I remember being shocked one day at a comment on Hacker News that cited a study saying the most common successful conclusion to depression.
To give you a hint, it wasn't any particular medication or therapy.
Rather, the most common way depression ends is through "spontaneous recovery" -- where a person gets better for no seemingly particular reason, the mix of thoughts and chemicals having run their course.
I'm nursing a minor tenderness in my elbow right now. Tweaked it lifting weights. I know it'll heal in a few days, so I just plan around doing lower body work and maybe doing more cardio or crunches for a few days. There's no need to obsess over it, it'll be better in a few days.
But how often do we take that same approach when something is holding us down mentally? Perhaps in a particularly bad procrastination cycle, or feeling uncreative and uninspired, not doing great work, or something along those lines?
Rarely. It usually causes the person suffering from a creative or mental affliction to obsess over it, question themselves, and otherwise feel really terrible.
I'm starting to look at low moments of uncreativity, compulsions for a particular sort of procrastination, low willpower, and the like as a passing fever.
Like always, you'll want to look to see if there's a root cause you can identify. Put in best practices as you can, like eating and sleeping well. And then just know it'll pass with time.
Obviously, if it's on the more serious side, get a doctor to check you out. But oftentimes, a short-term negative run is nothing to be alarmed about. They always feel longer than they really are when you're stuck in a minor rut. And you should do whatever you know is effective at shaking you out of it, to the extent you can.
But beyond that, it might be useful to observe it. "Ah, I'm in a poor writing cycle right now. This will pass with time."
Try to be objective about the extent of things, too. It's easy when we're bursting with ideas of thing we want to implement to feel absolutely miserable if you're only putting in 4 hours of good work per day, and a couple hours of semi-productive time with the rest being pure procrastination. But that's actually over the baseline of work that most people in standard office-type environments perform. Obsessing and ruminating over these short-term dips seems to make them worse, or at least, less pleasant.
Don't "do nothing," but sometimes if you're in a down cycle mentally (low creativity, procrastination, low energy, whatever) for no particular reason with no particular specific root cause that needs to be attacked, you can just reflect that it'll pass like a fever, and it will.