How To Get Yourself Out Of A Rut
There’s a feeling that everyone is familiar with, where the wheels are spinning in place and real progress is not being made. It’s frustrating. Why can’t this problem go away? When you’re presented with an issue that takes some thought, all of your mental muscles are stretched and if not solved quickly, these muscles fatigue rapidly. The feeling of burnout is a symptom of this fatigue and at some point the original problem you set out to solve never really does.
There are a lot of different scenarios where this is true. Between work, school, social life, home life, there are plenty of opportunities for issues to take place in our lives. Some we’re able to handle quickly, the others tend to linger. For our peace of mind it’s best to get these resolved as soon as we can. We’re very good at prolonging these problems though. Kicking the issue down the road means we won’t have to face it today. This is comforting in the moment but it’s always stored in the back of your mind.
The problem with doing this is that the problem never actually gets solved. Prolonging any issue at best keeps it on your mind and at worst makes that problem any even bigger issue the longer it lingers. This is why it’s good practice to take care of it as soon as you can. Many of us, however, are ill-equipped to actually figure out what the root of the problem is. We know what kind of issues it’s causing, but resolving it takes a deeper awareness and thinking that we might not always be using.
Don’t be intimidated or frozen in fear by the fact that you have an issue that needs to be dealt with. Acknowledgment is the first step to resolving whatever the issue might be and it will not get resolved until this takes place in your mind. Further, you must also be honest with yourself. If it truly is causing problems in your life you must not minimize it’s effect on you. Confirming to yourself that there is a problem and it needs to be confronted puts you in the right state of mind to take it on. Without full recognition of the issue you will not get to the root cause.
At this point you will start to see the problem for what it is and not the emotional toll it takes on you. Framing it in your mind so that you don’t get an emotional reaction is very important. Every problem can be solved if you’re able to see it for what it is and not the effect it has on you. This is difficult but a very important step towards resolution. Allowing negative feelings to creep in during problem-solving tends to spark self-apathy and irrational conclusions that have little to do with the actual issue. You must allow these feelings to subside.
Once the problem is acknowledged and framed so that you can see the whole issue, you can now begin to ask why this problem is occurring. This step requires some deep thought. A combination of reason and intuition is helpful in this step. Why has this problem occurred and why does it keep occurring? Start with where you are at currently and backtrack to where you first began to notice this problem in your life. What changed from how things were before you noticed it? Did you start doing something different, did someone start acting different around you, did you turn a routine upside down? These are questions you should ask yourself and you should really give the answers some honest thought. In some instances, the truth to some of the questions you ask yourself may be hard to acknowledge. You need to remember, however, that there is nothing wrong with asking hard questions to yourself. It is a critical step in finding the true cause of the issue.
One issue you may have when asking ‘why’ is the many different routes your reasoning will take when you work backwards to the root cause. It’s very easy to formulate different reasons for how you got here. In this case, it’s important to remember that the hardest problems often have the simplest answers. Don’t get too distracted by unlikely scenarios; these are clouding your ability to put together an event storyboard. Be deep in your thought but quick in your reasoning. This leads to the most likely cause.
It is at this point that you must start to piece together a ‘big picture’ for what is connecting you to the problem you have. By using your own thoughts, you were able to create a timeline of events that led you from where you are today to the start of the problem. This timeline should help things become clear as to how you’ve arrived at your predicament in the first place. Start connecting the pieces that you already know – when did you first notice the problem? How long has the problem persisted? What have you tried so far to fix this issue? – and see how the path has led you to where you are today. This exercise in meta-thinking is important because it often takes a lot of details that don’t always fit together on the surface to see the whole picture. As you think deeply, you can start to pull in things that you didn’t notice before that now seem to play a role in the issue.
A final piece to the puzzle that you should always utilize is collaboration. It’s often the case that you are stuck on figuring things out and a way forward is to ask for help. Getting an outside viewpoint of your problem can breathe a new perspective that you would not have been able to see and it’s that perspective that may be the missing link to resolving it. Keep in mind that if you’re having trouble detaching the emotional aspect of the issue, it’s very important to ask for help in finding out what is wrong. You simply cannot solve a problem if it is affecting your emotions so strongly. You will have irrational thoughts and can make things worse for yourself if you go at it alone. Others want to help. Use them for this service that they can provide.
With dedication and persistence, getting to the root of a problem is not an insurmountable challenge. We often don’t want to resolve it because it takes some work and can bring up uncomfortable feelings at the onset. However, this is just an illusion in your mind. There should be no shame or anxiety when you decide to finally tackle a problem that has been plaguing you. The key is to ask “why?”, over and over until you finally reach moment zero – that moment that the problem began. From here, you can finally start to see where things started going down the wrong path and how you can start to resolve it for a better mind, body, and soul.
