Currently Feeling: Like we're all either overstimulated 🫨 or undernourished 🪫
One is loud. The other is quiet. They both block our creativity.
Currently Feeling is a newsletter about what it means to be alive and creatively well in a world that constantly overstimulates, flattens, and disconnects us from ourselves.
I write about re-incorporating beauty, awe, wonder, and play into our lives as essential practices for tending to our creativity and reconnecting with what makes us feel most human.
There are two kinds of creative depletion I’ve been noticing lately 👀.
One is loud 🫨
The other is quiet 🫥
Yet both disconnect us from ourselves.
The Overstimulated Creative
🌀 "I can't hear myself think."
This is the version where you’re constantly plugged in. Consuming. Scrolling. Listening. Reacting. Absorbing.
You’ve read five Substack posts before breakfast. You’ve got three podcasts queued up while getting ready. You’re bookmarking inspiration, “saving it for later,” switching tabs mid-sentence.
Everything feels like input and you think you’re consuming/processing everything, but nothing’s actually landing.
We make the mistake of thinking we’re doing the most. Squeezing the juice out of life. Seizing the day!
Meanwhile, your brain is buzzing. Your nervous system is fried.
You’re full of ideas, but can’t finish a sentence.
This is what
(a Substacker I love) posted recently:“In a season where I need to listen to less podcasts and to more music… Like my brain just. needs. to. stop 😅 Enough is enough!!”
This, to me, is what happens when your creative signal gets scrambled 🍳. When your system is constantly responding to stimulation, there’s no space left to receive.
For example, as soon as I take something in, my brain wants to make meaning of it. But if I’m feeding it 10 things at once? It totally shuts down.
Sometimes the most effective, nervous-system-calming, signal-clearing thing we can do is… listen to a song. Go for a walk (without your phones or headphones). Close your eyes and take in the sounds of your environment.
Just one. Without stacking. Without multitasking. Without trying to squeeze productivity out of it.
The Undernourished Creative
💭 "Is this all there is?"
This version is sneakier because it looks like… nothing. There’s no buzz, no fire, no delight. Just a dull, lingering meh. You’re not running on overdrive. You’re running on empty.
A friend said something to me recently that really hit:
“I feel like I don’t get to do anything fun. I’m always working or caretaking. All I have to look forward to is a trip I’ve planned in the fall.”
I totally get that feeling of putting your joy on layaway.
It’s the kind of flatness that makes things like food or shopping or even doomscrolling feel like the only accessible sources of comfort — because life has otherwise become so stripped of beauty, adventure, spontaneity, or play.
As someone who processes the world emotionally, I’ve come to realize that when life flattens out — when nothing moves me — it’s not just a mood. It’s a signal. It tells me I’m overdue for beauty, creativity, or some small hit of wonder to feel alive in my own skin again.
This kind of creative depletion is just as real. The difference is, it’s quiet and so much more subtle. But it’s still a signal and it will eventually get so loud you can’t ignore it.
So… what do you do?
The first step is clarity. Are you overstimulated and full to the brim with noise? Or undernourished, running on empty from a lack of joy, beauty, or depth?
Neither one is a flaw; they’re both just signals. But we can’t work with our signals until we learn to hear them.
(I’ve been both. And sometimes, at the same time 🫠)
Both situations are symptoms of the same thing: a life out of sync with how we’re wired.
This is where Human Design has helped me so much. Understanding how I take in the world — how I digest, absorb, and orient to my environment — has helped me get way more honest about what I actually need.
Sometimes that’s less. Sometimes that’s different. Sometimes that’s more, but in a very specific direction.
Creative health starts with noticing. Noticing when the signal’s fuzzy. Noticing when you’re numb. Noticing when something simple — like building Legos or flipping through a baking magazine — lights something up again or de-stimulates you just enough to hear your inner voice.
If your brain feels like scrambled eggs lately (overstimulated, undernourished, or just creatively out of sync) I’ve been exploring how Human Design can help you figure out what kind of input actually fuels you (vs. fries you).
If you're curious what that might look like for you, shoot me a message or leave a comment. I’d genuinely love to talk it through!