The Creative Hangover 🍷

The price of doing it right...

There’s a specific kind of night in the deejay booth where everything just works.

Not “good set” works. I mean works works -- where the room is locked in, your transitions are landing before you’ve consciously decided to make them, and you’re reading the crowd faster than you can explain why. Those nights don’t happen every time. When they do, you feel almost supernatural.

Then you wake up the next morning and feel... nothing.

Not bad. Not sad. Just weirdly quiet. Spent. Like someone turned the volume down on everything.

I used to be confused by this. Was it lack of fulfillment? It took a while to realize: that flatness is the receipt. That’s your brain showing you what it just spent.

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Researchers at CUNY just published a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology that actually puts a name to this. They tracked 355 adults over 13 days and found something that will be immediately familiar to anyone who creates for a living: professional creatives occasionally feel worse the morning after their most productive days -- even when the creative work itself made them feel great in the moment.

They split participants into two groups: people who earn income from creative work or treat it as a serious discipline, and everyone else. Both groups felt better on days when they were creating. But the next morning? Casual creators carried the good feelings forward. Professionals sometimes fell into a kind of emotional flatness.

The researchers point to a few reasons. Professional creative work demands intense self-regulation -- managing your emotions, pushing through obstacles, constantly revising your own instincts. It can also deplete dopamine in ways that take time to replenish. And unlike hobbyists, who tend to create when they feel inspired, professionals create when it’s time to deliver. Creativity on demand.

One of the researchers put it simply: creativity is usually framed as a straightforward path to feeling better. What the study found is that for professionals, there’s a next-day cost: a creative hangover.

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Here’s the reframe that helped me:

The flatness isn’t a warning sign. But it IS a measurement.

Athletes feel it after a game. You feel it after a launch, a performance, a project you actually cared about. It means you left something real on the floor.

A creative hangover means you were actually in it!

The study also found something worth holding onto: creative professionals actually start from a higher baseline of well-being than the comparison group. More engaged. More connected. More likely to find meaning in their lives overall. The daily grind costs something, but a life built around creative work pays back in ways that are harder to measure.

So when the flatness hits - and it will - don’t reach for your phone, don’t try to manufacture the next idea, don’t convince yourself the well is dry. Just let your brain sit quietly for a minute.

It ran a marathon. It’ll be ready again sooner than you think.

(That said, I ran a real marathon last year… and well - never again. Lol.)

Anyways… thanks for reading, and here’s a idea for you:

Creative Exercise 🧠📝

Think about the last time you finished something you were genuinely proud of. Now think about how you felt the next day.

If the answer is flat, quiet, or a little off -- sit with that instead of pushing through it. That feeling has information in it.

What did you spend to make that thing? And was it worth it?