Study: 69% of creators are burned out. Is coaching the solution?

While many fans are aspiring creators, we are beginning to understand the demands that come with the job. A study from Healthy Gamer and Stream Hatchet shows that creators are more likely to deal with mental health concerns than peers, but tailored solutions can help.

Healthy Gamer, led by Dr. Alok Kanojia, MD MPH also known as Dr. K, has been working with creators for the last two and a half years through its coaching program. The program is informed by Dr. K’s holistic background as a psychiatrist, Ayurveda monk and firsthand experience as a content creator on Twitch, YouTube and TikTok.

This study show that Healthy Gamer’s program effectively improves both creators’ mental health and performance based on surveys and data from Stream Hatchet.

Creator Burnout

Compared to the general population, creators are dealing with more mental health issues. The reported rates of burnout, anxiety and depression are all greater in Healthy Gamers clients vs. the 2021 APA Work and Wellbeing Survey. These figures are also supported by other studies cited in the report.

This data highlights the challenges creators face and the impact it can have on productivity. Maintaining and building an audience requires creators to be highly productive. Mental health challenges can make it even more difficult to meet these demands.

Based on a survey of 74 of Healthy Gamer’s clients, the majority of creators report productivity challenges. Procrastination is the most common concern (76%), followed by work-life balance (72%). On the whole, it shows that creators face a number of hurdles to meet productivity demands.

Healthy Gamer’s results

While creators can and should seek support, many providers are not aware of the unique challenges that come with being a creator.

“Conventional mental health strategies may encourage taking a break, but for creators, taking a break can result in significant financial losses and diminished purpose,” the report says. “Therefore, it is essential to develop tailored strategies that help creators maintain their sense of purpose while also promoting good mental health.”

Through its creator-specific approaches, Healthy Gamer helps its clients address these work-related emotional challenges. It supplies clients with key strategies to help improve communication, boundary-setting, self-awareness, time management and confidence. Of course, these are tailored to each creator’s unique needs.

Following its 12-week creator coaching program, Healthy Gamer’s clients reported impressive results. The study used standard measurement tools to assess rates of anxiety, depression, life purpose, burnout and other life skills before and after coaching. All creators reported improvements in anxiety, depression and life purpose following the program. Severely anxious clients improved by 40% while severely depressed clients improved by 27%. Most importantly, the low life purpose group improved by 60%.

While the program did report improvements for burnout, they were not as uniform. Only 55% of the most burned-out group reported improvements, with beneficiaries’ scores rising by 22% on average. This translates to a 20% change on average for the most burned-out group.

Connecting performance through Stream Hatchet

Healthy Gamer took the next step to prove that its program improved both mental health and performance. In partnership with analytics platform Stream Hatchet, the report shows massive gains in average video views (+214%), peak viewers (+171%) and cumulative subscriptions (+200%).

Additionally, these gains did not come from sacrificing work-life balance. There was no significant change in airtime, but total hours viewed increased by 275% over the course of creator coaching.

These results were fairly universal. Female creators and saw equivalent gains to their male peers — notably, they made up the majority of participants in the program. Additionally, these results benefitted streamers of all sizes, showing that the coaching worked irrespective of reach. The results even indicated that 87% of clients saw their most productive month as a creator while in Healthy Gamer’s program.

While these results are impressive, it’s important to note that the data is drawn from 2020 to 2021. Twitch as a whole experienced rapid growth in response to COVID-19 during this time. However, the report uses Stream Hatchet’s data to compare client gains to the platform average showing a massive difference.

Balancing health with productivity

Together, Healthy Gamer and Stream Hatchet showed that providing mental health resources for creators can have massive impacts for well-being and productivity. Its tailored approach could be the key to its success. Cultivating purpose with ongoing support helps sustain creators and results in higher ROI.

Overall, the report is very encouraging. More recent data and a larger sample size will make the findings more robust. Ultimately, these results show that Healthy Gamer’s program could be an effective solution for growing concerns of creator burnout.