youtube burn out – Alan Spicer – YouTube Certified Expert

Okay, let’s get this out of the way at the top; not all YouTubers have anxiety, but there certainly does seem to be a high prevalence of anxiety among YouTubers when compared to the regular population. In this post, we’re going to explore some of the potential reasons for that, as well as ponder and muse over the implications of it.

In my personal opinion why all youtubers have anxiety – Being a YouTube creator lends itself to a certain personality type. The introvert who wishes to be creative, without their comfort zone mostly solitary. However, as they grow audience, channel growth or failure can become a wider concern and bucks against the introvert personality.

So, before we get into this, we would be negligent if we didn’t make it completely clear that I am not a mental health expert. Where necessary, you will find links to more authoritative sources, but this post is going to explore the subject from the perspective of a YouTuber, not a therapist.

At the end of the post there will be a section on tips for reducing stress as a YouTuber, but if you are suffering from serious anxiety, we fully recommend seeking real help rather than relying on the contents of posts like this one.

Why Do All YouTubers Have Anxiety?

The first thing we want to address is that the framing of this question carries with it an implication that isn’t necessarily correct.

It assumes that the driving factor is YouTube, that there is something about YouTube that leads people to develop anxiety.

Of course, without any additional evidence, it could very possibly be the other way round. There could be something about people who are prone to anxiety that leads them to want to start a YouTube channel. It is also entirely possible that YouTubers are not proportionally worse for anxiety than non-YouTubers, but that YouTubers who suffer from anxiety are just more visible, and so it seems like there’s more of them.

The point we’re trying to make here is that it’s important not to box your considerations in. The prevalence of anxiety among YouTubers could have come about in several ways—or even a combination of ways.

The Tortured Artist

While not every YouTuber is a whirlwind of creativity, it is often the case that someone who takes it upon themselves to become a YouTuber is a little more creative than your average person.

There is also a well established trope of tortured creative types who exorcise their inner demons through their art, but are ultimately a roiling mess of inner turmoil.

As much as this theory might make sense, as best we can tell, there is no confirmed link between creativity and these kinds of disorders. It would have been nice and neat, but it looks like this ain’t it.

Social Anxiety

Though anxiety wouldn’t necessarily be social anxiety, it is a form of anxiety, and one that leads people to avoid social settings. Even people with a crippling phobia for social situations are humans, and, for the most part, humans want to connect with other humans.

YouTube allows you to do just that.

It’s one of the many weird quirks of the human mind that someone who can barely function in a room with twelve other people could happily record a video of themselves and show it to a few million people, but there you have it. Being a YouTuber allows you to develop a community, meet people, and express yourself without ever having to set foot in a crowded party. This is all speculation on our part, of course, but it makes sense to us.

The Stress of Exposure

Anyone who has seen one of the many sad stories of child actors who end up with a laundry list of drug offences and assorted other brushes with the law will be well aware of what fame and exposure can do to a mind that is not ready for it.

While the fame YouTubers experience isn’t quite the same as the fame someone like Lindsay Lohan experienced, it is still a massive amount of exposure. Add that to the fact that many YouTubers start out making a passion project or just doing something for fun and never really expect it to go anywhere, and you have a recipe for successful YouTubers finding themselves thrust into celebrity status without being mentally prepared for it.

Whether it’s the new expectations on the YouTuber to behave a certain way, the potential threats to privacy and safety, or just the plain fact that there are hundreds of thousands—even millions—of people watching your videos, it is perfectly understandable that this situation may lead to a little anxiety.

Over-Representation

We touched on this above, but there is also the fact that YouTubers are far more visible than your average anxiety sufferer. Vloggers in particular are likely to talk about something like anxiety if they are suffering from it, since their channel is essentially built around them talking about their life.

In the US, nearly 20% of the population suffers from an anxiety disorder. When you consider how much the average person in your life opens up to you about the deepest parts of their life, versus how much a typical YouTube tells you about their life, it seems very possible that anxiety among YouTube is on par with non-YouTubers, it’s just that YouTubers talk about it more.

Tips for Dealing With Anxiety on YouTube (YouTube Burn Out)

First and foremost, once again, this is not medical advice. If you are suffering from anxiety to the point that it is debilitating and affecting your quality of life in a serious way, seek professional help.

Identify the Things That Trigger Your Anxiety

You may need the help of a therapist to establish what your triggers are, but some common triggers include;

Caffeine
Chronic pain
Medication side effects
Stress
Trauma

Some anxiety sufferers are luckier than others—someone who is triggered by caffeine can simply stop drinking caffeine, whereas anxiety brought on by chronic pain is less likely to be something you can simply cut out. After all, if your chronic pain was easily curable, you’d have it cured, right?

The idea is to eliminate where you can, and manage when you can’t eliminate. For example, many forms of chronic pain can be eased with regular exercise or stretching, which, coincidentally, can help with anxiety. Trauma can be worked through with a therapist. Medication is trickier, but there are rarely no other options. Examine your triggers and find out if there is a way of managing them.

Stay Healthy

The human body is a complicated thing, and our mood and mental state is much more greatly affected by things than we often appreciate. Keeping your body healthy can go a long way to improving your state of mind, which in turn can help with feeling anxious.

Now, we’re not talking about running marathons or developing rock solid abs (though there’s nothing wrong with those things if that’s what you want). Being healthy just means being in good shape. If you get out of breath going up the stairs, or your body complains when you perform even a moderately physical task, it’s going to affect your mental state.

Create a Relaxing Space

Anxiety is often brought on by environmental factors, and it can help to create an environment that counteracts that. It be a single room in your house (often the bedroom), or it could be your whole house, but work out what relaxes you and make a space that contains those things. From lighting to aromas, consider every aspect, and make a space that puts you at ease.

Take Up Meditation

It doesn’t work for everybody, but taking some time out of each day to clear your head, centre your self, or do whatever it is you need to do relax and take your mind off of the things that cause you anxiety can really help to… well… manage your anxiety.

While we’re here, we can put other activities like yoga or a peaceful walk through some nice scenery in the same boat. Sure, they’re not meditation strictly speaking, but they can have much the same effect.

Change Your Diet

This one is a slow burner as it can take months to really kick in, but changing your diet can help to manage anxiety. As a general rule, you want to skew your meals towards the healthier end of the spectrum because being healthier in and of itself can help with anxiety. There are also some foods that are thought to help, such as lemon balm, valerian root, kava kava, dark chocolate, and more.

Final Thoughts

As with most things in life, there is no quick or easy fix to something like anxiety, and it might be the case that you need to combine several of the suggestions we’ve made in this post to see noticeable results.

As for the apparent correlation between YouTubers and anxiety, it looks as though it is a case of correlation, not corroboration. If there is something about YouTubing that causes anxiety, it is yet to be discovered. Then again, YouTube is relatively new to the world, and it is entirely possible some researchers will one day find evidence to the contrary.

It should go without saying, however, that if you are suffering from anxiety, and you find that YouTubing is the cause, put your mental health first. Take time off, change your schedule, do what you need to do. If you have fostered a healthy community around your channel, your subscribers will understand.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

That is why I took the plunge and invested in my editing and design process with Adobe Creative Suite. They offer a WIDE range of tools to help make amazing videos, simple to use tools for overlays, graphics, one click tools to fix your audio and the very powerful Photoshop graphics program to make eye-catching thumbnails.

Best of all you can get a free trial for 30 days on their website, a discount if you are a student and if you are a regular human being it starts from as little as £9 per month if you want to commit to a plan.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

Maybe you’re on a bus, a train or sat in a living room with a 5 year old singing baby shark on loop… for HOURS. Or, you are trying to make as little noise as possible while your new born is FINALLY sleeping.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. PlaceIT can help you STAND OUT on YouTube

I SUCK at making anything flashy or arty.

I have every intention in the world to make something that looks cool but im about as artistic as a dropped ice-cream cone on the web windy day.

That is why I could not live on YouTube without someone like PlaceIT. They offer custom YouTube Banners, Avatars, YouTube Video Intros and YouTube End Screen Templates that are easy to edit with simple click, upload wizard to help you make amazing professional graphics in minutes.

Best of all, some of their templates are FREE! or you can pay a small fee if you want to go for their slightly more premium designs (pst – I always used the free ones).

5. StoryBlocks helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the StoryBlocks website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.

The dream of being a professional YouTuber is undeniably appealing. Making content for a living, working to your own schedule, doing what you love. So why, then, do so many people give up on that dream?

This is something that does not just affect those who have tried and failed to achieve the dream.

Some YouTubers achieve immense success and then, seemingly without warning, give it all up. Others seem to be on the cusp of that dream—having achieved constant growth for some time—and then just… stop.

For those of you starting out on the road to YouTube greatness, it can be something of a mystery why these people would do this, but there are perfectly good reasons behind it all (and some bad reasons), and we’re going to take a look at those reasons today. So, why do YouTubers quit?

Let’s see.

Burnout

Probably one of the leading causes of YouTubers quitting is burnout. One of the reasons it is so common is because it does not discriminate between successful and unsuccessful YouTubers; it is equally possible to get burnout with a few months and twenty followers under your belt as it is if you’ve been YouTubing for years and have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Burnout can come about due to a lot of reasons, but the broad scope of the problem is doing too much of something. For a long time YouTuber, this might be because they have been making the same kind of content for extended periods, and it is getting harder and harder to find the motivation to do it. On the other hand, a YouTuber who has not been doing it for that long might get burnout because they have pushed themselves too far; trying to get more content out than they have the time to reasonably make.

In both cases, it is possible to combat feelings of burnout if you take proactive steps. Things like trying to vary your content where possible. Granted, you probably have a niche and your audience expects a certain kind of content from you, but explore that niche fully, and try different things. It is easier if you do this from early on in your channel’s history, but it is never too late to start.

Remember, losing some of your audience because they don’t like a new direction is better than losing all of your audience because you don’t make videos any more!

Getting burned out because you are doing too much, and it is wearing on you can only be handled by managing your time more effectively. Most YouTubers get started while attending school or working a full time job, some might also have children to care for.

Trying to produce daily—or even weekly—videos around these obligations can be challenging to say the least. It is important to remember that many YouTube channels have succeeded with erratic upload schedules, or long intervals between videos.

Sure, your particular type of content might benefit from more regular uploads, but again, the damage from taking your time is almost certainly less than the damage from burning out and quitting!

Moving On

As strange as it often seems to those who are early on the path to YouTube success, not everybody wants this life. Some YouTubers learn this after achieving some of that success and realise it is not making them happy. Some go into the YouTube game knowing full well that they don’t intend to stick around. Other’s may merely be using YouTube as a promotional tool and have reached a point in life where they no longer have anything to promote.

Whatever the reasons, there a lot of YouTubers who quit because they don’t want to do it any more.

This type of quitting is also common with people whose success on YouTube has opened doors for them that they never previously considered. For example, a person whose charismatic nature lands them a hosting role on a television show. In that case, the person in question might never have considered hosting a television show as a career path before, but now that they have the opportunity, they find that they prefer it to YouTube.

Though not technically quitting, another reason that a YouTuber may stop uploading is because the success they have achieved outside of the platform is leaving them little time to work on the channel.

The most common example of this is probably musicians who, after gaining immense popularity on YouTube, find themselves too busy touring and making music to work on new videos. In this case, they might never have intended to stop making videos, but circumstances have made it too difficult to make time.

A Project Has Run its Course

Not everybody enters the YouTube game with the intention of becoming a full time YouTuber for the foreseeable future. Sometimes, people enter the platform with a specific purpose, and when that purpose has been achieved, they leave.

An example of this could be a political channel that is pushing for a certain thing—a particular candidate’s election, or a certain policy to be enacted. If that goal is reached, they could shift gears and move on to something else, but it is not entirely uncommon for YouTubers in this form to just dust their hands off at a job well done and disappear back into the night.

A similar version of this—and one that could be termed similar to burnout—is a channel exploring all the possible content in their scope. This could be a tutorial channel which has covered everything there is to teach on the thing they are covering. Again, the channel could shift gears and move onto something new, but it is not uncommon for the YouTuber to just decide to close things up and move on to new things.

This, in and of itself, is another form of the project running its course. If a YouTuber simply feels satisfied with their channel, that they have done all they want to and have nothing left to add to that particular body of work, they might decide to stop making content for that channel. You might think this is burnout, but it is different.

In this case, the YouTuber is capable of making more content, does not feel frustrated or tired with their channel, but simply decides now is the right time to walk away.

External Factors

The final reason we’re going to cover for why YouTubers quit is somewhat less voluntary. It sadly quite common for YouTube channels to end due to factors that are either beyond their control, or of their own making but ultimately against their will.

An example of the former would be a channel that goes under due to one of the many YouTube adpocalypses. Many YouTubers do it for the love of the thing, but if you were previously making enough money from your channel to be a full time YouTuber and a change in YouTube policy erases your income overnight, it can be understandably demoralising, and might well cause you to quit.

An example of the latter tends to be things like repeated copyright strikes or community violations leading to the channel being suspended. Though we wouldn’t go so far as to say this is fair 100% of the time, it is the case that the vast majority of channels that finish up this way had plenty of warning before they were taken down.

The important thing to remember about this is that, ultimately, it is YouTube’s platform, and whether you agree with their ideas of fair use of hateful language, etc., you have to follow them if you want to use that platform.

One final note on external factors; it is worth remembering that YouTubers have lives outside of the platform, just like the rest of us. Out in the real world, there are practically endless factors that could cause a YouTuber to stop making videos. They could have had a loss in the family and are no longer in the right mindset to make content. They could have landed a new job that prevents them from making online content. They could have been arrested for something.

They might even have died. It’s always good to take a moment and consider the possibility that things are going on in the YouTubers life that are keeping them away before getting angry at them for not uploading more videos.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, there are more reasons than we could ever list why someone might quit YouTube. We’ve done our best to break them down into broad categories, but humans are complicated, and that complexity is hard to pin down when talking about why someone might do something like this.

Still, the most common reason by far is that of YouTubers not achieving the success they had hoped to achieve as quickly as they wanted to. The only way to avoid that particular hurdle is to stick with it, and look for ways to get better. It is no guarantee of success, but quitting is a guarantee that you won’t succeed.

Top 5 Tools To Get You Started on YouTube

Very quickly before you go here are 5 amazing tools I have used every day to grow my YouTube channel from 0 to 30K subscribers in the last 12 months that I could not live without.

1. VidIQ helps boost my views and get found in search

I almost exclusively switched to VidIQ from a rival in 2020.

Within 12 months I tripled the size of my channel and very quickly learnt the power of thumbnails, click through rate and proper search optimization. Best of all, they are FREE!

2. Adobe Creative Suite helps me craft amazing looking thumbnails and eye-catching videos

I have been making youtube videos on and off since 2013.

When I first started I threw things together in Window Movie Maker, cringed at how it looked but thought “that’s the best I can do so it’ll have to do”.

Big mistake!

I soon realized the move time you put into your editing and the more engaging your thumbnails are the more views you will get and the more people will trust you enough to subscribe.

3. Rev.com helps people read my videos

You can’t always listen to a video.

This is where Rev can help you or your audience consume your content on the go, in silence or in a language not native to the video.

Rev.com can help you translate your videos, transcribe your videos, add subtitles and even convert those subtitles into other languages – all from just $1.50 per minute.

A GREAT way to find an audience and keep them hooked no matter where they are watching your content.

4. Learn new skills for FREE with Skillshare

I SUCK reading books to learn, but I LOVE online video courses.

Every month I learn something new. Editing, writing, video skills, how to cook, how to run a business – even how to meditate to calm a busy mind.

I find all of these for FREE with Skillshare – Sign up, pick all the courses you want and cancel anytime you need.

5. Shutterstock helps me add amazing video b-roll cutaways

I mainly make tutorials and talking head videos.

And in this modern world this can be a little boring if you don’t see something funky every once in a while.

I try with overlays, jump cuts and being funny but my secret weapon is b-roll overlay content.

I can talk about skydiving, food, money, kids, cats – ANYTHING I WANT – with a quick search on the Shutterstock website I can find a great looking clip to overlay on my videos, keeping them entertained and watching for longer.

They have a wide library of videos, graphics, images and even a video maker tool and it wont break the bank with plans starting from as little as £8.25 ($9) per month.