Is Stress Hurting Your Blog Creativity?

The New York Times recently explored the idea that chronic stress can hinder creative thinking—at least if you’re a lab rat.  Now I haven’t read any lab rat blogs, so I don’t know if it’s true.  Do stressed lab rats keep repeating the same old “Ten tips for getting through mazes” over and over, while relaxed rats have left them in the dust and are posting “Fifteen Surefire Ways to Get in the Placebo Group?”

From casual observation, I’d guess some bloggers are energized by looming deadlines and heavy workloads, while others find their creativity suffers when they feel pressured.  I’m definitely in the latter group. If I don’t have much time or I’m worried about something, I get stressed, and my posts come out stiff and clunky and often contain some of the same old ideas I’ve written about before.  Like the lab rats, I need to feel relaxed in order to perform my best and think up new ideas.

Can Blogging Itself Be Stressful?

Some people just blog for fun and I envy that.  But if you have a blog and are trying to make any money from it, it can be hard to explain to nonbloggers why blogging could ever feel stressful.  How can something that pays so modestly be any more than a hobby?  And when a hobby starts feeling demanding, the “normal” thing to do is quit!

The problem is, unless you are unusually brilliant and lucky, it takes a lot of work to turn a hobby blog into a source of real income.  But while you’re building it, it doesn’t seem to count as a “real job,” so you have to squeeze it into your life along with family responsibilities and other work.  If you don’t post on a regular schedule, it’s going to be hard to build a faithful blog audience.  But if you do, your friends and family may wonder why you’re taking it so seriously and stressing about it.

At the beginning, when hopes are high and everything about blogging is new and fun, this issue of “is it a job or a hobby” is not a big deal.  But after months turn to years, the lopsided ratio of work to income can become frustrating for some of us.

Also, as Mom101  wrote about over on the blogging and social media page,  the product promotion and review aspects of blogging can stress out many bloggers and distance them from the creative expression that got them into blogging in the first place.

Re-Energizing

Of course one idea for restoring creativity to blogging is taking a break.  But then many of us have these worst case scenarios in our minds about what would happen if we disappeared for a few weeks.  Are these really true?  Would our “regulars” leave us and never come back?  Should we keep the blog going with guest posts or further burden ourselves by banking a bunch of pre-written posts before we take off?  I think considerations like these keep a lot of bloggers from taking the breaks they might need to feel more creative and productive.  My guess: the world would not come to an end if went offline for a little while!

And there are other stress-reduction techniques besides taking time off:  visualizations and “mini vacations” and other relaxation techniques.  In fact, there was a Juice video  about this very subject earlier in the summer.

Turning Stress into Great Blog Posts

Of course one of the best ways to get creative when you’re feeling stressed is to blog about what’s stressing you out.

A couple of my favorite fitness bloggers recently wrote about both how much they love blogging, but also how the demands can be quite draining.  Mizfit and Charlotte of The Great Fitness Experiment both had eloquent posts about the challenges of blogging that I could totally relate to.   I’ve posted about my own blog angst before too.  Fortunately, readers seem to appreciate the honesty and don’t seem to hold it against us, at least if it’s only one post and not a chronic whine-fest.

And Holly at Nothing But Bonfires  turns stressful life events (including her constantly peeing cats) into a hilarious post.

Taking a different tone, Katherine at Shoot Me Now writes a poignant post about “holding on to her heaven,” when challenging life events make for hard times and lots of anxiety.

Does stress from your life ever make blogging difficult?  And does blogging itself cause any stress, or for you, is it just for fun?