No Resolutions. Yes Recovery.

By now, it’s almost cliché to roll our eyes at New Year’s resolutions. Every January, the cultural messaging ramps up anyway: New Year, New You. Set big goals. Optimize your life. Maximize productivity… Now!

For many creative professionals, this messaging is dysregulating.

If you’re a performer, touring artist, or gig-based creative, December wasn’t restful. It was likely your most demanding season of the year: multiple gigs, constant travel, irregular sleep, family obligations squeezed into narrow gaps, and the quiet pressure to stay healthy no matter what. Your body ran on adrenaline and stress hormones because it had to.

Then January hits. The calendar empties. The immediate demands stop. And suddenly your nervous system realizes it’s safe to collapse.

This is when you get sick. This is when exhaustion catches up. This is when your body demands the rest it’s been denied. And somehow, this is also when you’re told to launch into maximum productivity mode.

After decades of performing and now as a therapist supporting creative professionals, I’ve learned this: January isn’t for resolutions. It’s for recovery.

After intensive performance seasons, many creatives experience a predictable crash that feels shameful only because it’s rarely named.

Instead of relief, you feel depleted. No motivation, just fogginess and anxiety. Very little gratitude. Instead, you feel complicated emotions like pride tangled with resentment, relief mixed with grief, gratitude alongside anger at how much it cost you.

Your nervous system has been in survival mode. Your immune system was suppressed by chronic stress and lack of sleep. When the pressure lifts, your body finally does what it couldn’t afford to do before: rest, repair, and respond. This is physiology.

Friends and family, who barely saw you during busy season, now expect your full availability. Explaining that you need recovery and not reconnection can feel awkward or ungrateful. But protecting this recovery time matters more than meeting expectations you don’t actually have the capacity to meet.

Recovery isn’t catching up on everything you postponed. It often looks “unproductive” from the outside. It might mean solitude instead of socializing.
Lower-stakes engagement with your art instead of performing. Administrative work, teaching, or simply attending shows as an audience member. Irregular sleep. Days without structure. Medical appointments you’ve been delaying.

This phase can feel uncomfortable in a culture that treats rest as laziness. But your body needs time to return to baseline before it can sustainably engage with new goals. Resolution culture assumes everyone starts January from the same place with equal energy, resources, and capacity. Creative professionals often start January depleted.

Resolutions focus on what to add: new habits, routines, goals. Recovery asks a different question: What needs to change so this depletion doesn’t keep repeating?

If you’re exhausted, the solution isn’t more discipline. It’s structural change. Sustainable change rarely comes from dramatic overhauls. It comes from small, cumulative adjustments to boundaries, pricing, scheduling, and support systems.

Intentions are directional, not rigid. They allow flexibility and acknowledge your current state. “I intend to create more sustainable pricing” leaves room for experimentation and adjustment. “I will overhaul my entire business this month” creates pressure and shame. Intentions invite you to listen to your body instead of overriding it. Your exhaustion, illness, resentments, and coping patterns are data. They show you what isn’t sustainable.

If you consistently get sick after busy seasons, your body is signaling that this rhythm costs too much. If exhaustion doesn’t resolve with sleep, your stress load exceeds your capacity. If substance use increases during or after intense periods, that’s information about unmet support needs, not a moral issue. If relationships suffer beyond temporary strain, your work patterns may be incompatible with the life you want. These signals point toward boundaries that need setting and structures that need changing.

Saying no is one of the hardest and most necessary skills for creative professionals. NO…

to gigs during recovery, even when income would help.
to unpaid extras beyond contracted work.
to rates that don’t reflect your experience and costs.
to family and social expectations that ignore your need for rest.
to January’s pressure to immediately optimize your life.

Sustainability isn’t about avoiding hard work. It’s about building recovery into your rhythm so intense seasons don’t cause lasting damage. Productivity culture teaches that pressure fuels creativity. In reality, pressure produces output, but often at the cost of longevity.

Creating from rest expands access to inspiration, risk-taking, and joy. Artists who protect recovery produce more consistent, higher-quality work over decades than those who push relentlessly and burn out. The goal isn’t maximum productivity this month, but rather a creative life you can sustain.

If you engage in new-year planning at all, start with honesty:

• What does your body need right now?

• What patterns created the most depletion or resentment last year?

• What one or two structural changes would actually increase sustainability?

Not a long list. Not a reinvention. Just a few intentional shifts.

Most importantly, give yourself permission to rest before you plan, recover before you set goals, and trust your body over cultural pressure.

Take away: we don’t need to revolutionize our lives this January. We need to rest, recover, and make a few intentional changes that honor our finite human capacity.

Your body has been telling you what needs to change all along.