How Overconsumption Kills Your Creativity and 6 Ways You Can Fix It

This is it. You’re finally sitting down to work on your creative business. You’ve got your coffee and your laptop or notebook. You’ve settled into your chair. Aaaaaand you immediately pull out your phone. You know what I’m talking about. The thought of facing the blank page or canvas is daunting. So you turn to social media to “find inspiration” or “do more research”. But if you’re anything like me, it’s really just a distraction.

There’s no shame in the endless scrolling. But if you’re a creative, or an entrepreneur, it could be harming your overall creativity. Notice I didn’t say productivity. This isn’t that kind of article. There’s been plenty of those floating around, and I don’t know about you, but it feels like one big guilt trip. You won’t find that here. By creativity, I mean having the time to find inspiration, do the research we need to do, and actually, you know, create.

In this article, I’m going to talk about how, as creatives, we tend to spend too much time taking in others’ creative works and sacrifice our own in the process.

First of all, what does a creative do?

That might sound like a dumb question. We create things, of course. But it’s so much more than that, especially if your creativity is your source of income. We create but we also consume in order to inspire. We market in order to pique interest. We grind in order to cultivate. Being a creative isn’t a simple game to play, although it’s come a long way from the “starving artist” stereotype. We have a lot going on in our minds at one time because we’re managing a one-person circus. And sometimes it really does feel like a circus.

A big part of this juggling act is finding inspiration. Sometimes it’s not enough to sit in front of a blank page and wait for it to come. We have to go find it. Or we let our minds wander in the shower and make connections for us. Often this looks like heading to Pinterest, Quora, Twitter, or even the Gram in order to find out what others are doing successfully. And how do we put a new twist on it?

Inevitably, this can lead to hours of scrolling in order to find the perfect inspiration, if such a thing exists. And this pattern can harm our creativity. Ever heard of decision fatigue? It’s estimated that humans make an astonishing 35,000 decisions per day. It’s a lot, but we can still get worn out quickly. The internet drains a lot of those decisions for us. Decisions that we could instead be using to create. Imagine scrolling through Amazon trying to pick the best outfit for that wedding you’re attending. It’s overwhelming. And studies show that the more complicated the decision, the quicker we get exhausted.

Endless scrolling is also bad for our mental health because it starts the comparison game. We’ve all been there. We see our writer or artist friends on the Gram showing off their work. And it’s killer, right? How could we ever come up with something like that? But wait, that’s not what you were there for. Instead of giving you inspiration, like you originally wanted, now you’re jealous and feeling defeated.

Endless scrolling also wastes your time. Go ahead and roll your eyes. I know you want to. But have you analyzed how much time you spend on your phone? Because it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 3 hours per day. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been saying for years that I “don’t have time” to work out. If I were to condense all the time I spend on my phone, I’d have three times the amount of time I’d need to work out consistently. Not to mention, write! That doesn’t mean I can condense all of that time. However, if I give myself guidelines for finding my inspiration and research, I can use my little pockets of time more effectively. Here are some strategies I’ve been using recently to reclaim my creative time.

Set Time Limits

While I’m not saying you shouldn’t do market research, I am saying that you should set a limit. This limit can be highly individualistic. As a mompreneur, I don’t have much time on my plate to dedicate to, let’s be honest, much of anything outside of baby and home. That means I spend maybe one hour on competitor research per week. For clients, it’s more, since that’s how I make my bread. But you get the idea. Set a limit and don’t go over it no matter what.

Make A List

Another thing you can do to prevent the endless scrolling for ideas is to make a list of things you want to research beforehand. Having a list in front of you when you do your inspiration searching helps focus your time. And since you’ve set a limit for yourself, do yourself a favor and use it wisely. Personally, I use this technique with hashtag research and making connections on LinkedIn.

Write Down What Distracts You

This one is related to the previous tip. If you run across more questions or rabbit holes while you’re doing your inspiration research, write it down somewhere else and come back to it later. I am working to improve this practice, but when I do it right, it helps me stay focused. It also gives me a huge bank of research ideas for later. And then, to reward myself, I’ll sometimes let myself just go down the rabbit holes when I find I have a large stretch of time to myself. This also saves me from doom scrolling by giving my need to follow the rabbit a slight direction. I get to scroll and run and go deeper while structuring what I’m doing and it’s still beneficial to my work instead of being a mindless TikTok binge at one a.m.

Set App Timers

Now hang on, I know you’ve heard this recommendation before. But don’t write it off just yet. Spend one week using your socials and research engines regularly. Then check your usage in your phone’s settings. Decide for yourself how much of that time was spent actually researching and finding inspiration and how much of it was spent just scrolling. For me, that looked like limiting TikTok to 10 minutes and Instagram to 20 minutes per day. At one point, I completely deleted Facebook from my phone so I could only access it on my computer, which meant I was actually looking for an answer or doing research. You know yourself best, so monitor your behavior for a week and then set your app timer. I think you’ll be surprised.

Be Present In Conversations

This is something I’m actively working on, but I’ve noticed a huge difference. One of the best ways to find inspiration is in your conversations with others. But that requires that your mind be fully present, engaged, and listening while you’re talking to them. I’m guilty of having conversations with my husband but while we’re talking, I’m really thinking about something else. To combat this and give my mind a better grip on the present moment, I set Breathe reminders on my watch. Every time it goes off, I stop what I’m doing and figure out where my mind is at. If it’s not in the present moment, like if it’s stuck worrying about the future or analyzing something I did in the past, I take a deep breath and practice my senses. What can I hear, smell, feel, and see in this exact moment? If one round doesn’t work, I’ll do multiple rounds until I feel like I’m fully present. This allows me to take in what the other person is saying and it lodges better in my brain. This can become a gold mine of inspirational links for your wandering shower brain later.

Make Creativity A Habit

Let’s take writing for example. If I sit down every day and smash out a thousand words, even if they’re trash and need seven rounds of editing with lots of coffee, I wrote something. What’s that famous quote? You can’t edit a blank page. I used to find this piece of advice annoying. “That’s cool but how do you write trash and get gold out of it?” That thought combined with my fear of failure kept me from writing for a decade or more. I hate to say it now, because I’m sure someone reading this is thinking the same things I used to, but I promise. If you sit yourself down and write for 5 minutes a day, you will eventually strike gold. And this advice applies across all creative disciplines. Painting? Slap some paint on a canvas, even if it’s not pretty. Pottery? Make that lopsided coffee cup. Someone will love it. Embroidery? Do french knots till your fingers bleed. Then you’ll have a rose bush. When you sit down and do the work every day, day after day, you tell Inspiration, “This is where you can find me. Come when you’re ready.” And I guarantee you’ll do a shit ton of learning in the process. This reminds me of something I read once where a teacher told his shop class they’d be divided into two groups. The first group would be graded on one project and it had to be perfect. The second group would be graded on how much they produced. And it turned out the group that produced the most quantity improved their quality more over time than the first group.

Those are the things I have been actively applying lately to help improve my creative process. And it turns out, I don’t need Pinterest or Instagram that much.

What are some things you do to avoid endless scrolling and actually create? Share in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you!