What is emotional drain, and how can you reduce it? Negative emotions are the real culprit behind emotional drain, and over time they can affect your mental and physical health. Work pressure and relationships are the most common sources. Novelists may not have coworkers, but they still have to promote themselves, grow a fan base and run communities—each extra task is another burden. Utsudo suggests allocating your time, setting priorities, and letting go of unimportant relationships or work that upsets you, saving your limited energy for what truly matters.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

Negative emotions are emotional drain

Whatever you face, the negative emotional reactions it triggers are a form of drain.

Positive emotions like optimism, joy and contentment don’t count, because they affect people well. It’s wonderful to immerse yourself in them often, but emotions flow, and it’s unlikely anyone can stay in that state all the time.

Negative emotions are the real culprit behind emotional drain.

When people are immersed in negative emotions, they’re not only down, but over time it can cause mental or physical illness—many people today suffer from it. When negative emotions take over body and mind, the whole world seems to go dark, and everything feels beyond you.

Work and relationships: the most common sources of drain

I think we all instinctively want to avoid these uncomfortable feelings. But in a society where people interact so often, “work” and “relationships,” which trouble so many, are unavoidable.

For example, if you don’t get along with a coworker or boss, not everyone can quit right away. Some, constrained by financial or family pressure, can only endure or try other ways to get along. But the other person may have no intention of changing, so nothing improves, and every time you’re in the same room you feel stressed.

Or there are lots of things waiting at work—next week’s meeting, a new project presentation, tasks from your boss—all of which can make you anxious, uneasy or even fed up.

Emotional drain for novelists

On the path of being a novelist, we may have one less interpersonal challenge—coworkers—but none of the other troubles have gone away QQ

And today’s novelists can’t just write and be fine. They also need to know promotion, build a fan base, run communities and so on. Every extra task is another hassle, and even small things can make you irritable when there are too many of them.

Ways to reduce emotional drain

Of course, there are techniques to deal with too many chores, such as allocating time or sorting by importance and urgency. But “relationship” problems are trickier, since in many situations you can’t simply avoid people.

Whatever drains your spirit, it not only takes time to figure out how to respond but also creates a mental burden. So eliminate as much as possible whatever drains your mental energy, or find ways to have less contact with it, so you can focus more on your responsibilities and the people and things that matter.

Let go of unimportant relationships or work that upset you when appropriate. You don’t have to carry everything. If you can’t solve something, you can avoid it—some things just can’t be solved right now, so it’s fine to leave them on the shelf for a while (X

Knowing what to let go and what to keep

Your energy each day is limited. If you spend your emotional energy on unproductive things, you may find every day hard and be weighed down by gloom.

Knowing what to let go and what to keep lets you live more freely.

FAQ

Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #151: This Kind of Promotion Drives Readers Away—Yamete!
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.