getting out of a rut

mending broken cycles, and swimming with the stream

You finally found a productivity system that clicks, one that spikes your efficiency and gets you feeling like your days are accomplished and have purpose.

For days, weeks or even months you keep this up: waking early, eating clean, deep work blocks adhered to, progress on projects and purpose fulfilled.

You feel like you are floating in a fast flowing river that is taking you with it.

The effort to get on the stream was significant but now that you are on it, you are just moving.

However, there is that nagging feeling deep inside you that sporadically pops into your mind

The feeling is that at any moment you could hit a bend in the stream and be thrown back onto shore.

The gradual increase in this fear is what leads to it eventually happening.

And just like that, your time in stream lasted nowhere near the time it spent to get on it in the first place.

What’s worse is that your brain can’t even remember how you got on the stream the last time in the first place - meaning you have to figure it out again from zero.

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In pursuing an understanding human consciousness, what really intrigues me is this apparent cycle (motivated for weeks and then almost depressed for some time), and how it seems to be prevalent in all human minds.

Some minds, however, have built structures to ride the wave better than others.

And those structures are what I wanted to talk about in this letter.

What is quite sinister, in a certain way, about the self-sabotaging that the modern human mind imposes on these cyclical mood shifts is that when we are on the ‘stream’, we fight every attempt to create preventative structures that will help us stay on the ‘stream’, no matter what bends in the river we encounter.

Why would our brains do such a self-disrupting thing?

This is because in order for us to write a manual on how to get back onto the stream, we have to either be off the stream or, more frighteningly, dive deep into the feelings we have when we are off the stream. Our brains don’t want to do that.

But it is something we have to learn to do.

This letter is also an attempt at doing that. Documenting elements of what I did, how I felt and how I reacted the last time I was in a rut and what I realised about it and how I got out are exactly the kind of instructions that writing down will allow my future self to be grateful.

The more we learn about our minds, the more we can be happier and therefore better deal with the external hardships and pressure that we experience.

Our minds are built to see chaos as disorganising in nature and alien.

So whenever we lose our routine or something out of the ordinary happens, it throws us off, and if we haven’t built strong guardrails to keep us in line, our perception of reality can become chaotic too.

How good we feel or how much we feel like we are in that fast-flowing stream of ease and intrinsic achievement cannot be dependent on our external environment. It comes from a mastery of what is within.

In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi supports this:

Certainly we should keep on learning how to master the external environment, because our physical survival may depend on it. But such mastery is not going to add one jot to how good we as individuals feel, or reduce the chaos of the world as we experience it. To do that we must learn to achieve mastery of consciousness itself.

The most important thing I interpret from that is that even though when you fall into a rut and feel like crawling inside yourself and blocking out the world, we must remember that the rut, and subsequently the solution to it has absolutely nothing to do with outside events or anything external.

It lies within the parts of our consciousness that are unknown to us.

This is why whilst journaling at all times is powerful (or some sort of writing as a form of expression) it is especially powerful in these times when we are in a rut.

Precisely because these are the times that we will learn the most about our own mind.

What was the trigger that pushed me back off stream? Was it slightly too long spent this week on social media? Whilst spending too much time on social media, was it the comparisons that it concocted that spiraled the narratives of my internal dialogue? Was it how I reacted to an external traumatic event or disruption to life?

These questions written down, and kept could be exactly what’s needed for the next time for us to understand why A led to B.

Then it’s also important to document the realisations and discoveries we made about ourselves that got us back on track.

What framework brought me back? What elements of that framework are sustainable and aren’t vulnerable to me falling back into a rut for the same reasons I did the last time? What triggers are my mind, in particular, vulnerable to that I should stay away from (that are unique to me)?

Whether in a written form or vocal form or video, whatever is easiest for you, the paramount being actually documenting these findings.

If we reframe ruts and bad periods as research opportunities dissecting our own minds, we can help to not necessarily prevent them in the future, but rather be better prepared for them in the future and learn to accept why they are happening, so we can operate at higher levels of human function.

We all want to be happy at the end of the day, with any other material or physical desires that we have deriving from our search for happiness.

Learn to master the mind and the rest follows.

So next time you are in a rut and lose your routine or all sense of motivation, ignore everything external and look within at how your perception of the outside is blocking you.

— E.J.C.