Yesterday I caught myself trying to guilt-trip me into making a new anatomy study just to post something. I was sitting there, telling myself “Look at me, such a slacker. Haven’t drawn anything for a week, and still hoping for a bright future…”

It feels pathetic to rely on it, but I realized I was stuck in a corner where the only way to move was to hurt my own feelings. I’ve operated this way ever since I started posting art online around 5 years ago. Whenever I hit a low-output period, I use guilt to get back on track. It’s the only tool I thought I had left.

The feedback loop of guilt

Guilt is very convenient, it’s always there for you. I realized how backwards my process was when I compared it to the gym. I don’t have to shame myself into lifting weights because I genuinely enjoy it. In a way, I treat gym more creatively than my art.

With art, I’ve spent 5 years providing positive reinforcement for a bad habit. When you use guilt as a primary motivator for that long, you train yourself out of every other tool. You eventually start to believe that you need to feel bad to be productive. The more it works, the more you lose the ability to create for the sake of it.

Observing the behavior

The only way I’ve found to break this pattern is to stop and take an honest look at your behavior:

  1. Look at the last time you got out of a slump. Did you become productive because you were genuinely interested, or because you didn’t want to feel like a failure?
  2. Find how you measure your worth. For me it’s the frequency of my posts and the engagement on them. When you understand the metric, you can see why it’s triggering the guilt.
  3. Pivot to something adjacent and low-pressure for a while. Right now I’m taking a break from studies and exploring other areas like graffiti and creating my own app. I can’t be a slacker there, because there are no expectations.

I’m trying to change the source of my motivation, but it’s not a straight-forward process. My old habit of guilting myself is too deeply ingrained to pivot quickly on the same type of activity. I can explain the frameworks in my newsletters, but I’m still learning how to actually apply my own advice.