When Erin Shakoor realized self-care was intrinsic to her success, she adopted a formula for periodic personal reboots.

There are vacation days, there are personal days, and then there are zigzag days. For Chicago designer Erin Shakoor, combating creative burnout with traditional time off was good, but supplementing it with a dedicated day of downtime was better. “I think a lot of designers struggle to accept that we are artists and creatives who are inclined toward certain sensitivities,” she says. “What we do is intimate and difficult to compartmentalize, and that requires taking care of ourselves more intentionally than some other careers might require.” Taking a cue from a designer she admires, Shakoor adopted a system to formalize taking restorative time off in small, periodic chunks—no PTO or big travel budget required.

Grappling with the debilitating effects of burnout has motivated the designer to see self-care as essential, not a luxury. “There have been periods in my career when I experienced extreme anxiety and insomnia,” she says. “I felt easily irritated, indecisive and overwhelmed, and would procrastinate and let the tasks pile up. I could have the most amazing projects in the world, but none of them would inspire or excite me because my morale was low.” For a while, she white-knuckled her way through the ups and downs. About a decade ago, she began proactively searching for strategies to tame the roller coaster.