Recently, I was handed a colouring book — the kind with thick lines and no real stakes — and I could feel my whole body tense up. Not because I didn’t want to colour. Because some part of me immediately started asking what it was for. Was this supposed to be relaxing me faster? Should I be doing “actual” work instead? Was I even doing it right? Was this all just a waste of time?
That reaction really scared me. I used to be someone who could easily lose an entire afternoon making something just because it was fun, and somewhere along the way I lost the ability to create just for the sake of creating without having to mentally check if it was productive first. I think this is a very common experience for many people trying to build hobbies or find ways to relax, as well as for people who have already been creative throughout their lives. We’re taught that if we’re not doing something for a productive reason, it’s a waste of time. Every hour starts to feel like it needs to justify its own existence. There needs to be a reason why you’re spending that hour doing that specific thing. And play, by definition, exists without having to justify itself. So when you’re burnt out and overwhelmed by the demands of life, whether you’re a student or a working professional, you may struggle to find play relaxing. It might even feel unsafe; like you’re doing something wrong or wasting something you can’t afford to waste. After all, we grow up constantly hearing time is precious.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, most of us absorbed the idea that our time is only worth something if it produces a result. A finished product. A visible improvement. Something you can point to and say, “see, that was worth the time it took.” Burnout takes that belief and turns the volume all the way up.
When you’re running on empty and stretched too thin, the anxious part of your brain starts to treat play and rest as a threat — time you should’ve spent recovering “properly,” or catching up, or doing literally anything else on your mountainous to-do list. So when you sit down to draw, or garden, or fiddle around with an instrument, you may feel a low hum of guilt.
Shouldn’t I be doing something that matters?
Here’s the thing people won’t tell you: play does matter. It’s vital, actually. Not because it has to produce something at the end, though perhaps it does, but because it’s one of the only activities that asks nothing of you in return. You aren’t expected to improve, it’s not trying to fix or optimize something — you just have to show up and mess around. That’s precisely why it feels so foreign when you’re burnt out: you’ve forgotten what it’s like to do something without an agenda attached.
You can’t force yourself back into playing immediately. Being burnt out makes your nervous system cautious, and caution responds badly to pressure. You’ll likely just recreate the same performance anxiety you’re trying to escape by desperately forcing yourself to be creative and free, and you’ll end up burnt out and bad at relaxing.
Instead, it’s a good idea to start absurdly small. This may be more difficult for burnt out creatives who are used to playing on a grander scale, but it’s important regardless. Doodle in the margins of your grocery list. Let yourself hum a melody without it having to go somewhere. The goal here isn’t to make something meaningful — it’s to remind your body that not everything has to lead somewhere.
Give yourself permission to be bad at play too. This may sound strange, but perfectionism sneaks into rest just as easily as it does into work. If your “relaxing hobby” starts to feel like another task you have to succeed at, it becomes distorted. It’s not play anymore.
There’s a special kind of freedom in making something with absolutely no destination in mind. You’re not going to gift it to someone. It’s not going to be posted on social media. It’s not even practice for something bigger. Creativity just because your hands wanted to do something and your mind wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t an inbox.
Purposeless creativity is one of the fastest ways to interrupt the burnout cycle because it breaks the pattern of constant evaluation. There’s no metric for a good doodle. When you take away this mental scoreboard, you take away the exhaustion of being watched.
Even if the only one watching was you.
This is where play and art quietly overlap. Both ask you to create without needing the result to be worth anything. Both remind you that you’re allowed to exist without constantly earning it.
We tend to picture recovery from burnout as stillness — sleep, silence, doing nothing. And sometimes, that’s exactly what’s needed. Sometimes, however, the thing that actually brings you back to yourself isn’t rest at all. It’s play. It’s doing something that actually further expends energy; the mess, the mistakes, the pointless little project that doesn’t lead anywhere and was never supposed to.
If you’ve been running on empty for a while, you don’t owe anyone including yourself a productive recovery.
Try picking something up not because it will “fix” you, but because it might make you laugh, or feel curious, or feel nine years old again for five minutes.
You don’t have to earn your way back to joy sometimes you just have to relearn how to let yourself play.
July 10, 2026
July 10, 2026
