How to quickly get out of a rut

So pretend you're this guy, and you were really productive earlier the month. In fact, you are kind of killing it. You're reading lots of books, hitting the gym consistently, and actually getting your work in on time.

But then something happened. Maybe you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Maybe an invisible demon ghost violated you in your sleep. Whatever the case may be, everything seems just a bit harder to do. You're tired. You've lost all the motivation you had to keep being awesome, and you can't even remember why you were being productive in the first place.

That mental clarity that you seemed to be the beneficiary of just yesterday seems to have run away in the night. Unfortunately, this lack of motivation starts to seep into the other areas of your life. The thought dawns on you to go to the gym, and you're too lazy to do it. So you skip the gym that day. One day turns into two days, two days turn into a week.

You're also starting to buy more junk food, watch more TV, and play more video games. Not only are you not doing the things you know you should be doing, but you don't even want to. You can't even remember why you were being productive in the first place. Why are we still here?

For a lot of people, these long periods of success followed by long periods of self-destruction and failure seem to be a common pattern. And while this issue is a deep psychological issue that I'll dive into in a later video, I wanted to give you guys a more practical guide as to how I get myself out of these types of pseudo-depressive ruts and start being productive again.

Now, before we dive into these really powerful strategies, I just want to preface the video with a couple of things. Number one is that this video is not meant to be a replacement for going to therapy if you actually have clinical depression. I'm not a doctor; I'm just a dude, and I talk about what works for me. Second of all, even though this video is about how to get out of a rut efficiently or quickly, that's all relative. You're usually not going to get out of a rut overnight.

Okay, so strategy number one is to utilize the "do something" principle. This principle is the catalyst for action. If you don't have the motivation to do something, you need something that'll spark some sort of action. Something to get the momentum going, something to get the ball rolling.

The "do something" principle is a means to take action when you don't have the motivation to do anything. Most people think that in order to take action on anything, you need to be motivated to do that. Motivation comes when you're inspired by something. So, for instance, say you're browsing Reddit or something, and you come across a Matt D'Avella video. By the end, he says something that strikes a chord with you, and you're inspired to take action. That inspiration served as the adequate motivation to take action on your goals.

But the "do something" principle dictates that inspiration, motivation, action is not a linear sequence; it's an endless loop, and you can start wherever you want to start. So it's far more efficient to start with action and let that action become the inspiration and the motivation necessary to take further action.

You may be thinking, "Thanks, genius. If I'm unmotivated to do something, then I should just do something. That's really helpful!" But you actually take action without motivation all the time. Do you need some sort of huge inspirational epiphany to take a shower? No, it's just something you do.

These monotonous actions are the very actions you should be using as momentum to take further action. If you're just sitting there waiting for inspiration to strike, go brush your teeth. Brushing your teeth is a little constructive action that will give you momentum into taking further action.

If you have to write a giant essay, don't think to yourself, "Oh, I have to go and write my giant four-thousand-word essay." Just say, "I'm gonna open up the Word doc and write whatever comes to my mind for one minute, and that's it. That's all I have to do." But once you start writing, you will tend to want to write more because you've convinced yourself to get there. That is, in essence, the "do something" principle.

Now, strategy number two seems counterintuitive to what I just said, and that is to reward yourself for small wins. Now, if you follow this channel at all, I am NOT a pat-yourself-on-the-back and everyone-gets-an-award kind of guy. So if you're in the same boat, you might cringe at the thought of rewarding yourself for taking a shower or something like that because you know you're capable of so much more.

But the need to reward yourself for small wins, especially if you're in a vulnerable situation, is a psychological necessity. It has everything to do with the fact that you have basically two brains. And I'm not talking about right and left; I'm talking more about the more primal part of your brain, which is closer to the stem, responsible for motivation and emotion and stuff like that, and your more logical, abstract, moralistic part of your brain, which is present more in the prefrontal cortex.

So if your prefrontal cortex knows to use the "do something" principle in order to convince your primal side of your brain to take action on something, it's important that you're not too iron-fisted with this because it's a negotiation with yourself. Don't be a slave driver to the primal side of your brain, or your primal side of your brain won't feel listened to. It'll lash out, and it won't want to do anything that your logical side of your brain wants it to do.

So you almost need to use your higher judgment to provide compassionate guidance to the primal part of your brain and very gradually win it over. If you're too lazy to pretty much do anything other than sit around all day and you use the "do something" principle to convince your primal side of your brain to brush your teeth, take a shower, get some nice clothes on, and clean your kitchen, and you start to get really tired and agitated after this, take a break.

It may sound suspect, and your logical side of your brain knows that you should be doing a lot more than that. Just take it easy; reward yourself for doing something constructive for once after days of binging dopamine, and just relax and have a good time.

So you might be thinking, "How the heck am I supposed to get out of a rut if I don't ride this momentum out into the sunset?" That's what tip number three is all about. So strategy number three is all about progressive overload. It's very similar to the philosophy of lifting weights and getting stronger.

Instead of yo-yoing between taking crazy amounts of action and then your primal brain lashing out and going into long periods of self-destruction, you should be massaging yourself into organically growing a lifestyle that you gradually get used to that's more and more productive. You do more and more every day while rewarding yourself for the small wins and comparing yourself to who you were yesterday rather than who someone else is today.

So, for instance, if you develop a game plan over the course of seven days to get out of a rut, that's a lot more realistic than just trying to be productive all of a sudden. So say day one, you can't really do much other than go on the internet for long periods of time. On this day, if you convince yourself to take pretty much any sort of constructive action, that should be sufficient for the day.

Day one should just be about gradually taking a little bit more action and being happy with that. And the next day, remind yourself that that wasn't so bad, and actually, it felt pretty good to take action, and try to do a little bit more. If you do this day after day, then gradually and organically, both sides of your brain will be in agreement, and you'll very comfortably start to rise from the ashes like a phoenix and become the person that you were earlier in that month.

I can't stress how important this is: managing expectations, being patient with yourself, and letting your higher faculties be very communicative with the more primal and emotional sides of your brain. This synergy between both sides of your brain is integral for maintaining long-term success, and you can eventually be very reliably and sustainably living the kind of life that you've always wanted to be living.

I want to give a huge shout-out to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. For those of you who don't know, Skillshare is an online learning platform that has thousands of classes covering dozens of entrepreneurial, productivity, and artistic topics. It's also extremely affordable; with an annual membership, it comes in at less than $10 a month.

I just finished watching my friend Thomas Frank's productivity masterclass on Skillshare. Taking Thomas Frank's productivity masterclass helped me realize that one of the most important ways I can stay in that sustained productivity lifestyle is to reduce the amount of friction there is to actually being productive.

A lot of this can be achieved by creating a reliable, streamlined productivity system that helps you get things done without the headache. Because Skillshare is sponsoring this video, they're offering you guys, the Better Ideas viewers, a two-month free trial, which means for two months absolutely free, you get unlimited access to every single class on Skillshare.

So right now, you can check out Thomas Frank's productivity course for free using the link in the description, and while you're at it, you might as well check out all the other classes on there as well. Thanks again, Skillshare, for sponsoring this video. If you like this video, make sure to hit like because when you like it, the algorithm blesses me by shoving this video in front of people's faces, helping them out.

This will be especially helpful if somebody's in a rut, and because you liked this video, it ended up in their subscription, and this video was able to help them climb out of the rut. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on how you climb out of ruts. Everyone has their own little strategies that help them get momentum back into their life, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

If you're lurking here, consider subscribing and hitting the bell icon so you don't miss videos like these in the future. Tons of amazing stuff happening on the channel; you're probably noticing that there are more sponsored videos. This allows me to put more effort into the videos because I spend less and less, almost no time now, doing freelance videography, so I can rededicate that time to making amazing content for you guys.

But yeah, that's all for today. Thank you for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video. [Music]