a time where you're consistently in low power mode, is: Where can you find hope? Where can you find inspiration? What feels good? What feels fun? Move toward that whenever you can.
For some fun ways to connect to your creativity, and spark some of that inspiration, with a very low barrier to entry, I just want to remind you about my Feel Good Creativity Unchallenge, which is totally free, really fun, and it's 5 days of bite size, creativity and wellness prompts, that are ridiculously easy to do, as small as you want them to be, and will help soothe your nervous system to get you in that right place for creating, however much time you have for it.
Lastly, I think the very most important thing, either in a depleted state, or any time, is being extra kind to yourself. We really need to know that we can be there for ourselves when things are hard. If you didn't get up as early as you wanted to today, you can view that as, “Okay, I'm set back by an hour,” not “My whole day is ruined.” If your default is kind of this catastrophic negative, and you can't force a cheerful response, but you can just try questioning whether the negative response is true or has to be true. If it feels kind of unfamiliar to you to be self compassionate, think about how you would treat a loved one, a friend or family member, and turn around and treat yourself the same way.
I know I've mentioned these on the podcast so many times before, but again, I will never stop talking about Dr. Kristin Neff, and her self compassion meditations. There are various lengths of them on her website, and they're free. They're also in the Insight Timer app, which I really like for meditation. I'll link to those in the show notes if you want to try them out.
And if you need some external kindness, you can always send me a note. I'm always here for encouragement, little pep talks, and I'm rooting for you. So, I'm wishing you replenished energy, but most of all, the acceptance of what is, and the kindness, peace and fortitude to keep on going. Have a great week, and I'll see you next time.
Pianist and composer