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- Being stuck in a rut means experiencing a phase where you feel unmotivated, uninspired, and as if you're not progressing in life. This can often lead to feelings of frustration, stagnation, and even depression. It's important to recognise these feelings and understand that they are a normal part of life's ebb and flow.
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- Tania Luna
- Day to day, you don't look forward to much (other than maybe sleeping or just getting through whatever you're doing).
- You'd like to get your creative juices flowing, but it seems someone left an empty juice bottle in the fridge.
- Even though you keeping checking things off your to do list, it doesn't feel like you are getting much done.
- Your days all blur together, and it's not weird to look up blinking and ask, "Is this Tuesday or Thursday?"
- Overview
- 1. Accept the situation
- 2. Identify the cause
- 3. Take a closer look at your goals
- 4. Make small changes
- 5. Remember self-care
- 6. Give your brain a break
- 7. Be more impulsive
- 8. Approach things realistically
- 9. Break away from perfectionism
Ever got your car stuck in a ditch? Maybe you parked on the beach and when you tried to leave, realized you were trapped in the sand and couldn’t go backward, forward, or anywhere at all.
You realized pretty quickly spinning your wheels only mired you deeper. Frustrated and unable to move, you had to come up with a different plan.
Getting stuck emotionally can happen in a similar way. You move through life, following your routine, doing the same things each day. You don’t notice the rut coming on, just as you didn’t realize you’d get stuck in the sand.
But before you know it, life suddenly feels blah and meaningless. You don’t feel motivated. Creativity and inspiration have flown the coop. Work piles up, but you don’t know where to begin tackling it — and you can’t really bring yourself to care.
You know doing something different might help, but you lack the energy or motivation to try making a change.
Sound familiar? If so, you may have fallen into a rut. And just like with your car, spinning your wheels endlessly won’t do much to get you out. To excavate your car, you had to take some kind of action, whether it was shoveling sand or calling a tow truck.
So, you’re stuck in a rut. It’s OK. This is pretty common, and it won’t last forever.
But denial can keep you from making helpful changes. If you brush off your ennui by telling yourself, “I’m just worn out” or “I’ll feel more like myself tomorrow,” you’ll just continue spinning through the same cycle, prolonging your dissatisfaction and distress.
If you’re stuck in a slump, examining why can help you start pulling yourself up.
A little self-exploration sometimes yields answers right away. Perhaps your relationship hasn’t progressed as you intended or your job feels like a dead end. Or maybe a number of minor stresses have compounded to leave you emotionally depleted.
Working toward specific goals can motivate you and give you a sense of purpose. Even if a goal lies a little outside your current reach, there’s nothing wrong with that. Life allows plenty of room to grow, and you can often achieve those goals with some work.
When most of your goals are unattainable from where you are right now, however, you might continue failing to achieve them and end up frustrated with yourself.
Instead of beating yourself up for not achieving things, ask yourself whether your goals align with what you can realistically achieve. If your (honest) answer is “no,” take your goal down just a notch and see if you have more success.
There’s nothing wrong with scaling back, and it doesn’t mean you have to abandon your loftier goals altogether.
Once you realize you’re stuck in a rut, you might feel tempted to completely restructure the situation by making a lot of large changes.
It sounds great in theory, but overhauling everything at once often doesn’t go as planned. Trying to change several habits or behaviors at the same time can quickly get overwhelming and make it difficult to stick with any of the changes.
If you’re having a hard time identifying what got you into the rut, or just feel totally unmotivated to get out of it, do a quick check-in to make sure you’re looking after your well-being.
Good self-care practices help refresh your mind and body. They can also boost energy and motivation, leaving you feeling more capable of reworking your routine in other ways.
You don’t need to overhaul your lifestyle, but try to carve out time for some of the following:
•mindless relaxation
•breaks from difficult projects
•time off when you feel burnt out
A routine can feel familiar and comforting, and it’s not bad to have one.
Without variety, though, life can get a bit boring. You keep doing the same things each day because you’ve grown accustomed to them, but suddenly you start to feel worn down and bored.
Left to its own devices, a part of your brain — specifically, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — will try to work through problems by applying patterns or rules you’ve learned from your previous experiences.
When you face a new kind of challenge, these strategies may not work as well as they did before. This leaves you without a solution (and in a rut).
Impulsivity gets a bad reputation. Sure, some impulsive actions carry risks. But plenty of them are perfectly safe and beneficial.
Making snap decisions can increase your confidence and provide a chance to explore new options that add inspiration and variety to life. Even something as simple as walking the long way home can introduce you to things you’ve never seen before.
Whatever problems you face, realistic thinking can help you find effective methods of solving them.
It’s understandable to want to pin the blame for the rut on outside sources, but most of the time, you can’t change anything except yourself.
Ruminating on things you can’t control typically doesn’t help. Neither does crossing your fingers, hoping for the best, or sitting back and waiting for things to magically improve.
Instead, consider things from a realistic perspective. Ignore the external factors and consider which of your actions (or lack of actions) contributed.
Perfection might be a health goal for some folks, but for most people, it just leads to self-sabotage.
When you have high standards, you probably spend a long time making sure your work always meets them. Even when you do a great job, you might believe it’s just not good enough and keep working at it.
A strong work ethic is an admirable trait. But it’s also important to recognize that making mistakes is a normal, important part of growth.
Trying to avoid a single mistake can often prevent you from getting things done. Plus, it can lead to feelings of anxiety and depression when you don’t succeed at total perfection.
- Day to day, you don't look forward to much (other than maybe sleeping or just getting through whatever you're doing).
- You'd like to get your creative juices flowing, but it seems someone left an empty juice bottle in the fridge.
- Even though you keeping checking things off your to do list, it doesn't feel like you are getting much done.
- Your days all blur together, and it's not weird to look up blinking and ask, "Is this Tuesday or Thursday?"
- You dream about getting away — and not just on vacation. Everyone daydreams now and then. But if you’re always wishing you were somewhere else, you may be in a rut.
- You don’t look forward to much, other than sleeping or getting through whatever you’re doing. If you regularly feel like you don’t have anything to look forward to, start to look for beauty in what lies around you.
- No matter how hard you try, it feels like you’re going nowhere. It’s not uncommon to feel stuck in the hamster wheel, especially at work. Our brains are wired to resist change, preferring to fall back on old habits.
- You look at other people’s lives with envy. In the age of social media and curated photo collections, it’s easy to compare your life to others’. But it’s important to shift your focus back to you.
You know that feeling, being in a rut is that hazy malaise of unenthusiastic existence. It doesn’t register as depression, yet you are just getting through each day feeling unfulfilled....
What Does It Mean When You Are Stuck In a Rut? The phrase “stuck in a rut” comes from when people rode around in wagons. Those wagon wheels would wear away the road until they created ruts: deep grooves in the dirt that held those wheels in place.
Jun 19, 2020 · Feeling unhealthy or nostalgic? You could be stuck in a work rut without even knowing it. Here's how to recognize the signs—and do something about it.
