I’m in Bangkok, my winter base.
My ‘happy place’.
And I’ve been tired these past weeks.
Very tired.
A feeling I usually don’t associate with this city.
It’s not a very glamorous or special kind of tired. More like an ordinary, sometimes confusing, sometimes cellular, sometimes even muscular, physical tired.
Like more of life is moving through my body than it is equipped to handle.
And one of the parts that is especially confusing about it all is this: this has been one of the most creatively alive periods I can remember.
- Some of the guests on my podcast have been stunning. Mind-bending exchanges that stay with me way after the recording stops.
- I’m part of communities where the need to edit myself is ebbing. I am accepted as my authentic, imperfect self. Loved, even, I daresay.
- And most importantly, I’m deep inside making two deeply fulfilling records that feel like milestones on my artistic journey and career.
This combination though, has made something quite impossible to ignore.
I am exhausted.
But not burnt out.
Let’s clarify
I know this might be superfluous after everything I said, but I am tired. Really tired. No amount of sleep feels enough of late. My workouts need a lot more care. My energy levels feel unreliable on some days.
But I am not out of ideas, don't feel depleted, hopeless or empty. Nothing like what burnout is supposed to be.
So I find myself asking this: what exactly is the difference?
And more importantly, is there one?
It’s also gotten me to realize how most of us have been taught to collapse those two states into one ‘diagnosis’. And my lived experience after 25 years of being a professional musician and educator for fellow creatives, suggests that a distinction might matter more than we think.
A Bit of Context
The last few years have not been my lightest.
The demise of my father rearranging my internal architecture in ways that are still unfolding. A health scare with my mother, whom I’m very close to. The sense of responsibility and vigilance these incidents brought into the foreground.
And yet, there has been sustained creative output.
Touring. Recording. Writing. Practising. Coaching.
So as someone who helps creatives overcome (or better still), prevent burnout, I had to hold myself accountable to what’s going on here.
Was I defelecting? Channeling stress into work? Denying?
I am no stranger to what the dreaded burnout feels like. I’ve been there.
Which is why you can imagine my surprise at how that’s not what this feels like.
And that ‘absence’ (for lack of a better term), caught my attention. Not just personally, but professionally.
What Burnout Actually Points To
Burnout is often casually interpreted as tiredness taken too far.
The research though, is a bit more specific.
Christina Maslach’s work, for example, frames burnout as a pattern involving emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation or cynicism, and a reduced sense of efficacy.
In other words, it is not so much about low energy (though that can often be a natural bi-product), and possibly more about a rupture in meaning.
Agency. Relational contact.
In coaching and collaborative conversations, burnout will often show up linguistically before behaviourally.
We could start talking about work as something ‘happening to us’ rather than something we are choosing to do.
Language starts to flatten. Curiosity disappears.
The work may continue, but the presence, enthusiam, intentionality and even vibrancy may fluctuate.
To be clear, all of us in it for the long run are going to have to deal with fluctuations of some sort. There is no perfect ‘career’.
But that shift matters. Even more so when the fluctuations start spiralling downwards with a frequency and range that overstep the realm of a natural ebb and flow.
Exhaustion Lives Elsewhere
If I were to break it down to one specific factor distinguishing exhaustion and burnout, it would be this: exhaustion is more honest.
Why? It is usually easier to locate in the body.
It shows up after long periods of physical and mental demand.
Travel. Grief. Focus. Responsibility. Ambition. Workload. Heavy deadlines.
The system is doing a lot, and it lets you know. The information on the quantities of tasks are easy to identify. And so your brain is a little less confused about the causes behind the way you feel. They’re right there on your calendar and your to-do list.
Many of the artists I work with (myself included!), are surprised to notice how well-oriented they can feel even under severe phases of prolonged pressure.
Heck if any of you have ever worked on full-length albums, tour dates, art installations or a painting you’ve been working on for months, you know what you signed up for.
We care. We are engaged.
We still recognise ourselves in what we are making. When we are making art.
And that is so deeply aligned with our sense of identity that despite the blood, sweat and tears, it rarely feels like a state of failure when actually in the thick of it.
Burnout, on the other hand, is insiduous.
It’s exhaustion’s sneakier twin. And doesn’t always anounce itself via ‘symptoms’, plausible causes or warning signs.
Creative Work and Load
There’s a part about creativity (especially from a professional standpoint) that rarely gets talked about.
Creative work is expensive. On multiple levels.
It’s not just the actual expenses despite financial uncertainty, but the manner in which it asks for emotional availability and sustained attention despite an inherent brand of ambiguity that is normalized in the industry.
Add some real life to that, and tiredness becomes part of the terrain by default. (Which is not a dealbreaker, we knew this wasn’t the simplest of paths, but hear me out).
Truth is, some of the most fertile creative periods I’ve witnessed, both in my own life and in the lives of collaborators and clients, have coincided with physical or emotional strain. Exhaustion did come as part of the glory.
Not because strain in itself is desirable (spoiler alert: on the contrary, it can be damaging if habitual), but because meaning and authorship were still intact amidst the work. To reiterate, our identity didn’t feel threatened.
But in my experience, when creatives start to burn out, it’s not the quantity of work that is the sole deciding factor.
Burning out is not the ‘if this=then that’ of prolonged hard work, which is a much more nuanced topic, especially in the arts.
It’s because we worked wrong too long. Out of alignment. Felt conflicted about the work we were doing somewhere deep within.
Something vital went awry or worse still, missing, as the endeavour continued.
Reading the Signal Correctly
Where things tend to go south is interpretation.
- Exhaustion misread as burnout leads to premature disengagement.
- Burnout misread as tiredness leads to rest without repair.
Both are followed by the same (initial) patterns repeating.
When I coach students and clients who might be dealing with a sense of disillusionment, the inquiry I encourage is is rarely about productivity or output (usual KPI’s in an industrial world).
I try to focus on orientation instead.
Questions like:
- Do we still recognise yourself in our work?
- Does effort still feel chosen?
- Has our relationship to meaning shifted?
These are questions that point toward a different kind of response. A more conscious acknowledgement of deeper conflict underneath what we think is ‘happenning to us’.
Is There Actually a Physiological Difference?
I’m really glad you asked.
Because yes, very much so.
And while fairly straightforward, it’s more than a mere semantic.
Exhaustion can be a purely physical state. It’s what happens when the body has worked hard for a sustained period of time.
Think of an athlete after after a race or sport event. The body will be depleted, but not ‘broken’, (assuming they’ve trained well). With enough rest, food, and reduced load following the event (all part of the training), the body knows how to recover.
This is where burnout is very, very different. Because it usually involves the nervous system being dysregulated. Prolonged and unresolved stress with an atrophied sense of choice, safety, or agency. Over time, that slips the body and mind into a low-grade ‘survival’ state.
Stress hormones stop regulating cleanly. Rest doesn’t restore in the same way. Sleep suffers in quality and helps lesser.
Burnout often carries elements of accumulated trauma. Sometimes not necessarily one big event, but repeated overwhelm without repair.
- Exhaustion says, “I’ve done a lot.”
- Burnout says, “I can’t really keep going but I’m not sure I feel safe enough to stop.”
Different Needs, Different Responses
Exhaustion will usually respond well to recovery. Some containment. Pacing. Sleep. Fewer moving parts for a while.
Burnout asks for something a little more intricate.
Structural changes. Self-enquiry. Maybe some boundary renegotiations. Reconnection to values and authorship.
Identity.
When the two are are confused, we often end up either abandoning things we actually cared about, and/or stay in conditions that we never resonated with in the first place or have outgrown.
Why This Matters to Me
I sit in a slightly unusual position.
I am a practising artist, still inside the work, still navigating the same tensions as the people I support. And I spend a significant part of my week in conversation with creatives who are trying to build lives that don’t extract from their nervous systems.
Over the years, that has taken the form of long form coaching containers, one to one work, courses, and an ongoing library of resources through podcasts and written pieces.
And the one thing I have noticed despite all the productivity guru literature out there is this:
True creatives aren’t really interested in ‘productivity’. We are interested in creativity (duh).
But here’s the thing about creativity: it’s a non-linear road.
One where conditions can, in fact be a bit exhausting on occassion.
That’s not burnout by deafult.
And that difference is an essential one.
A Personal Note
In case I hadn’t made it clear enough: I am not saying that romanticizing an exhausting schedule or lack of structure the latter in the name of creativity is something to glorify.
That being said, over the years, something seems to have clarified itself quite clearly at this point.
I do not need less meaning. I need more recovery.
And those are different conversations.
So if you find yourself in that liminal space where you feel tired yet engaged, depleted yet creatively present, consider this an invite to be a little less harsh on yourself and catastrophizing to quick conclusions.
Life happens. And it can get tiring.
Sometimes that’s just simply a matter of capacity. Capacity that may be asking for a little more attention rather than a complete overhaul.
So if you’re confused about the exact implications of the way you feel on one of those days, take a minute. Breathe.
And ask yourself if it’s too much work that’s the real issue, or lack of the kind you actually want to do.
References
Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., and Leiter, M. P. Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 397 to 422.
Shirom, A. Job related burnout. In Handbook of Occupational Health Psychology.
Porges, S. W. The Polyvagal Theory. W. W. Norton and Company.
Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M. The what and why of goal pursuits. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227 to 268.
van der Kolk, B. The Body Keeps the Score.
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