One year ago I wrote a blog where I opened up about being burnt out. I had the chance recently to discuss this with someone in the community and the idea of a recap blog sprang up. It seemed like a great idea so, here it is.
Since I wrote that blog, I have not felt anything close to the level of burnout that I experienced last year. So, I guess I can claim success! Yay! Oh, but hold up a second there Mr Wolf, before you go planning the wild celebration party. It might be a good idea to go over some of the specifics of the last blog and break it all down piece by piece to see what real measure of progress there has been in the last twelve months.
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One of the first problems I discussed last year was my very mild feelings of ochlophobia, a condition where being in public spaces with many other people is very uncomfortable. While not a direct source of burnout, it does contribute to feelings of overall stress. It is a complication, a wrinkle in the bedsheets at 2am, a buzzing in the brain that won’t go away. And yes, I still feel it from time to time in my personal life off stream. Having revisited my old blog post this week, it struck me that I don’t really notice this much at all while I am streaming!
Well… OK there might be an exception to this. Reading out loud! *Dun-dun duuuuuun!*
My old foe, constantly crawling forth from its dank and putrid hole every time a decent-sized chunk of text pops up on screen, requiring me to read aloud. I have mulled this over a little and feel that maybe my difficulties reading out loud to an audience are linked in some way to being uncomfortable in a ‘crowd’ so to speak, since we are talking about the internet here. Still, being aware of an audience while reading something out loud could be part of the problem in the back of my brain. Maybe this beast is the last boss monster to be slain on the path to true self-improvement? We shall see.
If nothing else, I feel like I am less flustered by this than I was a year ago. So again, there is improvement there. In my last blog I discuss this in connection to a game called Pillars of Eternity and having to do huge amounts of reading causing a lot of stress when I would get my words muddled. And while I still get tongue-tied today when I need to read stuff, I have not felt it cause me any stress in some time.
Another source of burnout was my schedule. As I discussed in my blog last year, I cut Sunday from the schedule to give myself a free weekend day for personal stuff. I feel this has helped a lot, however I have recently decided to change my schedule again and add a few more hours back to the days I am currently streaming. Nothing drastic, an hour or two on each broadcast at most. So, in a year’s time I will look back at this blog and see if that was a good idea. Hahaha haha… ha… yeah.
It is safe to say in summary that an overall burnout has not been a problem in the last year. I have had some breaks from streaming, too. Since the previous blog on burnout, I got engaged in October and then married in May this year. These two events along with my wife’s birthday in February came with a short holiday where I was not streaming, so I had some time off to recharge my batteries.
Before I am done here, I do want to raise a different kind of burnout that I have experienced this year. I am feeling burnt out on big games. Since December the channel schedule has been dominated by several huge game playthroughs such as Fallout 4, Black Flag and more recently Final Fantasy XV. After spending a long time on each of these games (over a month in some cases, and four with Fallout 4), I was getting to the point with each where I simply want to get to the end of the game and play something else.
I feel some short games are in order going forward. Not that I will never play a long game again. Even as I write this I am planning a full playthrough of Mass Effect 1 through 3 starting in December. Also, I feel it would be a good idea to be more open to the idea of splitting up the larger games by taking a break with a shorter game here and there that can be done in a couple of streams.
Let’s see how this goes over the next year. See you then!