What to Do When You Feel Creatively Empty
You know the feeling. That bone-deep tiredness that no nap or green juice will touch. The ideas that once came freely now feel flat. The excitement that used to buzz in your chest has turned to static.
If you’ve been feeling creatively empty — like your spark has left the room — you’re not broken. You’re burnt out, or as entrepreneur and founder Liana Fricker calls it, maybe you’re just in a “burndown.”
When Liana hit burnout — again — in 2023, she realised that it wasn’t a one-off collapse. It was part of a repeating pattern. She’d push hard, build momentum, connect dots, gather people, spark ideas — and then, suddenly, the tank was empty. She had to start “by designing my work life and just my general life in such a way that creates that space so I can stay open.”
Liana calls herself an “idea-laying machine.” But even machines need power sources — and her old ways of working (and marketing herself online) weren’t sustainable anymore.
So she began to experiment. To unlearn. To ask a different set of questions:
What if I stopped performing consistency and started trusting my energy instead?
What would work look like if it was slower, tactile, real-world?
What if connection — not content — was my strategy?
These are some of the wellbeing practices and mind shifts that helped Liana rebuild creative energy — not by working harder, but by reimagining what “working” means.
Each one is a quiet act of resistance against burnout culture, and a reminder that creative energy is not infinite but it is renewable.
1. Stop Performing Consistency — Start Practising Self-Trust
The advice we’re given online — “be consistent!” — often misses the truth that not all brains or energy cycles work in straight lines. For Liana, the key was designing routines that flowed with her energy, not against it.
She now plans her month in cycles: high-energy weeks first, slow restoration later. Some weeks are for ideas, others are for Antiques Roadshow and weighted blankets.
“If all I could do was meditate in a sauna and watch Antiques Roadshow with my weighted blanket at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday, I can do that. Because that might be what the burndown needs, right?”
Try this: Instead of scheduling every day equally, design your calendar like a tide chart. Plan creative work during your high-energy phases, and build in restorative “ebb” weeks.
2. Redefine Burnout — and Learn Your ‘Burndown’ Pattern
Liana differentiates between burnout (the big collapse) and burndown (the mini energy crashes that happen every few weeks).
When you start to recognise these smaller cycles, you can respond before the full crash.
Notice:
Do you have predictable weeks of high motivation followed by emotional flatness?
Do you overcommit when your energy peaks?
Can you give yourself permission to pause before you’re forced to stop?
Reframing burnout as cyclical rather than catastrophic helps turn it from a crisis into data — something you can observe, not judge.
3. Design for Energy, Not Productivity
“I think if you're someone who suffers from quite big burnouts or you've had a few in your life and you're over the age of 40, you may want to take a step back and ask yourself, what is this internal engine that keeps making me run at full speed, ultimately off a cliff?”
So she began to design her days not for output, but for energy flow. She created conditions that help her stay open — like attending real-world gatherings, limiting context-switching, and making space for brainfood conversations.
“I absolutely came home buzzing with energy, being in a room, in a curated space. It didn't feel too overwhelming, but just with so many interesting people telling me interesting things, that kind of cup is very full.”
Try this: Once a week, replace a Zoom call with a walk, a museum visit, or a local event. Think of it as refuelling, not slacking. Creative energy is relational.
4. Feed Your Brain (and Body) With Connection
Liana describes herself as “best with a spark” — someone whose creativity ignites in conversation.
That spark doesn’t come from scrolling; it comes from connection. The quick chat with a stranger, the serendipity of a room, the awkward but alive feeling of being seen.
“Whereas if you're on your phone or on your laptop, it's like the closest you'll ever get to an invisibility cloak, right? You can choose whether to engage or not.”
For those feeling creatively apathetic, connection might be the antidote — not to produce something, but to remember what it feels like to be moved.
5. Reframe ‘Anxiety’ as Excitement
A subtle but powerful reframe:
When your heart races before a new project or social event, what if it’s not anxiety — but excitement?
“The moment when I realized that what I would have described as anxiety was excitement was huge for me. Because even calling it anxiety changes the relationship with it. It's something to stop doing.”
Reinterpreting physical sensations as energy — rather than threat — can turn overwhelm into motion.
6. Build a Creative Ecosystem
Liana also began thinking about wellbeing like professional athletes do: as a team effort.
“There's no athlete that goes to the Olympics that does not have a sports psychologist and a physio and a chef and because the machine is this integration it needs specialists.”
That might mean therapy, coaching, accountability partners, or simply the people who remind you to rest.
7. Let Rest Be an Act of Mastery
Creativity needs stillness. For Liana, that looked like allowing emptiness — even boredom — without guilt.
“I was absolutely an empty vessel. There was no guilt because there was no energy for guilt. There was no shame because there was no energy for shame. Like, right. I was just empty.”
This is her glass of water philosophy:
“You know no one's gonna say how dare you have a glass of water. Why are you getting up to get a glass of water? What? You are gonna fail. Sometimes my glass of water is antiques roadshow.”
Creative fatigue, burnout, apathy — these aren’t signs of weakness. They’re signals. Your body is trying to tell you something.
When you stop trying to perform consistency and start listening to those signals, you create space for something far more powerful than productivity: self-trust.
And maybe, what looks like burnout is actually your creativity asking for a different kind of rhythm — one that includes silence and conversation, slow design and sparks of engagement.
If you want to explore these ideas further, listen to my conversation with Liana on the podcast A Thought I Kept.
Need some support as you navigate life’s ups and downs, explore our 1:1 coaching sessions.
