Creative Work is Like Working Out; Recovery is Essential

Written by: Numair Qureshi

Proper rest and recovery are essential for creative breakthroughs.

Creative work is a lot like going to the gym and putting yourself through an intense workout. When you push your muscles to exhaustion, you may feel as though you have nothing left in the tank and that life will forever be this way from this point forward.

But then you go to sleep and wake up recovered. You have newfound strength, and you find that you're able to repeat it all over again; however, this time, you can go even further than you went before.

This applies to creative work. When you're working on a challenging and complex problem, you can push your mind to the point of exhaustion. You will reach a point where it may feel as though all your thought experiments led you to nowhere. Creative work can lead to so many dead ends that by the end of the day, you can feel like a complete failure.

Creative work isn't as clear-cut as a workout. When you're working out, you know whether or not you are hitting your reps. Creative work, however, is more subjective. It is largely reliant on intuition. Even though you may know the outcome you want to achieve, the path to get there isn't always spelled out for you.

In such cases, you may spend an entire day working on the solution using the wrong approach. And when you realize that the approach was wrong, you may reach such a deep level of exhaustion that it will feel like the worst kind of failure. You may think that there is nothing left in you, and that all your efforts were a waste.

However, if you go to bed and let yourself rest, you will wake up with new stores of energy. Your mindset will be refreshed, and so will your perspective. You will realize that the mistakes you made yesterday allowed you to reach some phenomenal insights that you are now grateful that you have. And those insights paired with this new day's energy will end up leading you to the outcomes you've been striving to reach all along.

Just allow yourself to breathe. You've got this. Now get some rest and get back at it again tomorrow. You've got this.