The Pros and Cons of Burnout and Your Mental Health
I burned out in 2018 and it changed my freelance writing career forever. Although I didn't end up working at Dairy Queen like I thought when I was at my lowest of lows, I did learn plenty of pros and cons to burnout and how it affects your mental health. To me, mental health and burnout are critical topics to talk about as freelance writers so we’re diving into the good and bad, real and raw ups and downs of burnout.
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If you're like me, you've probably read a bunch of articles about how you don't want to burn out and how you want to avoid it at all costs. And do you want to do everything in your power to make sure that burnout is not part of your career charge trajectory, but what I've learned over the years and from my own burnout is that burnout can actually be really good for you. It might be obviously bad, but there's a lot of good points that happen when you end up, you know, dealing with burnout. So I'm going to go through a few pros and cons today about burnout and how it affects your mental health, and then also kind of how it affects your business. So one of the first things I wanted to cover, okay, Linda Lindo just popped in. So one of the first things I wanted to cover is that when you burn out, one of the things that you learn is kind of whether or not you want to continue working in that career, did you burn out because you were trying to keep up and you really hated the work and you're just burned out because it's not something you want to do, or did you burn out because it's something you're really trying hard at and you just kind of did it in a way that's not really super sustainable.
So when you burn out, you kind of come, at least when I burned out a few years ago, you come to this kind of crossroads of like, do I actually want to keep doing this or do I want to quit and do something else? So for me, that looked like me sitting on the floor and crying a whole bunch and saying that I wanted to work at dairy queen and quit freelance writing completely. Uh, it was one of the low points of my career. And it definitely was something that, you know, I, at the time I thought was really horrible and that I would never freely do freelance writing. I would never write again. I would just go do something else that wasn't so taxing and wasn't so difficult. But then I learned through kind of sleeping and backing away from my career a little bit and recalibrating how I felt about how I was organizing my business, that I really did want to do freelance writing.
I just didn't want to do it that way. So that pro of taking you to a crossroads, at least with your writing career, is that like, do you really want to do it? Maybe you don't really want to do it that way, but it shows you that, like, after you kind of come back a little bit, you get some rest, you talk to people and you kind of think about what you did right. And wrong. It either pushes you to say like, you know what, I really love this, but this is not the way I want to do it. Like one of the things I was saying at the time was if it's going to be like this, I don't want to do it. And it was just because I was running my career in the wrong way. So when you reach that kind of crossroads, you can either come to that conclusion of like, Hey, if it's going to be this way, I don't want to do it.
And like, but I, you know, you get some rest and decide that you do want to be a freelance writer or the other option is you're just like, Nope, this isn't for me. You know, I burned out because this is too much for me. I don't like the marketing. I don't want to do, um, following up. I don't want to do all these projects. I've learned that like, although I like writing, I like writing on my own timeline. I like writing my own blog. I like writing my own stuff on my own schedule without deadlines, without worrying about chasing invoices or without worrying about, um, you know, keeping your marketing funnel going. So this kind of crossroads, I think, is a pro because it kind of teaches you whether or not you actually want to do it as a positive, it's like a line in the sand, whether or not this is for you or not.
So we're not kind of teaches you that the next kind of thing is that, you know, the pro is that you're kind of burning out because you're putting in a lot of effort, you're working really hard. You're spending many hours, many days trying to do all these things. So you can kind of give yourself a little bit of credit for working really hard. And working really hard also means that at this current level, that you're at the, in the way that you're working, that's kind of your limit. So for me, what I kind of learned is that's my limit of basically that way of working. Like it's not sustainable. It's not going to work for me. This is, this is all my available time. This is all my feel, energy mentally, physically, emotionally that I can put into this. And like this isn't working, I'm not at the, I'm not with the clients that I want to be with.
I'm not at the income level I want to be at Charlotte. Are you haven't you haven't a day. Good girl doing a little fluffing. So, um, if you're not the income you're want, you don't have the clients, you, you have the business, doesn't have some sort of system that helps you run it efficiently. You're kind of just basically reacting instead of responding to things. So that kind of limit that you reach. Like when I reached my limit, I was just like, Nope, I'm done I'm out. And that was only because that limit just wasn't something that I could scale. It wasn't something that I could move forward in my business and be like, cool. As long as I trade out clients, I'm fine. Like, that's just didn't that didn't work for me. Even if I traded out clients, the amount of hours I was working, the type of work that I was doing that was very detailed.
And it took a lot of brain space and took a lot of like paying attention to all these little pieces that wasn't sustainable. You can do. You can only do so much of that before you kind of like, you need to back up a little bit. So the limit part isn't that it's your total limit. You can never go any further. This is like, your max capacity is more of like at this level, doing this work in this way with this schedule is not scalable and it's not sustainable. So you are working hard, which is a great pro. Like it means that you really care. It means you're putting in the effort, but reaching that limit, like if you're at your limit and you're not where you want to be in your career, then you need to shift something you need to work about, like figuring out how to make your business more scalable and more sustainable, which means you have weekends off.
And I'm kind of, you know, like really a bare about that. Now I try really hard not to work on the weekends because for years I've worked weekends all the time and that kind of contributed to my burnout. So you have to kind of figure out which parts of, you know, where are you working hard that maybe you could figure out an easier system, like a better followup system. Like for me, that was switching to boomerang. Um, but there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of figure out where you can scale. Like, can you stop doing more churn and burn work? Like, can you stop doing more blog posts and end up doing more case studies or eBooks or work with people who need more content marketing, help someone with content strategy, um, do a quarterly report for someone, something that would be, you know, have a longer deadline than like, I need four blog posts a month and we have to do it all the time.
And you know, you have a contract for six months and you have to do whatever that is 24, no, wait 24 blog posts. Is that right? Yeah. Um, I'm not good at mental math, but um, you end up, you end up making this transition. So you have to kind of decide where you want to put your work effort in what's scalable and sustainable. So that's number two. And then, um, your next one is basically this idea that took me a long time. It's actually kind of, I guess, a two fold idea. So the first part of it is that you work smarter, not harder. I didn't really like, I didn't get that until I burned out. And I was like, Oh, this is what working smarter means. Not harder, harder just means you work more hours. You spend more time doing stuff. You just try to like beast it out all the time.
And it's just not, it's not going to work for the long-term. You can do it for a few years. Like I did it for many years and it just, it's not sustainable. It's not scalable, but you can make this shift where you think about the smart pieces. Like, like I said, with boomerang, or like you have up systems with your email or you end up doing marketing in bulk and you're like, you know what I've noticed. I get my best clients from March to August. So I'm going to do a ton of marketing from March to August. And then I'm going to kind of do baby marketing, like less marketing the rest of the year. So you kind of look at trends, you look at your expenses, you look at like, what kinds of things are coming up? Like, what did I spend money on?
Are there courses that come every like a new course from someone every year? Is there something that pops up where, uh, that can help you learn how to do something better? Is there a system or program like I'm very big into tools. So like for me, it's always like, can I find a tool that will help me get rid of other tools and consolidate things into one tool? So I don't have to get into 800 different things to get something done. So for me, that was dub Sato. I made that switch and that made my business like running my business so much easier. So working smarter means finding stuff that makes it gives you the ability to scale and then gives you rest time or vacation time. Or, you know, sometimes what happens is like, what happened to me in this January is you have to make time for things to break in your house or to handle all these different regular tasks and having a freelance schedule.
Sometimes that means you can bump things. And sometimes it means you can't, but if you're working smarter than you should be able to at least get by with some smooth systems so that you can kind of move your schedule around. If you're working harder, at least from my experience, it's like, all your time is stuffed to the gills. You can't stop working because you have to do all these things all the time. You're just like everyone even asking you a question, you're basically like, no I'm working. Like I can't talk to you right now. And that's just, it's not healthy for your relationships. It's not healthy for your work ethic. So working smarter, it comes down to like analyzing what you've done and figuring out how you can make it more efficient. So think about that piece instead of the working harder. And then this is kind of in tandem.
This is that second piece that goes along with it, which is fail fast. I didn't understand this until I actually did it. Like I realized what I was doing like every few months and I still do this. So every three to four months I fail. Like I make a big fail. I make a big mistake or I'm make a mass of something or I'm just like trying to get everything done. And it's, I just didn't organize my time. Well, or a bunch of things popped up that I had to handle. And it's just, I always thought that I was doing it wrong. I was like, Oh my gosh, like, I'm always making these mistakes. Like, what am I going to get past the point where I stopped making mistakes? And I stopped doing all these things that hinder me from getting better. But then I finally realized like, that's the fail fast because you're trying all these things because you're implementing new systems because you're trying to work smarter and not harder.
That means you're failing a bunch if you're actually trying to improve. And you're trying to take on better clients, you're trying to do harder work. Um, like let's say, you're trying to do more case studies or more complex eBooks or more reported articles for different businesses. The more you take on complicated work, the more you're going to fail, but the faster you fail, the better you learn. And there's also this quote, which I can't remember who it is, um, off the top of my head. But it's basically that, um, you learn more from your failures than you do your successes, right? So if we're working smarter, not harder and we're failing fast and we are learning from our failures, our business should get better. And this kind of teaches us from burnout because if you fail fast and you burn out, like you will, you will learn a lot from burning out that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.
Uh, and what I learned, one of the things I learned from it was that you have to fail fast. You kind of have to try all these things. And yeah, what I let happen was I let them build up. I didn't realize that I was failing. I just kept trying to like turn on the hamster wheel. I didn't go back and analyze it and say like, Oh, I should be doing this or should try this. Or I didn't think about it in a way that made it curious. Like it wasn't, it wasn't curiosity. It was more like, you're a loser. You can't do this. You keep making mistakes. Everyone else seems to be able to do it. Like all these people are making tons of money or all these people have these great clients. All these people are getting all these books lines. And I didn't think about it that way.
I just kind of let it build up and then I burned out. But the fail fast thing actually helps you from burning out again, because you start looking at your signs. Like, I start looking at the signs. I'm like, Oh, like, this is what I can learn from this mistake. Or, Oh, this is like, I'm kind of edging here on like being really tired and grumpy. And I'm not being a very, very fun person to hang out with. And that means I need to kind of back up. I need to sleep. I need to take some time off. I need to kind of recalibrate. There's a bunch of things that you learn from failing. And for me, there's another thing that I learned from burnout, which is that, like, I think I'm the type of person that has to kind of fall and scrape my knees and like, you know, get all bruised up to then figure out how to fix it.
There's sometimes where I'm kind of quick to fix things, but big things, you know, there's, um, there's a lot of times where people are like, don't do this. This might happen. You know, they warn you and they try to give you advice. And you're like, yeah, whatever. I think sometimes I'm that person, like in this instance with burning out, like I was that person I had to fall and scrape my knee and like hurt myself really badly and get really tired and just be sick and coughing all the time. Because I don't think I would've learned the lesson otherwise, like going so far into the extreme of burnout and crying and being so exhausted on headaches every single day. Um, and not getting enough sleep and having too many deadlines squeezed together that taught me a whole bunch of different things. Like, um, also how to say no, like it taught me how to say no about like, no, I'm like the reason that I say no, doesn't matter to anyone but me.
Right? Like, I'm just saying, no, I can't do that right now. No, my schedule is full, no whatever. Or even like, no, I'm tired. I don't have to tell anyone that, but I need to set that boundary for myself. So there's a lot more pros that I could go through here. I know I kind of ran through them kind of quickly, but um, now we're going to go into comments. So there's, I'm going to list three cons here, just like I did for pros. So the kind of burning out is obvious that you have burned out. You are exhausted, you're tired. You might be depressed. You might be super, super anxious. You might be feeling like you hate everyone. You might be feeling like nobody understands where you're at. You might be feeling resentful. You might be feeling bitter. You might be feeling jealous. There's a lot of different feelings you get when you are burned out. And it's, it's really heavy. Like for me, when I burned out, it took me a few months to kind of recover, to get enough sleep, to analyze what had been going on to even give myself enough space. Like I slept for like three weeks. I slept like 12 or 13 hours a day for like three weeks after I just was like, I'm done. Like, I got to take some time to myself.
And
That can be really hard on your career. You know, when you're, when you're at this point where you're at your lowest of lows and you don't feel like you can come back and you don't feel like you're able to do your assignments well, like it can hurt you. You have to take that time to take rest. So all of the emotions that you have when you have burnout, it's just, it's really heavy. Like for me, a lot of times, like the therapy really helped, like I was going to therapy at the time, but you know, your therapists can't save you, right. Your therapist can't save you from yourself. So continuing to go to therapy really helped me getting on medication for my anxiety really helped me talking to people about what I was going through really helped. But you know, the kind of burnout is like, you have burned out.
Like you just don't, there's no more gas left in the tank. The metaphor that I used to use was like, I feel like I'm in a well, and all I'm doing is scraping rocks at the bottom. Like there's no water, it's just rocks. And I had this really raspy voice cause I'm so exhausted. And it just felt like there was nothing, there was nothing left. Like I, I had nothing and even sleeping for those three weeks. It still took me a while to recover from it because it was just, it was too much. And then I was just, you know, the idea of having to work again. I was just like repulsed by it because I was so just, I was so burnt out on doing all these assignments and trying to do like everything at once. So that's the first con um, and then our second con, I'm going to happen to the comments.
I know people are here. So Linda's here. Linda has, you know, let's take a quick break. So we'll say Linda says I burned out, but I wanted to keep writing. Then I got sick and had to retire. Now I want to come back, but I feel lost. Yeah. So that's another thing that we can talk about with burnout is like you feel a loss that can be, I'll just add that in as our second con, because that's a really good one. So not only are you emotionally, physically, mentally exhausted. And you're just like basically a puddle of silly putty, but you're kind of lost as to what you should do to fix it. You're kind of confused.
Hold on. We just got to do this real quick. Cause you look so funny. Hi, you're just waiting. You're just waiting for the tree. Knows you guys are too funny. Just waiting, just waiting for the three Fritos. Okay.
So you're just kind of lost and feeling like you have no direction because the direction that you were going in, isn't working, it's not, it's not helping you succeed. It's actually hindering you. It's hurting you now you've burned out and you're just like, what do I do now? You just don't really know how to fix it at first because you're so exhausted. You just don't want to think anymore. You want to crawl into a little cocoon and hide from the world like that. That's how I felt. I just wanted you to crawl away from world and just not exist for a little bit. I just wanted everybody to forget who I was for a little while and stop sending me emails and stop checking in. And so, you know, I just was like, I need to be by myself right now. But that sense of like being lost you, that's kind of coming into like the pro of recalibrating and reanalyzing working smarter, not harder.
So when you're feeling lost, I think it's good to feel lost for a little bit after you burn out, I think you just are going to feel lost because you, your brain is not functioning, right? Your brain is so tired and so worn out that you just kind of need to give yourself that space to relax. You need to give yourself, like, I always kind of think of it as like an accordion. Like when I get really, really tight, it's like a really tight accordion, you know, it's all wrapped up in storage, like, so you can take it with you. But then when you're relaxed, it's like all the way open. And you know, that feeling of being lost, I think eventually as you get less tired and eventually as you start analyzing all the things you did and what you want to change, you find new directions that you can move in.
And like, for me, I figured out like how to say no, I figured out the projects I did and didn't want to do that was when I kind of started realizing like that year was the year I kind of came up with that cake and icing method that I've talked about, um, which is basically like your cake is the stuff that makes the money in your business. These are big juicy voluptuous, niches, like healthcare or finance or, um, you know, like tech, anything with tech or like mine. I have food and travel and real estate insurance health. Um, there's a lot of them that are in the cake area that make the majority of your money. Your icing is sort of like extra stuff that comes along. Like it could be the publication that you write for, you know, a few times a year. It could be someone where you end up doing a few reported articles.
It could be something where like, let's say you want to do a very small section of women's health, or let's say there's a piece of travel. Like I want to do adjust adventure, travel, not all travel. Let's say, I just want to do restaurants. Like one of my icing niches is restaurants because food is much bigger, but restaurants is much more niche down. So this cake and icing method is what I came up with it because I was like, I was working a lot in icing, like niches and small pieces here and there. And I didn't have any big projects. And I realized you have to have the cake piece. You had to have the cake piece to kind of move along. So that was something that I came up with after, like when I was feeling lost, what I was feeling kind of tired.
And I was just like, when I went back and looked at everything, I was like, Oh, like you need a cake and icing, like you need the meat and then you can have like the bones and like a few other things, you know, to kind of give it structure and give it a little more. But there's, there's a lot of pieces there that can help you get direction. So we'll just add that as number two. And then basically it's like your third con of burnout is that you may not, you may decide that you just want to quit completely and you lose your career over it. Like you've gotten so far that you just want to quit writing. You just don't want to do it anymore. And that you basically are just like, I just want to do something that's really easy where I just basically punched buttons and like move on with my life and just don't have to think so much.
So when you burn out, like I said, there's like this crossroads that you get to, but sometimes what happens is that you end up choosing the side where you take a break from freelancing for like two years or five years or 10 years, and you just need to move away and do something else. And burnout burnout can teach you a lot and it can teach you whether or not freelance writing is for you, but it can also teach you whether or not you really want to run your own business or you want to work for someone else. So when you're tired and when you're so like emotionally, just like everybody, like it, you know, basically like the color has drained out of you. You're just like pale or you just look sickly and you're just, Oh my God. You know? And you know, it's just a lot of things that hit you and it may just hit you that you're just like, you know what?
Burnout has taught me that this is not for me and that I don't want to own my own business. And then you kind of have to figure out a new direction. Like, do I want to apply for a full-time job? Do I want to go do something else? Do I want to start a different business? But a lot of freelance writers, you know, instead of analyzing what went wrong, they quit, you know, burnout can make people quit. It just makes people never want to do it again. And sometimes as a consequence of burnout, there's been authors who have burned out they've, they've written all these novels and they're just like, you know what? I can't write another thing I'm done. And that's the end of their career. And they'd go off and do something else. Or, um, there's freelance writers who ended up starting a new business.
Like they ended up starting a blog or they end up starting a photography business or they end up becoming a travel agent. I mean, these are all examples of people I know who have quit freelance writing to go do something else. And you know, it's kind of a con if you always thought that you were going to be a freelance writer, right? Like, let's say, you always thought you'd be a freelance writer. It's a con, because now you're like, now, what now? What do I do? Like now, what do I do? Like I, um, I thought I would be a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was small. Now what I do, but sometimes, you know, that's just what happens. Like burnout teaches you a lot of things. And one of them might just be that, you know, you did a bunch of things wrong and you just decided like, you know what?
I don't want to course correct. I just want to get on a different bus. This is the wrong bus for me. And that's okay. Freelance writing isn't for everybody. And maybe it's not for you right now. And maybe you just want to kind of step away and try again later. But I kind of think for me, at least burning out really taught me a lot more than it took away. You know, at the time in the moment it was really rough and I hated it. And I, like I said, like I was sitting on the floor and I was crying and I said like, I'm just, you know, I, if it's going to be like this, I don't want to do it. And my partner was like, well, what are you going to do instead? And I said, I don't know. I was just work at dairy queen.
Like I was just at the, I don't know why I said dairy queen. I have no idea. I I've only been there a few times in my life, but I just, that's just what popped in my mind. But when you're in that state, when you're in that state, you just kind of, you know, you just don't really know. You just don't, you just want to stop doing everything and lay down. So I hope this was helpful. This is just a few things. I actually have a lot of things that I learned from burnout that, um, I think we can go over, but I'm hoping to get to questions. If people have questions, if you feel like this has been helpful so far, if you feel like you've gotten a little bit of value from this, hit the thumbs up or share it with someone, or if you feel like you want more advice about freelance writing, feel free to subscribe below. I'm going to hop in here real quick and see if there's stuff in here. So, okay. So Linda says Mary Kay Ash said success is learning to fail forward. Yeah. So the failing forward part, I think is really important. Really important. Then Vicky's here. Hi Vicki. Um, yeah. So let's see if you guys have questions. If you can pop them in the chat, I'll give you guys a quick, um, for, I pop that up, I'll give you guys a quick update there. So they're just like waiting for
Retreat. I was there just like, you're just on it. You're just, you're just like, give me all the Doritos. Give me all the treat us good job. Here's a sleep. So we're just going to let him sleep. You can have more treats.
So, um, let's see. So Tommy says, did burnout teach you anything about low paying clients? It did. So,
Oh, someone woke up. Do you wanna try it up? There you go. Good job. You're great.
So yeah, so low paying clients. A lot of the time that you ended up doing the churn and burn method. So you end up having this small projects over and over again. You end up doing a lot of things a bunch of times, and that doesn't end up being your cake and icing method. That means you're just churning and burn it. You're doing a lot of small articles for three, four or 500 bucks. You're ending up doing a lot of things that are like, you take a thousand dollar project, but it takes three months to complete. So it's really small over that. Um, and for me, the low paying client part was just kind of like, you can only have some low paying gigs and they can be low paying in a way like publications are lower than like doing a content marketing package, right?
Let's say you do a content marketing package for 10 grand. Um, that's a lot different than a five or six or 800 or a thousand dollar article that you do for a magazine. Um, those types of things, I think with low paying clients, there's a difference too. Like you can only, you can only work for low paying clients for so long before you need to move up to you. Can't just keep toiling away at 25 cents a word and then 30 cents a word, and then 40 cents. Like you need to make bigger jumps. You need to make bigger jumps. You need to go after bigger fish. And you know, you can't keep a bunch of low paying clients on your roster. If there's a client that you really like working with, then you can try to get them to raise their, your rates with them. Or, you know, you can try to figure out, maybe you just do a little bit of work for them because you really like working with them, but you really need to have this mentality of like, I can only have X amount of this.
Like I can only have a very small amount of this. And you know, one of the things I learned also was that I needed to raise my rates. Like I was working at way too low of a rate way too often. Like my project average was really low and that bummed me out when like my other friends were like getting project averages of like $2,000 or $3,000. Like every project, they got average two to $3,000. And I was like, okay, I'm not even close to that. Like when I burned out, I was not even close to that. And, um, it just, it really takes a toll on you. So you also need to learn to like say no to people. Like, even if they're offering you a rate that you feel like, you're like, Oh my gosh, this is more than I've gotten. If it's not close to where you want to be, like, you need to just say no gracefully and move along. So I hope that was helpful. Um, let's see.
So, okay. Linda has a good question here. I'm going to pop this up. Oh, Vicky says good for her for staying on the bed. She's Vicky. Charlotte's only staying on her bed because she knows she's going to get treat out. So if I pop it back right now, like she knows that if she stays there that she's going to get, she's going to get something and she's got her little legs crossed. You're so funny. Okay. You got your little not anymore. Now you look like a mermaid, but your legs were crossed like a little, like a little gentle lady. Okay. So Linda says, I want to pivot into case studies and white papers, but I was told I have to write articles and market to magazines. How can I break into writing white papers and such instead? So with white papers and case studies, those are interview heavy.
So a good way. I've I agree with writing articles and getting published pieces with interviews, because it's really hard to get a case study or a white paper, like just, just that gig alone without having clips that show, you know how to do an interview. So that's one, two, you can get a case study or white paper from a client that you already work with. So like, when you have your initial client meeting, you talk to them and say like, okay, going to work on this blogging project, but what do you have in the future? And they're like, Oh, well maybe we're thinking about white papers and case studies. Like that might be an opportunity that they see or work through blog posts. And they decide that they want to give you, you know, they decide they want to do a case study and they already like you.
So they give it to you as part of your project. So I think with white papers and case studies, you have to learn how to do interviews. Like they're very interview heavy, so you need those skills. And the only, I feel like there's a couple of ways that I've seen people get them in. That's it it's like one, you have the clips, like you have magazine clips, you can show that you've done interviews. You can show that you understand the format of a case study. You can show that you understand how to basically work interviews into an article. And then the other one is like, you already worked for a client that you previously asked them. If they have other work in the pipeline, you didn't just like go into this thing and say, um, basically like, yeah, let's just do blog post. Like you have to ask them about their future projects because that's how you get stuff.
Like a lot of people have asked me how I moved into different things. It was asking that question, Hey, like we're talking about blogging, but like, do you have anything in the future that you're thinking about? And if they say no, then you're like, okay, but a lot of times you want to ask them like what's in the future. And they say, Oh, well we have eBooks or this or this or this that helps you kind of get more projects in the works. And you're already working with someone who likes you. So they're like, okay, cool. We can farm this out to her too. We don't have to hire someone new. But like I said, the interview part is really important. So
I would
Also go and look at case studies and white papers as examples. Like I would learn how to do that format because case studies and white papers have very specific formats that you need to follow. And you're writing them in a very different way than you do a lot of other pieces. Like you're, you're basically marketing the fact that this company does something great through a customer story or through, you know, a chain why their product is better than someone else's or like the difference they're making whatever. But there's a lot of different things in there that I think would be helpful if you just go look at them a little bit more.
So let's go look at this. Do do do. Yeah. Okay.
Okay. So this is, uh, this is Vicki made a good point here. Let's pop this up. It's thinking. So Vicky says some blog articles are getting so long. They're practically white papers. You could probably portfolio a certain kind of really long article. I wouldn't say it's a white paper, unless it's like an official white paper. So even if they're a long article, the slant of a white paper is very different than an article. So your white paper would be like your case study is basically a, like a very big testimonial. So I feel like it's better to start with a case study. So your case study is like a very big testimonial and explaining like how your product solves the problem. Your white paper is more like why your product is better than other products, or like there's a bunch of different cases where you have white papers that are very different than the structure of articles. So I've never would call something a white paper and less is an actual white paper, because if you send it as a clip and it's not a white paper, that could be bad news bears. So anything else? Um, okay. If you have any other questions, pop them in. I'm going to give you guys one more little. Oh my gosh. Bear, bear. You falling asleep while. Well, gosh, you're so funny.
How are you doing he weight easy Google girl. Do the best where you're so old. I'm just glad you're alive. You're just, I'm just glad you're here with us today. Bear. There you go. Good job. You sound like a little piglet and I love you. All right. So I hope that was helpful. I have a lot of motor stuff on burnout. I know this was kind of general and overarching, but there's a lot of things that you can really learn about burnout and how it affects your mental, emotional, and physical health. Um, it's not like I advocate for burning out, but I do think that burning out is not the end of the world. A lot of people write articles about how like don't do burnout avoid at all costs. Like never do this, but it happens to a lot more of us than then they talk about like a lot more freelance writers burnout.
Like I'm pretty sure every freelance writer who I've seen who's been successful has burned out. And if they haven't burned out than if they'd gotten really, really close to it. So burnout is not the end of the world. It'll teach you a lot and it still will be hard. But sometimes, like I said, like I'm the type of person that has to fall in scrape my knee and break my nose to like kind of figure out certain things. Like sometimes I can take advice and just do it. And sometimes I'm just like, Nope, we're doing this. This is working, you know, and it, and it's not working. So I hope this was helpful so far. And um, yeah, I will see you guys next week. Have a great weekend.
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