When you are streaming or making videos, while you may be making something, the product, at its core, is YOU. Many creators make sacrifices to their sleep, diet, exercise, personal time, and more to create their content
… which may work for a while, but it’s not sustainable.
How can you balance a busy schedule, content creation, and a healthy lifestyle? Today’s article will delve into the first things we often sacrifice as creators with busy schedules: our health.
Sleep
Streaming often goes late, and work usually starts early.
But I want both! Sleep is for the weak!
Everyone has different ideal timing and needs for sleep, but here is one immutable fact about it: everyone needs to get enough sleep, at least most of the time.
Work, school, relationships, and other important obligations all have clear, immediate consequences if we neglect them, so sleep is often the first thing we sacrifice when it comes to content creation. You’ll feel tired the next day or two, but
Who relates to this?
You had a busy day at work. It’s a Thursday and you normally publish a video on Fridays. You get home, relax for a bit, and realize you haven’t made tomorrow’s video yet. You work from 9 PM to 3 AM recording, editing, rendering, uploading, making a thumbnail, writing a description, adding tags, and scheduling. You feel accomplished, but you have to wake up in 4 hours again for work.
You may, in the end, finish the video on time and feel great about it, but you can’t rely on midnight oil to finish projects all the time when you have other commitments. While cutting sleep is an easy way to avoid consequences for neglecting other commitments, there are long term health consequences for cutting too much sleep. We won’t delve into the science of it, but aim to get enough sleep more of the time!
Refer to our post on time management if you need ideas to plan your schedule better and be more productive while still getting enough sleep!
Diet
Many of us forego cooking for fast food or deliveries to save time, and many foods and drinks targeted at gamers are less than healthy.
We are not nutritionists, but be careful with what you eat! At the very least, be mindful of when you make convenient choices like ordering fast food or drinking energy drinks and instead consider healthier options from time to time.
Exercise
We are not personal trainers, and we are certainly not certified or qualified to provide anything other than extremely general tips, but here is a big one:
Gaming and content creation can largely be sedentary activities. Make sure you fit movement and light exercise into your day.
While exercise uses energy and takes time, it ends up increasing your total energy through the day if you stick with it. You don’t need to be an Olympic-level athlete or even go to the gym to see benefits—it could be as simple as adding a 10-minute walk around the block each day or a brief walk around the house each hour.
Rest + ”You” Time
Weekends are great, open spots in our schedule where we can create our content for the week!
… but if you spend 12+ hours a day every weekday working on your job/education as well as creating content AND work on content on weekends, you’ll face inevitable burnout.
Unless creating content recharges your personal “battery” as much as resting, make sure to have at least one day (mostly) off a week! At the very least, have semi-regular “you” days. Below are some ideas:
- Once a month, completely unplug and do stuff you’ve been too busy for, like cleaning your space
- Use extensions like Netflix Party to binge-watch something with friends one day
- Plan day-cations in your local area! You’d be surprised what awesome things you can find within a one-hour drive. Within one hour from our office, there’s tons of hiking trails, public gardens, city life, and more.
The idea is to ensure that you spend time doing things to rest, recharge, and relax from time to time. If you’re going out on a day-cation or other trip, be sure to follow social distancing rules, avoid crowded spaces, and wear a mask when other people are around—at least until the pandemic is over.
In Short…
Many of us add content creation to an already busy schedule. Without a lot of thought, care, and planning, we often end up sacrificing our health to make it happen. Time-wise, sleep seems to be a harmless thing to cut when compared to commitments, but everyone needs enough sleep. It’s also easy to forget about maintaining a healthy diet, exercise schedule, and quantity of relaxation time.
Remember to take care of yourself! In many games, you need to rest and recharge in order to level up, and the same goes for real life. You are the most important part of your content, so treat yourself that way!
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