Dealing With Anxiety When Building Your Creative Career

Something I don’t talk about nearly as much as I experience it is the massive amount of anxiety that comes with building your own creative career.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. My mind wouldn’t turn off, and I was buzzing all night (in a bad way).

I was drowning in anxiety about everything:

• What if I can’t actually make this work?
• Views and engagement has been down lately—what if it gets to the point where no one sees my stuff and then everything falls apart?
• All the creative stuff I’m doing lately, the music, the writing, all of it sucks. Am I actually way worse than I thought? Have I got way further to go than I thought?
• What if it’s all just too overwhelming?
• What if I don’t deserve this? Am I a fraud?

This happens to me maybe once a week, sometimes a lot more, and at the very least once every couple of weeks—and not just at night.

It sometimes feels like it’s as much a part of my regular routine as actually working.

And one of the most frustrating things about these moments is that your mind kind of shuts down the possibility that everything might actually turn out ok.

The negativity closes you off to positive answers to the above questions, and it’s easier than usual to go to those ‘worst case scenario’ places, which leads me to the other super frustrating thing:

It can throw you completely off track.

Sometimes I’ll be anxious and just keep pushing on with my work.

But sometimes it’s so bad that it takes over and puts a stop to everything.

I’ll have a solid day planned out, get up and be ready to go hard, and a couple of hours in the schedule is out the window because my mind just shuts down.

And look, life happens.

You can’t rely on every day being perfect—that would be delusional.

On top of that, anxiety just seems to be like a built—in part of building something for yourself.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone who’s built their own successful thing say “it’s actually the easiest thing in the world, I never got/get anxious.”

But this happens often enough and is disruptive enough that—for me—it’s worth trying to do something about.

And this brings me to the point of this letter:

As a creative, how do you deal with building a successful career while also being constantly beaten down by the doubt and distraction from anxiety that comes with it?

(Not to mention any extra struggles on top of that)

Today I’ll share a few simple things I did and am currently doing to deal with it.

I’m sure there are plenty of much, much more successful people who have a better answer to this than me, but this is the way I’m approaching it at the moment.

I would consider myself successful according to my personal definition: Most days I wake up and get to do what I love, what I’ve chosen to do. I have lots of autonomy, I generally have lots of control over my days, and I get to be creative on a consistent basis.

There’s enough challenge in my day to day life that I feel satisfied with the work, I feel like I’m pursuing something genuinely meaningful to me, and I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job of it.

If you think it’s worth reading what I’m doing, read on.

Anxiety on the calendar.

No one really schedules in anxiety, right? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a calendar with “be anxious for 2 hours” on it.

I don’t do this either… but I do factor it in when I plan my days.

A while ago I realised something about myself: Even when I’m in great situations, I’ll still find a way to be anxious.

Before I had my own business, I thought it was the 9—5 work that was causing all my problems.

It didn’t help, that’s for sure. But even in my current situation, which I would consider pretty awesome relative to being in any of the 9—5s I’ve been in, the anxiety creeps in.

If you’d told past me, “Alex, soon enough you’ll have your own creative career. You’ll be your own boss, have total control over your days, and get to be creative in multiple fulfilling ways” I would have assumed (and I did) my anxiety would completely disappear.

Nope, it just comes up in different ways. New responsibilities, new problems.

Better problems and responsibilities, to be clear. And that’s something I can lean on when I feel like shit. But the anxiety is still there.

Once I realised it wasn’t automatically going away just because of a change in situation, my focus shifted from “how do I get rid of this?” to “ok, how do I manage this?”

Don’t get me wrong, I still do things to work on getting rid of it.

I’d say over the last few years, I’ve significantly reduced my level of anxiety over an average week.

But I made the decision that I wouldn’t let it continue to hold me back so much from doing what I needed to do, and so managing it became the focus, instead of letting ‘fixing’ it consume my life.

Ok, so how?

The answer for me was mostly in everything around it.

I decided to design my life in such a way that I could actually make space for the anxiety.

The idea was if it wasn’t completely going away, I may as well set things up so that when these highly disruptive moments inevitably come, my career didn’t fall apart.

What does this look like?

On paper, less busy (and on the surface, less productive) days, and a lot more “recovery” time (stick with me here, even if this isn’t possible for you).

Basically, nowadays I commit to less, and even if the hardcore anxiety decides to strike, I’m much more likely to fulfil my commitments.

I’m more likely to keep promises to myself, and that feels good.

You might be thinking “what kind of bullshit is this? So you’ve just lowered the bar for yourself?”

Kind of… but not really. Here’s what’s happened:

The power of reality.

First, by getting real with myself about what I was most likely able to achieve (instead of what I believed I should achieve), I was able to get much clearer on my actual situation.

I think there’s a false sense of security in pretending something like your genuinely disruptive anxiety doesn’t exist.

You can have delusional confidence (which in a lot of situations I fully support) and tell yourself you’ll be able to deal with the anxiety as it comes up and get tons of stuff done…

…but if you can’t actually back that up with your actions, you’re living in a fairy tale.

Eventually, that will catch up to you, and the longer you let the delusion go on, the more damaging it will be when you’re confronted with reality.

There’s a place for delusional confidence—you do need an insane belief in your ability to succeed.

But you also have to be smart. It’s a balancing act: Be unrealistic, but also (somehow) simultaneously realistic.

When I got real about my situation, I had real clarity on where I was at. And once I had real clarity, I felt more in control.

There’s something intensely grounding about being totally honest with yourself.

It feels right, and it feels powerful.

By looking at my situation and my anxiety right in the face and saying, “alright, let’s fuckin’ do this” I was able to start designing a lifestyle for myself that was based on reality, and therefore much more stable.

So again, on paper this didn’t look too impressive. There was less work in my calendar, and a lot more of a safety net (in terms of time and commitments) were the anxiety to get bad enough to stop me from working.

But since then, overall I’ve been more motivated, a lot more satisfied with and grateful for my progress (because it’s real), and although I still get those moments of intense doubt and disruption, they bother me a whole lot less in the big picture.

I feel much more capable in general too, and I feel I can still move forward even with something so disruptive.

You may not be in a situation where you can carve out a ton of space for potential moments of anxiety that stop you in your tracks, but you can sit down and get real about what you’re actually able to accomplish.

Remember, unrealistic and realistic. You can still dream big (and you should), but be smart.

If you’re interested in this approach, see how it feels to truly accept reality, and then challenge yourself to go hard from that reality.

Don’t pretend your anxiety—or whatever thing that’s blocking you—isn’t there.

Face it, and then set new, real, solid goals with that in mind. Watch how much more motivated you become to achieve even greater things (more on this in a moment).

That’s been one big benefit of this approach for me.

But here’s where (I think) it gets really interesting: By “lowering the bar” for myself, I’ve actually drastically raised the bar.

The forcing function of dealing with anxiety.

When I made the decision to be more real with myself—which ultimately led to me committing to less—what I didn’t realise was what a positive effect it’d have on my productivity.

By giving myself less time to do actual work, I forced myself to get more focused and work on what really matters.

Accepting there would be disruptive anxiety moments limited my options in terms of what to work on.

This has been highly beneficial. I cut a lot of ‘fake important’ stuff.

It’s easy to tell yourself everything is important when you don’t have to choose between goals.

When you do, you have to ask questions like “if I cut this out, how would my business change?” and “what’s bringing me the highest return for my efforts?”.

This has lead me to 10x style thinking, helped me see what I’m working on as more important (and so I want to do a better job at it) and transformed the way I look at what’s possible in life in general.

Not only this, I’m also using my time more effectively.

With this perception of limited time, I’m more often committed to staying on task and finishing the few things I’ve scheduled.

And this is a good time to bring up an important point: I’m motivated by default. I want to get shit done.

It’s not hard for me to get out of bed and get to work.

This helps a lot. It’s like now that I’ve committed to achieving less, I’m even more driven.

Whether or not that’s coming from a good place, I don’t know, but I do know it’s put me in a situation where I’m more productive than ever, even with these anxiety moments, and without avoiding reality.

If you’re not someone who finds it easy to get motivated, that’s a conversation for another time, but I want to be clear that I think this approach of creating extra space for the anxiety works so well for me because I’m more likely to use my work time productively.

Pushing and stretching yourself is good, when you do it in the right way, and especially when it’s followed up by a similar intensity of rest.

I’ve had (plenty of) moments where I’ve pushed too hard and burnt out, but I’ve also had moments where I’ve been too easy on myself for too long, and that doesn’t feel good either.

Like the unrealistic/realistic approach to achieving things, we want a healthy balance of positive stress and rest and recovery.

In my eyes, that’s how you grow without destroying yourself.

I should also clarify that I don’t always stick to these work limitations.

Sometimes the balance is off, and I’ll work all day, if I can and want to. And that feels right sometimes.

But I approach my weeks as if I can’t work all day. I plan as if I’ve got a lot more limitations.

So this is a big part of how I’m currently doing it: I’m managing the (sometimes intense) anxiety that comes with building a creative career primarily by creating space for it and accepting it’s most likely not going to fully go away.

I’m working with it instead of letting it steal time, focus, and energy from my work, or pretending it doesn’t exist and being (stupidly) delusional about what I can accomplish.

And in most cases, when those moments of intense anxiety happen, I will try to work through them—that’s my step 1.

But sometimes it doesn’t work, if it’s bad enough.

For whatever reason, I just can’t get around it.

So I’m being realistic about that and designing my life to allow me to flourish regardless.

But Alex, what about the anxiety itself? Are you doing anything to actually work on reducing it?

I am.

Managing anxiety.

So I’ve tried all kinds of things, and I’ll go through phases where I’m really into like meditation, or certain supplements, or walking, or some healthy practise that’s meant to reduce anxiety.

I do still do that stuff, and I highly recommend you explore options like this for yourself because they can be really helpful.

But I don’t really want to give you like a list of options in that way because you can easily just google that.

I’d rather give you a few big things (on top of making space for it) that have had a much bigger impact on me long term.

So before I go through them, I’ll quickly say this: If you’re someone who constantly struggles with…

• Sleep
• Exercise
• Eating good food
• And you’re in an environment that’s really bad for your overall wellbeing…

You need to sort them out.

Fixing up all of these without changing anything else has had a massive impact on me.

I would say they’re a big reason for my baseline level of constant anxiety lowering significantly.

It used to be so bad that I could do next to nothing.

I was living in constant fear of basically everything, and 99% of my time was spent just worrying about shit and not actually making any moves.

So fixing up those four big ones (sleep, exercise, food, and environment) over the years has freed me from that constant fear and unease.

But that doesn’t always fix everything for me.

Sometimes the anxiety—wherever it’s coming from—is just too big a force and it’s able to override the effect of those good habits.

So on top of everything I’ve mentioned so far, here are a few very simple things I do to deal with it.

Building evidence.

The first thing is gathering evidence of my power over the anxiety.

So the idea with this is zooming out so I can see myself as someone who has been able to keep moving forward time and time again, regardless of these moments of doubt and distraction that come from the anxiety.

Basically, I’m saying to myself: “Look, you’ve struggled with anxiety for all this time and look at what you’ve still been able to do. You didn’t die, you didn’t give up, those moments pass every single time, and you’re still going.”

And I know this sounds basic, but it’s been super powerful for me.

By regularly showing myself that there’s real evidence of me being more powerful than the anxiety—because I’m still standing—I’m diminishing its control over me.

When you sit down and properly reflect on your resilience over the long term, not just how you acted in those bad moments, you get a better idea of your real power.

You can more confidently say “fuck, I can handle this”.

And the more evidence you have of being able to handle it, the easier it is to say in these moments of intense anxiety or doubt or frustration or whatever:

“This is just another one of those times that I’ll get through. I’ve done this a million times and I always come out OK. I have overwhelming evidence that—even though right now I feel like shit and like everything is falling apart—I always bounce back stronger.”

Over time, this has built a lot of confidence in my ability to overcome challenges, not just directly related to anxiety, but in other ways as well.

So I try to do this kind of reflection fairly often when I’m not in one of these bad moments, because it’s much easier to see the positive, and it’s also much easier to acknowledge the negative without it messing with me too much.

Remember earlier on I talked about how when you’re in these bad moments, it’s much harder to see how things will turn out ok?

Your mind closes up and your focus narrows.

You’re zooming right in instead of zooming out like you need to, and so it’s harder to get back into a good place.

But if you gather the evidence around those moments, you’re much better equipped to deal with them when they happen.

If you build a wall today to protect your house from a storm that’s coming tomorrow, when that storm comes you’ll be more likely to survive it, right? You might still suffer some damage, but you likely won’t have to rebuild everything.

Whereas if you try to build the wall only during the storm, how effective do you think that’s going to be? Not very, right?

It’s going to be much harder to build up something that actually protects you because while you’re trying to build, you’re simultaneously trying to deal with the storm.

Just so we’re clear: The wall is your evidence, and the storm is your anxiety.

This is how it seems to work for me anyway. You gather the evidence and build a fortress when you’re strong, so you can better protect yourself when you’re not.

And the more you weather these storms, the more real evidence you have that you can handle it, and that gives you even more strength.

Over time, those storms aren’t so destructive, both outside of when they’re happening and while they are happening.

It’s like the winner effect: The more wins you have, the more wins you have.

And this leads me into the next point on this.

What if you don’t have any evidence?

What if you’ve been pummelled by your anxiety time and time again, and it has actually stopped you from getting anywhere?

First, if you’re still here, you do have evidence.

If you’re you’re currently still holding out hope that you can make real progress and build this thing, you have evidence.

It hasn’t beat you. Even if it set you back 10 years, it hasn’t won if you’re here right now and ready to go again.

I’ve had to go to this place multiple times in the last few years: “Ok Alex, this thing has really pummelled you… but you’re still here. It didn’t kill you, so it didn’t win.”

And then from this place, I’d give myself small wins to build back up.

It’s hard on the ego, but sometimes the best thing you can do is give yourself a series of laughably small wins to build confidence.

It could be something as simple as watching a video on a topic you’re struggling with in your creative career.

It could be that you decide to make one social media post, or write one riff, or tick off one tiny thing on your to do list.

This helps you build momentum, and hopefully what will happen is that drive to succeed will push you to do bigger and bigger things.

Again, there is a lot of power in accepting reality and acting from a place of truth.

“Fake it til you make it” can be incredibly useful sometimes, but sometimes the best thing you can do is to say “I’m at where I’m at. If I accept that, and I take actions that will help me build a solid foundation, I will last in this game.”

So if you currently don’t feel like you’ve got any evidence, what’s worked for me is:

• Acknowledging the truth that if I’m still here, I haven’t been beaten. And that is evidence.
• And also acknowledging the truth of where I’m at so I can take real, solid actions and build real evidence up from there.

You can do this.

Zone 2.

Another thing that’s been helping a lot lately to deal with anxiety is Zone 2 cardio.

I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about exercise because everyone knows it’s good for this, so I’ll keep this super quick, but it has helped a ton.

Specifically Zone 2 cardio is apparently great for helping you become more resilient to stress and anxiety, and I’ve noticed this in myself in a big way.

(If you don’t know what zone 2 cardio is, go and look it up.)

I’ve been doing these loops around a walking/running track right near where I live, and I’ve been monitoring which zone of cardio I’m in so I can try to stay in Zone 2.

Since doing this, I’ve noticed a big difference in the way I respond to stress and anxiety.

Even though I’m still having some moments, the severity of them has dropped pretty significantly since I’ve been focusing on Zone 2 cardio.

In general, I feel overall more mentally stable, grounded, and ‘big’ stressors don’t feel so overwhelming anymore.

I’ll leave this here because I want to move on and you can find tons of resources on zone 2 cardio if you’re interested. But absolutely worth looking into if you’re someone who’s struggling to get control of your anxiety.

Ok, what else?

I have two more things to touch on that have helped me before we wrap this up.

Feeling it.

One is actually letting myself feel the anxiety when it comes up. I don’t know if this is “right” but it seems to work pretty well.

I used to try and fight it a lot when it would come up. I hated the feeling and so I would become fixated on trying to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

But if you’ve ever heard of The Law Of Reversed Effort, that applies in this case for me.

I once heard someone say that emotion is just energy in motion, and so if we actually let that energy do what it wants to do (move around), it will quickly leave us.

This has totally worked for me.

In 99% of cases, if I get super anxious and I sit with it for 2 minutes, and just let myself feel whatever feelings instead of trying to block them… it goes away. Or at least it reduces significantly.

It still sucks in those moments, but I’ve found that letting it be there and just observing it drains its power, and it leaves much quicker than it otherwise would.

So the next time you feel anxious, instead of trying to force it out, sit down and just let it move around your body and mind.

Watch what it does—just observe the feeling and the movement.

If you can step back and look at it from an objective point of view, you might find that it feels less like it’s actually you, and more like it’s a separate thing that just wants to fuck around for a bit and then leave.

Isn’t it so interesting that the best solutions are sometimes just so simple?

This genuinely works for me a lot of the time. Not every single time—sometimes it’s too much. But a lot of the time. Try it.

I also seem to learn a lot about myself in these moments when I do this.

When I step back and try to look at the anxiety calmly, it gives me the opportunity to look at what’s actually going on with me.

Sometimes it’s like, “oh ok, interesting that you can’t stop focusing on how well this other person is doing and it’s bringing up these feelings… what’s that telling you about what you want?”

Or sometimes it’s like, “Alex, you’re literally getting worked up about nothing. Nothing is actually wrong.”

So I don’t really want to be giving advice here because I’m not qualified to do that, and I don’t even know if what I’m saying is actually good—but this helps me for sure.

Personal Growth.

And the final thing I’ll say before we wrap this up is that—for me—diving into personal growth in general has been a huge help over the long term as it relates to managing anxiety.

I find that a lot of the time when I have a problem in life that keeps coming up, it’s not necessarily directly about the thing I think it’s about, but more so it’s something related to my overall sense of purpose, wellbeing, or values.

Obviously this is not going to be the case for everything.

But what I’m getting at here is that by working on different parts of me—even things that seem unrelated to what I’m anxious about—I’ve been able to reduce my overall level of anxiety about those things.

An easy example is this: When I’m in a habit of regularly exercising, my anxiety around not being able to achieve what I want in my business goes down.

But this applies to a bunch of things, and I think working on building myself in general has been a massive part of how I’ve been able to keep moving forward despite these heavy moments.

I don’t want to drag this part on because everyone knows personal growth is a good thing, but I do want you to consider that everything is connected, and that if you’re hyper fixated on a particular problem, the best ‘fix’ might not be so obviously attached to that problem.

Ok, so a quick TL;DR.

What has helped me deal with the sometimes intense anxiety that comes with building a creative career is:

• Getting real with myself and actually making space for it, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
  • I can then take actions based in reality, which helps me to feel more grounded and make better progress.
  • And it also helps me be more productive, focus on what really matters and do better work.
• I also do my best to make sure my sleep, exercise, food and environment are great. Zone 2 cardio helps a lot.
• I gather evidence that I’m capable of dealing with it by regularly reflecting on my past achievements and by actually experiencing the anxiety moments and showing myself I can get through them.
• When I feel anxious, I try to not fight it, and instead just let myself feel it until it goes away. Again, incredibly simple but for me it’s been very effective.
• And I also just work on my personal growth in general. I’ve found that solutions aren’t always where you think they are, and that everything is connected in this human experience.

So I really hope this helps in some way.

Like I’ve said, I don’t know if any of this is “right” or good, but it’s what I’m doing and it seems to be working.

I hope you’ll try some of this stuff if you’re not already, and if you do I’d love to hear about your experience with it after you’ve tried it for a while.

Just before you go, I want to let you know that I’ll soon be opening up the Awaken Your Fan Base course for musicians again, which is a course that teaches you everything you need to know about:

• Defining your artist identity
• Content creation + content strategy for social media
• Social media growth for musicians
• Productivity + workflow
• How to release music in 2024

If you’re interested, I recommend you join the waitlist so you can get access to the early bird price. Hope to see you there 🙂

Ok, let’s call it there. Hope it helps and talk again soon.

All the love,

Alex