When you’re training for a sport you don’t exercise every day because that leads to injuries from overuse. Your muscles get stronger when you rest.
To create content you need to do two things:
1. Consume & create content (exercise)
2. Get offline to recharge your creativity (rest)
Originally I posted this on LinkedIn. But I kept thinking about it and realized I had more to say. After creating social media content for 10+ years professionally, I've experienced the roller coaster of excitement, being overwhelmed, burnout and rude comments for more than a decade of my life. Sometimes I wonder how I've kept my sanity. Usually this question pops up in August in the midst of the Kentucky State Fair when people are yelling at me about parking.
Nature. That's what's gotten me through 10 years of constantly being online. When I first moved to Louisville, I immediately joined a climbing meetup and started rock climbing. As long as I can remember I've been climbing on things. Trees, fences, my parents roof. Fortunately Louisville has a wonderful climbing community and most serious climbers make weekly treks to Red River Gorge, a beautiful area about 2 hours east of the city. When you're climbing or belaying you can't check social. Not only is cell signal weak, but it's a hands-on attention-necessary activity.
Every time I go to the woods, especially on longer vacations, I come back feeling refreshed, creative and full of ideas. But because I spend a lot of time on the internet, I know you can't rely on one person's experience to make a judgement. Repeated studies show that being in nature is good for your brain.
Take this tidbit from an American Psychological Association article:
"And experiments have found that being exposed to natural environments improves working memory, cognitive flexibility and attentional control, while exposure to urban environments is linked to attention deficits (Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 28, No. 5, 2019)."
A Stanford study found that walking in the woods versus walking in an urban setting made a difference in key areas of the brain related to depression.
"The researchers found little difference in physiological conditions, but marked changes in the brain. Neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a brain region active during rumination – repetitive thought focused on negative emotions – decreased among participants who walked in nature versus those who walked in an urban environment. "
Not everyone is going to spend every weekend traveling to a world-class climbing destination (or be fortunate enough to call the Red River Gorge their home crag) but even going to a local park helps trigger these benefits. Often when I get writers block or creatively stuck, I go into my backyard and stare at my garden. Initially I saw this as procrastination. Then I realized every time I walked outside I came back better prepared and more creative. Now it's a key part of my work day, especially for creative-heavy projects.
If you're feeling stuck? Go to a park or the forest. It's probably exactly what you need.
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