How to avoid creative burnout and refill your creative tank (before you really need to)

I'm writing this fresh off a surf charter in the Mentawai Islands: Ten days of rising with the sun, chasing remote waves and leaving the phone in the bag delivered the kind of mental reset that's impossible to achieve in your usual environment. It’s a privileged position to be in, no doubt, to spend that kind of time and money on a holiday, but it was also well overdue. Somewhere in the middle of chasing RFPs, growing the team, and moving to a new country (one of the great benefits of working at a 100% remote creative agency), my leave balance got to the point where I was being told: Take a break, kid.

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But here's what I've learned: You don't need to relocate or disappear to remote islands to maintain your creative enthusiasm. In fact, waiting for the “perfect” big escape usually means running on empty for far too long.

The advertising and marketing game has always been relentless. We're expected to generate fresh ideas on demand, often for products or services we have zero personal connection to, under unrealistic deadlines, while the hounds of AI-assisted productivity are breathing down our collective necks. Without intentional refuelling, creative burnout is inevitable.

Why your creative tank runs dry

Our industry (along with other so-called ‘glamour’ fields like film, music, and fashion) has always romanticised the grind. We celebrate all-nighters and back-to-back pitches like battle scars.

But creativity isn't a renewable resource that magically replenishes itself. 

It needs input to generate output. When you're constantly in production mode without allowing time for absorption, your work can become derivative and predictable: recycling the same references, the same solutions, the same visual language you've relied on for years (if that doesn’t sound like an LLM, I don’t know what does!).

I've seen talented creatives plateau not because they lost their skills, but because they stopped feeding their imagination with new experiences, perspectives, and stimuli. No one wants to be a ‘hack’. 

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The big moves: When you can swing them

Dramatic changes create dramatic shifts in perspective. My relocation this year forced me to navigate a new culture, work across different time zones, and see how creativity functions outside the Western agency bubble. The surf trip stripped away the constant connectivity that keeps our brains in reactive rather than generative mode. 

If you have the opportunity for significant changes, take them:

• Relocate, even temporarily. A short stint in a different city changes your visual references, daily rhythms, and creative inputs. Consider workations or remote work exchanges if permanent relocation isn't feasible.

• Take real, disconnected vacations. Not the “checking email by the pool” variety. Go somewhere that makes constant connectivity difficult or impossible. Your brain needs genuine downtime to process and synthesise.

• Take a major skill pivot. Learn something completely unrelated to your work. I've seen creatives take cartooning classes, learn traditional bookbinding, or (seriously) pick up a new instrument or language. These seemingly unrelated pursuits create new neural pathways that influence your creative problem-solving.

The small shifts: Everyday changes for creatives

Most of us can't immediately relocate or disappear for weeks. But small, consistent inputs can be equally transformative:

• Change your consumption diet. If you're endlessly scrolling design inspiration sites, you're just marinating in everyone else's solutions. Read a novel, listen to podcasts about subjects you know nothing about, watch documentaries on topics outside your interests. Go to that foreign film festival. Creativity thrives on unexpected connections between disparate ideas.

• Alter your physical routine. Take a different route to work. Visit a neighbourhood you've never explored. Sit in a café where you don't know the barista's name. Physical novelty can trigger mental flexibility.

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• Seek out adjacent creative fields. If you're in advertising, spend time at architecture lectures, textile exhibitions, or experimental theatre. The best ideas often come from applying principles from one creative discipline to another.

• Create without an agenda. Start a personal project with no commercial objective. Write poetry badly. Take photographs with expired film. Make jewellery out of junk. The point isn't mastery. It's to remind ourselves that creativity can exist without client approval or strategic objectives.

• Curate real conversations. Schedule monthly lunches with people outside your industry. Re-connect with friends who might be tradies, scientists, small business owners, social workers: anyone whose perspective can help you see the world from outside your agency bubble. These conversations might just be a pleasant diversion, but they might also offer unexpected wells of insight.

• Embrace strategic boredom. Delete social media apps from your phone for a week. Take walks without podcasts. Sit in waiting rooms without pulling out your phone. Stare at the ocean. Sit with your thoughts (scary, right?). Our brains need unstimulated time to wander, connect, and imagine.

The permission you're waiting for

You're allowed to prioritise your creative replenishment.

I’d even argue it's professionally irresponsible not to. Clients (and your colleagues) don't benefit from a depleted creative spirit any more than you do. The best work comes from creatives who are genuinely excited about ideas, not those grinding through another brief on fumes.

Whether it's a surf trip to a remote island chain or simply taking a different route home tonight, the principle remains the same: New inputs create new outputs. Your creative tank is your responsibility to maintain. Don't wait until you're completely empty to start refilling it.

The work will always be there. The question is: Will you still have the creative energy, insight and enthusiasm to do it in a way the machines can’t?

Thought Leadership (90)