I usually post twice a month on Substack. Also, once or twice I send an email to my eCoffee circle. It is the last week of October, and my published articles and sent emails of the month account for a total of 0. Not for lack of time, nor ideas. My “Content Ideas“ sheet and “Drafts“ page are brimming with ideas, half-formed topics and sentences that arrived at odd hours.
And yet, every time I sat down to write, nothing came. I’d open the document, stare at the blinking cursor, write a line, delete it, then scroll through older drafts hoping one would call to me. But no. The spark wasn’t there. It felt like my creative self had gone on an extended holiday without leaving a forwarding address.
I struggled with writing. Hard.
Part of me wanted to force it. To prove I could still deliver on a “schedule“. I treated it as a problem to be solved. But this one refused logic. It didn’t respond to structure or self-discipline. The more I pushed, the heavier it felt. And so I paused, which ironically became the very thing that enabled me to write these lines..
On these creative droughts
Surely, many factors contributed. I tend to be most creative when I have a thousand other things to do. You know those procrastination-fuelled waves where ideas overflow simply because they shouldn’t? But this time was different. I had a full plate and deadlines that really shouldn’t be messed with. If you follow me on Substack, you might have seen this Note:
I was, to put it mildly, burned out. So much so that I required a few days of absolute detachment from screens to recover. No emails, no tabs, no notifications. Just time with my family in the Mediterranean countryside.
To add to that, my cycle was entering its slower phases. The ones where my body naturally retreats. When it needs slowness, rest, quiet, and inwardness. It’s a rhythm I’ve recognised and grown more attuned to over the years. There are times to be radiant and outward, and there are times to dim gently, to conserve, to listen.
But even knowing that, I ignored it.
I numbed the quiet with the meaningless hum of social media filling every still moment. It’s tragic, really, how easily our fingers reach for distraction before our hearts even realise what they’re craving. I told myself I was “keeping up,” doing “research,” but in truth, I was simply overstimulated and disconnected from my own inner voice.
Thank goodness for dreams.
They’ve been my internal compass for a long while, offering guidance and clarity when my waking mind is too cluttered to listen. Saturday night left me uneasy the next morning. It was enough to make me pull the plug.
So I did.
Yesterday was deliberately slow. I had almost no screen time. I spent most of the day reading a book that had been waiting patiently on my shelf for months. Then, before bed, I dimmed the lights, put on shamanic drumming, and let the sound wash over me. I simply lay there, breathing, feeling, allowing myself to be empty.
It was the first truly slow day I’d had in a while.
That quiet brought clarity.
It made me reflect on how deeply our creativity is tied to the state of our nervous system, and how easily it can be hijacked.
We often romanticise creativity as something that lives in the mind, as though ideas appear from some mysterious intellectual ether.
In truth, creativity is embodied. It comes from a calm, nourished, open state.
When our senses are overloaded, when we’re running on adrenaline or chasing constant hits of dopamine, there’s simply no room for inspiration to emerge.
Social media, for all its wonders, is engineered noise. It’s a quick pleasure without depth. And while those tiny bursts of dopamine can feel satisfying in the moment, they leave behind a hollow kind of mental fatigue that looks like “writer’s block”.
When I think about it, my inability to write wasn’t a failure of discipline or imagination. It was a symptom. A sign that I was overstimulated and undernourished, creatively speaking. My mind had become full of other people’s thoughts, other people’s voices, other people’s content. There was no space left for my own.
Yesterday reminded me that reading a book slowly, without checking your phone every few minutes, can rewire your attention in the most healing way. That allowing yourself to do nothing for a while isn’t laziness but restoration.
When we stop feeding on fragments of information, we begin to digest life again. We start noticing the small, beautiful things that never trend online. The smell of tea cooling on your desk. The weight of sunlight through the curtain. The sound of your own breathing when you finally pause.
From that softness and stillness, words begin to return. Not forced, not demanded, but offered gently. I think that’s the real lesson this little creative drought has taught me.
So, if you’ve been feeling similarly stuck, unable to create, to think, to write, maybe it’s not that you’ve lost your spark. Maybe you’re simply overstimulated, disconnected from your own rhythms. Maybe the wisest thing you can do is nothing at all for a while.
Put down your phone. Pick up a book. Step outside. Listen to music that doesn’t demand your attention but meets you gently.
And when you come back to the page, or to whatever it is you create, you’ll find that the words, the colours, the ideas, they were never gone. They were just waiting for you to get quiet enough to hear them.
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