The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 126. Blogger Burnout: What it looks like and what to do about it

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Let’s talk about blogger burnout. On today’s episode, it’s Amy and I am coming at you with a solo episode. I am sharing my own personal struggle with burnout and offering advice on how to prevent and recognize the signs. I share the impact of burnout on professional and personal life and stress the importance of self-care, including taking breaks, saying no to excessive commitments, and delegating tasks.I also talk about redefining success, incorporating movement, prioritizing sleep, eating well, and managing stress. I provide practical tips on time management and adjustments for bloggers to maintain a healthy balance and prevent burnout!Thanks for listening! Let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsThank you to our sponsor Memberful for sponsoring this episode! Check out Memberful HERE!Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode126

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Well, hey, it's Amy here. And today I am doing a solo episode. And as I was writing my notes for this episode, I was just going to come at this today from a very kind of objective standpoint. And honestly, upon writing the outline, talking about burnout, I've decided to share a little bit of where I've been the last nine-ish months or so. And so that's kind of a little bonus you're going to get today and why I chose to add this into the docket of episodes that I think is really important to share. And that is sharing my own kind of personal story about burnout and then talking about how we can prevent it, how we can look for the signs and recognize where we are with it. Because I think

that burnout is something that a lot of bloggers and a lot of online entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in general, I think it's something that we deal with. And I think it's kind of one of those silent things that we deal with and think that it's probably something that we're doing or not doing and that other people aren't struggling with it. And I think that's really why I decided you need to talk about it and you need to share. is something that you've likely heard of, or you might have even said yourself, like, I feel like I'm burned out. But just for some like signs that you can kind of look at in regards to burnout, like what does that really mean? And it can mean a number of different things. One thing, it can mean like decreased motivation. So that can be motivation for things in your life. It can be like lack of motivation for things in your business. Maybe you sit down at your desk and you're like, I have nothing to write. Like I have nothing left to share. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I'm not passionate about this or I don't

feel relevant, but decreased motivation. Fatigue is another one that I think comes up quite a bit. It can feel just like physically exhausting, like to do the work, to even get yourself at a point that you can sit down and write, or maybe you have students that you're supporting, or maybe you have a membership, or maybe you have a podcast, different things. Maybe you just feel like I am just exhausted. Maybe you could sit down and work for six hours, and now like hour one in, you feel like you could go take a nap. Just that it's almost like this mental fatigue that has now turned physical and you just feel completely worn out. Another one is disinterest in your work. Maybe you found yourself at a point that you're

like, I don't even care about this anymore. Why am I still talking about this? Kind of goes back to that, do I feel relevant or not? And so just having just that disinterest, like I don't, maybe I don't even want to blog anymore. Maybe I don't want to share anything online anymore. Maybe I don't want to get on social media anymore. Maybe that's the last place I feel like being. Burnout might show up in that way that like you just, it's almost like you kind of want to like turn in and hide and you don't want to share. And I'm sure as you're talking, as I'm kind of talking, you're like, she's also describing like a lot of depression symptoms. And I think they do kind of mimic each other, if I can be honest, because like feeling

irritated or those feelings of depression is another sign of burnout that we're feeling. And so just some things to note there, like, are you not wanting to do the normal activities that you want to do? And maybe that goes beyond your blog. Maybe it goes, it's now bled into your personal life. And maybe you feel more irritable with your family or your friends, or once again, just turning in and you're not wanting to do the things that you normally want to do, which also leads into like lower productivity. Because if you're not doing what you were used to doing, you're obviously not producing the way that you used to produce. And not even just blogging. I want to make sure that that is

shared today, that these feelings might not just be in regards to your blog or your online business, it might be bleeding over to your personal life, It might be bleeding over to how you're showing up for your family, or how you're showing up in other things that you do, whether it's another job that you have, whether it's another volunteer opportunity, maybe you're a mom or a dad. So think about that. Nervous system dysregulation is another one. You feel like you're in fight or flight. You feel like you just can't get yourself calmed down, you feel completely stressed out all the time, like any little thing can just cause you to lose it. So just not feeling regulated, maybe you just feel like you're just, I often say like you're vibrating at a different frequency is what it feels like, leading to overwhelm, leading to trouble sleeping, maybe you're not getting enough sleep, maybe you have that physical exhaustion that then you go get in bed at night and you're like, I've been exhausted all day. Now why can't I sleep? These are all kind of like signs of burnout. And these are things that if you're feeling a number of things that I just mentioned, then I hope something I share today will be helpful. Because I think we live in a society

that is like do more, be more all the time. And that this idea of resting or this idea of taking a break or whatever feels lazy or it feels like, why can everybody else seem to do this and I can't? I know that that for me was something that I struggled with when I realized I am actually really, really burned out. So I had the realization. It's been a while, if I can be honest. It's probably been a couple of years, but I tried to push through it. it. And come last fall, so the end of 2023, I reached a point that I was like, I have no gas in the tank left. I feel like I've been working the candle at both ends. I'm obviously co-founder

of Spark Media Concepts. And then I have my own blog, Love Your Body Well, and have my own podcast as well. Still there. But I've been podcasting for a year and I loved it. Just like I love doing this podcast each and every week. But it felt unmanageable to the point that I just felt like I wasn't being a good mom. I wasn't being a good wife. The irritability was something that was really huge for me. And then I noticed just a lot of physical symptoms arising. Nervous system dysregulation was a big one for me personally. And I had to make a really, really important, scary, and if I'm honest, sad decision

for myself to totally pull back. And podcasting is one of my very favorite things to do. I loved doing my podcast. And it got to a point though, that I decided in November of 2023, that I needed to take a step back from it. And it was important for my mental health. It was important for my physical health. It was important for just my overall happiness. And that was a really hard, hard decision to realize like, okay, you're at a point that you have to stop because this is not manageable anymore. And you're not getting better by doing the things that you think are going to make this better. It just felt like an uphill battle that I couldn't win. And so the only way to get through it was to literally look at my schedule and ask myself, what can be taken off? And I know that that's really hard to do as an online creator,

as an entrepreneur, because we put ourselves out there in such a way that then when we pull back, we're like, people are going to notice. And what if they ask questions? And my advice to you from somebody who's had to do that is it's okay if they ask the question. It's also okay if you need to do that for your mental health. It's okay if you need to pull back and say, this is not serving me right now. And the no that I'm saying right now does not mean it's a no forever. It doesn't mean that this door is closed forever. It doesn't mean I can't ever reopen it. But right now, for the sake of my physical and mental well-being, it has to be a no.

And that's really hard. That is really, really hard. For me, personally, it was tough because I teach people about blogging. I have students, Jennifer and I have students that we teach about blogging. And it felt a little bit like I was exposed when I told them in the membership, like I'm pulling back. So not only did I stop recording for my podcast, I've also taken a little bit of a sabbatical for my own personal blog and have just been doing Spark Media pretty much for 2024. Love Your Body Well has just been a little bit on sabbatical. And it was well received,

thankfully. And I think what I've learned in this was that a break was necessary. And so I have some tips to share with you today about like, okay, so if you've realized, okay, Amy, I'm kind of recognizing myself in your story a little bit, maybe I'm feeling this. I just want to give you some things that I've done and some research I've also done. This isn't all about just what I've done, but that you could take a look at and hopefully, you can look at your own journey. You can look at how you're physically feeling and ask yourself, okay, what's my next step? And one of the first things I had to do was take a break. And I'm going to call that a self-care break. And this is step one and how you can kind of get out of that burnout feeling. But taking a self-care break, this might look like a week.

It might look like a day. It might look like an afternoon. It might look like months. It might look like years. I can't answer that for you. Maybe you just need a giant deep breath. Because what I have found is when you are just like running this race, and you're never off and you're never able to like see the light through the trees, your creativity is stalled. And when we have that white space in our calendar, we have that white space in our day, that's when creativity flows. When we are so busy all the time, and I'm a mom, I think many of us are parents, and we have other responsibility. I don't know of anybody who their only responsibility is blogging. Most of us have a lot of other things in our life that we are juggling. I think that's just a common thing to assume. And so knowing that this self-care is important, and it means that something on the calendar might have to get shifted. And it's not lazy. have to get shifted. And it's not lazy. It is not lazy for you to take time for yourself. And when I talk about taking time, often self-care looks like, go take a bubble bath,

go get your nails done. That's really not what I'm talking about. Sure, if you want to go do that, that's great. But that could look like taking five minutes at your desk or going and sitting outside and doing some breath work. That could look like walking around the block after your lunch. That could mean eating lunch without your computer or your phone in front of your face. But take your lunch outside, listen to nature and the sounds. Anything that can allow you to connect back within your body, I think can just help you take that giant deep breath that I was talking about. Something that I have personally been incorporating is like morning sunlight. So the second I wake up in the morning, I just go sit on my back deck. I live in Kansas in a neighborhood. And so I do not get to like look at the beautiful beach or anything like that.

So you can do this wherever you are. But I go on my back deck. And now my kids know that that's where they find me in the mornings. So they come out in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever you can do. I don't even care if it's a minute. Just go out, take a couple deep breaths in the sunlight. It has been a game changer to start my day. And this was something that was one of those simple things that I kind of said to myself, this is so simple, it feels like almost resistant if I don't do it. So when I started incorporating it, it really was like, take five minutes, just go get some morning sunlight. Start your day with the natural sun versus the phone in your face. I think just any time that we can kind of get away from our electronics, especially as content creators, because that's where we spend a lot of our time, is only going to just fuel what we need here. And that is just peace on the inside, quite honestly. And so anything that you can do for that, but then making sure that those

self-care breaks aren't just when you're feeling burned out. How do you look at your schedule then? And how do you make sure that you're incorporating this on a daily basis, on a weekly basis? Maybe you're used to working seven days a week. Raise your hand if you're doing that, because I know a lot of you are. My recommendation is going to be do whatever you can to have a full day off work. We are not surgeons saving lives. We are bloggers. And we can step away from it. We really can. And I know that is challenging. I know that we think, well, I can't let this go or people are depending on me. They might be. But nothing that we are doing

is a life or death situation. And you taking care of yourself is really, really important. Because all those symptoms that I described in the beginning, that's not fun. It's not fun for you. And it's not fun for the people in your life that you love. And it's not a good thing. When we feel like what we're doing, this job that we're doing, this job that we decided to do, because we're passionate about it, is literally taking all the joy out of our lives. So taking those self-care breaks is going to be something that I want you to consider. How can I add this into my day? How can I make sure that this is more seamless? And it just becomes a routine. And it's not going to feel like a routine

in the beginning, but it will. I promise you, you just have to give yourself some time. And you can't do a million things at once, but you can do little things one at a time. And that would be my recommendation is if you're wanting to incorporate a new habit is just to do one simple thing and just do it small. The next tip I have for you is going to be a really hard one for a lot of you because it was hard for me, but to say no to things that aren't going to move the needle forward or that are going to physically or mentally drain you. So as bloggers, we get a lot of opportunities, quite honestly, that come our way that are really exciting and they could be so amazing for our business. But when we really

look at what is included in that opportunity or what is expected of us with that opportunity, a lot of times it does take a lot to get that done. So you need to ask yourself, is this worth it? And sometimes it's going to be, but not every time. It is okay to say no to things that are going to protect your peace, or are going to protect the boundaries that you are going to create so you don't end up burned out. The only way that you're going to get more comfortable with saying no is by saying it for the first time. And like I said earlier, it doesn't mean like when you say no, it doesn't mean that you're saying no forever. It could just be no right now. That reminds me of an opportunity

that right after I'd started my podcast, it was early 2023, I had someone reach out. It was actually a guest that I'd had on and I loved connecting with her. It was amazing. And she's like, I think that you would be a great person to be in this mastermind for the next year. And there was going to be some travel involved. And there was going to be some travel involved. And it was going to be a financial investment. But it was one of those opportunities I was so excited about. I thought it was going to be so cool. And just to be able to connect with the people too. I wanted to do it. But the more and more and more I thought about it, and this was at the height of my burnout

that I wasn't really sure that it was total burnout yet. I asked myself, how are you going to feel? And like, I needed to know more. Because it's not just managing your business. It's also managing, you know, your personal life too. So I'm a mom with three kids, all are involved in activities, like how am I going to manage this? How am I going to manage travel and all that? And what I came to realize is I can do this if I want to. But I also had to take into account how am I going to feel if I do this opportunity? And ultimately, I decided not to do it. And I was pretty bummed about that for a little bit. And then as the year played out, there were several times and several things that came up that I really did make sure and check back in and say, this is the reason why you didn't do that. This wouldn't have been manageable.

This would have completely stressed you out if you would have been part of this group. And that just wasn't the right time. It doesn't mean that someday it can't be again, but it wasn't in 2023. So knowing that saying that, no, it's not forever, it might be. But there are going to be other opportunities that are going to come your way that might feel more aligned with what you want to do. Thank you to Memberful for sponsoring this episode of the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Whether you are sharing your passion for food, art, relationships, family, health and wellness, or travel blogging, you can monetize your blog by adding a membership with Memberful. Trusted by some of the web's most prominent bloggers and independent publishers,

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There's also a link in our show notes to learn more about Memberful and how it can support your online blogging business. You have to kind of think strategically and make a plan when opportunities are presented and ask yourself, do I really think this is possible to get it done? You've heard us talk about ClickUp. That's one of the first things that we do as we take on a new project is we get in a meeting and Jennifer and I map it out in ClickUp. We kind of work backwards. So we do that reverse engineering, like, this is when the projects do, and this is everything that is expected before. And then we reverse engineer. And I'm not saying we're never stressed, because that would be lying. But it really does help to know that, okay, this is expected on this day, and this is expected on this day, and try really hard to like honor the due dates that we set for ourselves. Therefore, we aren't stressing out come due date if it's a project that we've decided to take on. Because you are going to take on projects. You do want to do things that are going to help with

exposure or going to help with networking or getting out in front of more people. Maybe you want to create a course. Maybe you want to start a podcast. You're going to want to do those things. But you really do need to ask yourself, is it physically possible for me to do all the things I want to do? And if it's not, then that's when I would give you the encouragement to ask yourself what can be delegated out. Can you hire a virtual assistant? And I think that that can overwhelm especially beginner bloggers at the thought of like hiring somebody. But think about the mental space that it is going to free up for you if you need to hire someone. This doesn't mean that you need to hire somebody full time. You can hire VAs for like five hours a month, or an hour a week, or for one small task. Maybe all they're doing is checking your email. Does email stress you out? Maybe that's all they're doing is just keeping things in your inbox that you actually need to look at. Maybe you're missing opportunities in your email because you can't keep up with it.

So that's just like one example of something that you can hire out. But delegating those things to other people, especially as you're growing, I think is going to be just a really important piece of the puzzle to prevent the burnout because you have to have better balance. And I don't really love the word balance, but we can't put all of our eggs in one basket all the time. And you can't take all of your eggs out of your work basket and then put it in your personal life basket. At some point, we have to balance the weight of it all and understand where am I lacking in some areas and where am I thriving in some areas? And where am I thriving in other areas? Or do I feel like I'm just lacking in all areas? And if that's the feeling, how can you get out of

that? How can we pull ourselves out of that space? And a lot of times that looks like looking at the calendar and asking ourselves what can go? Like, do I have to do everything here? You don't. And I know that you think that you do because I think I do. And just I think for women, especially, we think that nobody else can do it as good as we can do it. But they can. And it's okay. And it's not worth your mental space. And it's not worth your mental load of having to do it all. And it's okay if you need a break. It is okay if you need a break. You're not a failure. And I want to make sure that you hear that. If you need to take a step back from something, you are not a failure. You're thriving if you do that. Because you're putting yourself first. If you've

heard me say it once, you've heard me say it a thousand times that bloggers, I often consider us helpers. That's part of the job description. But if we just are constantly pouring ourselves out to everybody else all the time, we aren't going to be able to do that very long because at the heart of it, we have to take care of ourselves. It's important. And I know it's hard because we want to be successful. Like we don't want to do this job and not be successful. I get it. Like I'm right there with you. But sometimes we have to ask ourselves what success actually means and define that differently. Another tip is just to make time for things that take care of your physical body, because your physical body is going to feel the burnout. Go back to all the symptoms. A lot of those are like physical symptoms that are going to manifest if we get ourselves to the point of like full-fledged burnout. So what are some things? I'm going to give you just four ideas that you can do. They are movement, sleep, eating nourishing foods, and stress management.

Now those are fully loaded tips, but I want to break it down. Movement. I am not telling you to go to the gym for an hour every day. I would encourage you to go outside and take a walk to your mailbox. I don't care if your mailbox is at the end of your driveway or down the street, but just get outside. Take a couple deep breaths. Walk back in. Just physically move your body, preferably outside if you can, because I think that being outside in nature is always really helpful. Sleep. I think this is a common thing with bloggers that we kind of burn the candle at both ends. We get up early. We stay up late. We talk to a lot of moms who blog, who are getting up before their kids are up and then they're working after their kids are going to bed. I recognize that. I know that that is a season

that that is what growth looks like. But I want to encourage you, please don't do that each and every night. Your physical body needs rest too. And so how can you find a way to maybe even get 30 more minutes of sleep or an hour more of sleep? Can you allow yourself to sleep in at any point? Or can you shift work around to where you can prioritize getting just a little bit more sleep. Because without sleep, without adequate sleep, our creativity is down. There's a number of physiological responses that are going to happen going on less sleep. And so just ask yourself that. This is more than just about getting in bed and sleeping But this is also about how am I going to feel the next day if I don't get the sleep that I need. Eating nourishing foods. I am not a dietitian, but I do have a Bachelor of Science in health promotion. And so I do know quite a bit about just how to essentially fuel the body. And I want you just to ask yourself how you feel when you eat different foods. This is less about calories and macros and all the things, but more about how do I fuel my body to feel my best? And if you're living on caffeine each and every day, there is no judgment.

I'm just asking, how does it make you feel? Is it something that you can't have about? You have to have it in order to survive. I think that is a very common thing. Very, very common. I think we live in a society that we all have like a caffeine IV drip going just to function. And I just want to challenge that a bit. That was something that I, that was like one of my first clues is I realized like I was literally caffeinating for half the day. And then I couldn't sleep at night and I wondered why.

But it was like, I'm literally having to have caffeine all day just to keep my eyes open. I did not feel like I was functioning without it. And so those are just important questions to ask yourself. I don't know why I went on a tangent just about caffeine. It's about much more than that. But how can you eat more nourishing foods? How can you add more whole foods to your plate? Things like that. Because when we fuel our bodies with the good things that make our bodies feel good and less sluggish, then that is going to help us as well. Stress management is the other thing I mentioned in regards to your physical body. And I've mentioned several times now, like breath work, you can do what's called

like a square breath. And all that is, is you inhale through your nose for four breaths, you hold that for four, you exhale for four, and then you hold it for four. So you're literally like picturing a square. There are so many different apps that you can download that have like guided breath work that I find really helpful. Because one thing that I noticed when I started adding breath work is I could not calm down. I would try to like close my eyes and it literally felt like my eyes were fluttering underneath my eyelids. I could not get myself calmed down. That has since improved. So if you notice that, if you notice that like your physical body just cannot calm down, I promise you it will get better. It's just kind of one of those practices that you need to keep kind of pushing through and getting comfortable feeling a little uncomfortable.

That's how I felt. And so a couple ones, like if you have a Peloton, they have excellent meditations on there with like guided stuff. One that was recently just shared with me is called Insight Timer. I think that's a really cool one. The Calm app is one. There are so many other ones you can you can go on YouTube and and find breath work. There's lots of different people on Instagram sharing things like that to blogs, but find a way to just like manage the stress. And I think a lot of times what stress management looks like is kind of what I've already talked about, like looking at your schedule, what can be taken off. And that kind of goes into time management too, that I'm going to talk about next. One of my favorite things to do is to look at my calendar each week. And I'm kind of a weirdo who looks at my calendar like several times a day. But ask myself, do I have to do everything on this? Really? Does everything that's on here today have to be done today or even this week? Can I move appointments around? If I have an appointment, do I have to go to this appointment? Do I have the capacity to go to this

appointment? Or do I really need to have this meeting right now? Or could this meeting be pushed back? It's okay to cancel. Say it again, it's okay to cancel something and like move it back to where you have more capacity. Sometimes we look at a week and we literally ask ourselves, how am I going to get this all done? And we're so stressed out about the fact of getting it done that it takes up all of our mental energy for the entire week. And so just asking yourself, how can I give myself a little bit more grace this week with my personal life and my blog? How do I make this all work? And then there are days that they are just going to be really busy. Maybe you have a lot of meetings. Maybe you have a lot of kids' activities. Maybe it's all

lumped into one day. It's going to happen. Like we can't completely avoid that. So ask yourself, like, how can you physically prepare for a busy workday to where it doesn't take anything out of you? And that's when I would go back and talk about, you know, the things with the physical body. So making sure that if you're sitting in a whole bunch of meetings, like in front of your computer all day, do you have like a five minute window that you could just walk outside really quick? Make sure you have water sitting next to you. Keep yourself hydrated. Make sure you're getting

a good night's sleep the night before. Make sure you have a lunch prepared to where you're not like totally working through lunch and then you have nothing to eat. So just think about some of those ways that you can physically prepare for a really busy day ahead and knowing that that's okay and that's going to happen. You can't avoid that. Something else I want to talk about is like re-evaluating your business and what needs to change. And that's what I had to do. And where the decision came with just taking a sabbatical for my own personal blog and podcast so I could show up fully here with Spark Media. Just because you've always done something in your business doesn't mean you always have to. And so if you need to make a shift in what something looks like, it's okay to do that. Maybe you are used to popping out three posts every single week, and you've done it for like

five years, and that's just your routine. And that's it. But like you are exhausted. And every day you dream about quitting. Every day you're like, I don't know how I can continue doing this. Re-evaluate your goals. What can you do with the content that you've already created without having to pump out new content all the time? Maybe social media is physically draining you. And you feel like you have to show up for hours a day. But maybe you don't. Maybe you don't need to do that. Maybe you could literally uninstall the app from your phone two days out of the week. Or maybe you can put screen time limits. That's been something that's been really helpful for me. I have an hour that I can spend on Facebook and Instagram. And that's personal and business. And after an hour, it's turned off.

And what I did in the beginning is I made my husband, because I felt like these boundaries were really muddy for me, I made my husband put the screen time password on there. And I was like, you cannot tell me what that is. Somehow I found out. So I know what it is now. But I try really hard not to enter in that screen time password to give me more time. I really do try to honor that limit that I set for myself. So if you feel like your social media consumption is taking up a significant amount of time and that's stressing you out or creating burnout, maybe implementing some boundaries there might be something that's really helpful for you. And knowing that you don't have to show up on social all the time to be successful. That's why you're a blogger. Your blog is always working for you.

And that's the beautiful thing about it. That's the hard thing about social media is that you do have to show up often. But maybe you want to take that energy of where you're putting all this time in social media, and maybe you want to put it back in your blog instead. And that's more, you know, behind the scenes stuff. And that's just making sure that you are creating content that people can find indefinitely because it works very different than social media. So just reevaluating your business and asking yourself, where are some changes that I could make that could maybe just free up some mental space for me and give me more capacity in my life? So I want to leave you with just recognizing that burnout is common. I think many of us, whether you're a blogger or a content creator, we have felt it. We are either going through it, we have been through it, or we are going through it. And so know those signs. And that way you can understand to look for them if it were to happen again. And I think that that is one key

piece I want you to take away from this is, as with anything in life, we can help ourselves get through something and then we kind of get a little lax and we kind of go back to our old ways, but know the signs. So if it starts to happen again, or maybe you didn't even know that burnout was a thing for you, or that was what you were experiencing, know what to look for. So when you start feeling like lack of joy or like physical and mental exhaustion, maybe that lack of motivation, feeling really irritable, or maybe even a little bit depressed, you can ask yourself, you can do that check in and say, okay, hold on. I think this is happening again, or I think I'm feeling really burned out. What can I do to take care of myself? So know those signs so it doesn't happen again. Just a reminder that growing a blog is a marathon, not a sprint. And you don't have to do it all in one day. You do not have to do all of your work in one day. It is okay to take breaks. It is okay to take a day off. It is okay to take the time away so you can have the creativity that you need when you sit back down at your desk to create content that is going to help others. You have to prioritize your self-care as almost like this armor against burnout. So how are you going to do that? Maybe today after this podcast ends, you can take some notes and ask yourself, what

fuels me? What pours back into me? What is something that maybe you love doing that you're not doing anymore? Jennifer loves to sew. I love to read. And when we have talked about feeling burned out, those are two of the things that get brought up. She wants more time to sew and I want more time to read. And so how can we do that without guilt, knowing that when we are adding these things back into our life, we are doing it so then we can serve better, whether it's our families, whether it's our communities, whatever that is, that's why we're doing it. Because you are meant to feel joy too. You don't have to work to the point of exhaustion. We can find the balance. We can find the beauty in blogging again. And if you don't feel excited about blogging right now, what needs to change for you? You don't have to continue feeling that way. I want to challenge you in that and ask yourself, what needs to change? And then be brave

enough to make the change. And that's one little change. I can say that the freedom that the last seven months has given me, I'm now getting to a point that I'm asking myself the question, what does it look like next? And I don't know the answer to that quite yet, but I feel like I'm getting closer. And I think that that's a common thing with people who have had to take kind of a sabbatical or a break is allowing yourself to kind of step out of it and ask yourself, what can I do different? How can I make this look in a way that's going to serve me well? And getting curious with that has been a really insightful journey that I've been on, and one that I would

recommend to anybody who is maybe feeling like I was last year. And I just want you to give yourself some grace. I probably brought up some things today that gave you a lot to think about, maybe even a little emotional. And that's okay. I'm not one to run from feelings. And so if I did that, I want you to know I did it. Because we deeply care about bloggers and not just about the success of your blogs, but also who you are as a person and what you can do to take care of yourself. And I think that this is a key piece in taking care of yourself is recognizing your own mental health, how you feel physically, how you're going to show up differently in order to run a thriving blogging business for years to come so you don't have to give up sooner than you need to. So thanks for tuning in with me today. Thanks for listening to the solo episode

and hearing a little bit more about my story. And if this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to share it. Share it with somebody. You can email it to them or share on social and don't forget to tag us. Those help us so very much every time that you share. And just thank you for being part of this community. And we care about you deeply. Always your success, mental, physical and in your blog. So hope you have a fantastic day. And I hope you do something to take care of yourself today. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at spark media concepts.

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