How To Conquer Burn Out And Prevent It From Ruining Your Career

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, Episode 15 You're listening to the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast. The number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio.

Chris, how are you doing today, sir?

Chris Graham (0:21)

Oh, I'm doing great, I'm feeling well rested. I just got done taking a nap.

Life is good.

Brian Hood (0:28)

You're such a dad. All right, so what was the last time? Can you remember the last time you got burnt out from something?

Chris Graham (0:34)

Yes, you know, it's happened many times to me. I would say I'm not a good quitter. Often when I'm doing something, you know, an activity or organization I'm a part of or something like that, I tend to stick around a little longer than I should.

And I burn out instead of quit. Well, I burn out and then quit. So, yeah, it's not fun.

Brian Hood (0:57)

Yeah, so I've hit burnout, I mean, multiple times at different scales. I've hit it on a massive scale where, you know, it led to depression. I've hit it on minor scales, you know, even recently, putting this new course out, a profitable producer course, that was a lot of work. And as soon as that was done, I was burnt out, to be honest with you, around Christmas time. It wasn't as bad as I've been burnt out in the past before. But it is definitely a real thing that I have faced, off and on, over my entire career.

And, you know, it does get old.

And, you know, there are times that you can deal with it. Sometimes you can deal with it alone. But we thought, since this is something that is gonna be very real to you in your career, if you do this full time, for any amount of time, you're gonna hit points of burnout in your career. And we thought it would be a good episode to at least give you some tips that we have come up with to help us deal with burnout. We're not pros at this.

You know, we're not any sort of medical doctor or anything when it comes to, you know, saying that certain things may work for you. But in our opinion, it's worth trying stuff like this out before you go into the medical, the prescription drug type world where you're just dealing with the symptoms instead of going to the core issues. Again, talk to your doctor before you listen to us.

That's just good advice anyways.

Chris Graham (2:09)

So when you're feeling burned out, there are a lot of underlying potential issues. The one we got to address right away is depression.

And it's a controversial subject. There are a lot of ways to think about depression, a lot of ways to look at depression. I myself struggle with depression as a younger man.

I have been on a variety of different prescription meds in my teens, so some experience there. But the things we're going to primarily focus on are switching it up. What are some ways that you can hopefully deal with your burnout, and by extension there, potentially some depression that you might have surrounding your career. And the type of work that we do, that us as a community do, working with manic depressive artists can be a wild ride. So it's not uncommon to be discouraged when your mom and dad want you to go out and quote unquote, get a real job.

And there's a lot of emotional baggage in this field of work. So we're going to talk about some ways that you can deal with the inevitable phases of burnout that you're going to go through. And none of these ways are going to involve prescription drugs. If that's what your doctor and you have decided, go for it. But maybe here's some other advice that just might be more effective in the long run. And just a quick short story. I was diagnosed with ADD when I was in middle school. And my doctor, who is a great guy, God rest his soul, he's since passed away, asked a bunch of questions, diagnosed with ADD, and I proceeded to try half a dozen different prescription medications to see if it helped me in school. Funny thing was the doctor didn't ask me any of the important questions. What's your diet look like? What's your exercise look like? What's your sleep look like? If he had asked that, he would have figured out, well, you're eating, this is not an exaggeration, you're eating two things of French fries and a chocolate chip cookie for lunch every day.

Perhaps, that is having some impact on you outside of the lunch hour. And so, I think this topic of burnout can have a lot to do with that. Two large boxes of French fries and a chocolate chip cookie is gonna create some burnout in your career because it's not sustainable.