> I've found myself sitting at my desk each evening
Wait, isn't that what daytime is for?
Get out. Play games. Read. Write. Ride a bike. Build something with your hands, with code, whatever. Hit the gym. Cook complicated dishes. Go to restaurants. Join a club and make some friends. Even sleep more.
You need to find what you like to do with your time, and truth is it's probably not what you want it to be. Picking up hobbies and mastering them is what drives a lot of people through life. If that interacts positively with $DAYJOB, that's great but it's rare.
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Having read some of the other replies now, it's slightly disturbing how many of them draw to one of two conclusions: there's something chemically wrong with you, or you've made a massive mistake in life and you need to immediately change every decision you've made up to this point.
Sometimes life lulls. Unless there is something wrong —and yes professional assessment might help here— making massive and/or pharmacological changes to your life might be worse than just riding it out.
I'd personally just shoot for happy first. Treat this as burnout —as anybody working might call it— and take small corrective measures to improve you. If you need an extension to your studies, you can get an extension to your studies. Life isn't going to leave you behind.
Completely agree with this, getting variety into your day is also really important for your brain to properly rest. I can't remember where, but a few years ago I read that the brain rejuvinates not by doing nothing/sleeping/watching tv but by switching contexts and working on something new.
If you've spent all day in university with a heavy day of lectures (sitting, listening, staring at a screen / whiteboard) you're probably not going feel ready to sit down and crack out an essay or project in the evening. You need to spend some time doing something that takes your mind in a different direction, getting active is a great contrast to lectures for instance.
You need to be well rested for motivation to take hold, and if it doesn't you'll at least be rested enough for discipline to get you going.
>> I've found myself sitting at my desk each evening
>
> Wait, isn't that what daytime is for?
This is also a really great thing to pick out. I started doing a lot better at university when I treated it as a 9-5/6 thing. I'd spend the day on campus either in lectures or doing assignments. At 6pm at the very latest it was time to do something different. I broke that sometimes if I had a nasty combination of assignments, but on the whole this gave me most of my evenings and weekends back in my final year while doing my dissertation. It was a huge quality of life improvement, far bigger than anything else I did during university.
I agree with the above advice but it’s not immediately actionable for someone in OPs situation.
You have given a how but it’s hard to do without a why.
Burnout and lethargy are due to both physical and mental health factors that feed into each other.
A two track strategy is needed. First for your physical health
- Increase the amount fresh fruit and veg in your diet. Reduce sugars and carbs.
- Go for a run in the morning get some fresh air.
- Have a nice warm bath before you go to bed have some soothing tea and get good sleep.
This alone will not be enough if you’re seriously burnt out. Next we move to psychological factors
- Introduce noise and variety into the system. This can be as simple as visiting an interesting new place to a full blown crazy experience.
- Start meditating and learn about how to use it to calm your mind.
- Think about the kind of person you want to become and why you want to do it. Your current ideal you and your strategy to go about getting there aren’t working or providing you with satisfaction. Be honest with yourself about where you went wrong, what your strengths are and what you can bring to the world. Once you do this you have a vector pointing all your actions towards a new ideal you informed by your past mistakes.
Your physical health should provide you the foundation to go for it.
Happy to discuss further over email / DM if interested.
In the past day I’ve applied a few of your suggestions and found an improvement. It is amazing how much of a difference meditation and variety have on mental health. Thank you!
This tells the OP what they could be doing instead, but not quite how to get there out of the rut they are in. Apathy or lack of motivation can be difficult to shake. Don't get me wrong-- they are great ideas, it just seems like going from A to C without addressing the issue of a vehicle, B.
An issue here is that the title says "rut", but the description sounds more like apathy. Most of us would interpret "in a rut" to mean being stuck with the same schedule every day and being tired of the schedule, and that's different than not wanting to do anything.
Many of these suggestions, which I endorse, are referencing the description, and the answer to that is simple: Let yourself do nothing"productive". Force it even. Time for a vacation, maybe even a bit of a lengthy one. Your brain and/or body is trying to tell you something. This is basically the final phase before full burnout. Take it seriously.
And sometimes the answer is just to actively do nothing "productive" for a couple of weeks or months. Do nothing until you can't stand it anymore. Very few of us are built to go go go every day for years on end. As much as I like the civilization I live in, no previous civilization in history has even been able to do that much, or expected it of very many people. You aren't a bad person if you just stop for a while.
And if it feels bad... bear in mind, one way or another, you are going to stop. You can stop in a controlled manner, take a break, and come back refreshed and functional, or you can stop when you are a broken human being. We do not generally have a "just push through and don't stop" for this kind of work.
There isn't a specific "middle step B" because the idea here is specifically not to have one.
Agree with above. Not every moment needs to be "productive", its toxic to believe this. If you worked hard at job/school/project all day, you can relax in the evening. Do the above suggestions, surf the web, or just chill. You're mind needs recovery time too.
I’d start with making the bed in the morning with a mindset of mind over matter. It gives the feeling of being in control.
Also, buy a cheap ticket a couple weeks out and fly to a new city for a weekend, if in the US, Austin, New Orleans, or San Juan PR. Stay at a hostel and interact with people having fun.
You make some excellent points! Anecdotally I find getting out of ruts to be more of a muscle you train, rather than a skill you learn. Picking up on when your mind drifts, and figuring out how to get it going again, will take a lot of practise and experience. Exploring life in between our scholarly/work duties seems to me like best way of figuring this out.
These are excellent points. Today I cooked a new dish and found the process remarkably satisfying.
> Life isn't going to leave you behind
Thank you. I guess it’s easy to fall into the habit of focusing solely on the future. I’m going to take your advice and work on things I can change now to start gaining momentum again.
Lol…yea, same thing happened to a comment I made a few weeks ago. Everyone started talking about all the drugs they take and it’s a chemical thing and that there’s no other hope without them. This is where we are at in this country. Look at all the drug commercials on tv. And then…you know, people against the vaccination drugs but that take tons of others. I’ve given up on people at this point. They are so lost.
Advice to OP. Just do anything besides what you are currently doing and that will change your trajectory. Like try not working at your desk and work somewhere else. Work different hours. Don’t work and do something else. Just don’t do what you’re doing - do one of the infinite amount of things you could do otherwise
>Having read some of the other replies now, it's slightly disturbing how many of them draw to one of two conclusions: there's something chemically wrong with you, or you've made a massive mistake in life and you need to immediately change every decision you've made up to this point.
Yeah I get tired of this response. YOU NEED DRUGS NOW! No, life is often boring and mundane. You will not be happy every second of it, if you were you wouldn't even know what happiness is because it wouldn't stand out. The solution is to force yourself to do something, whether you feel good is irrelevant. Motivation rarely appears on its own, it's a result of action. You do not wait around to feel motivated.
The problem is modern society gives you this option when for centuries waiting to feel some sort of innate internal motivation wasn't an option, you did what you had to for survival whether you felt like it or not.
Wait, isn't that what daytime is for?
Get out. Play games. Read. Write. Ride a bike. Build something with your hands, with code, whatever. Hit the gym. Cook complicated dishes. Go to restaurants. Join a club and make some friends. Even sleep more.
You need to find what you like to do with your time, and truth is it's probably not what you want it to be. Picking up hobbies and mastering them is what drives a lot of people through life. If that interacts positively with $DAYJOB, that's great but it's rare.
---
Having read some of the other replies now, it's slightly disturbing how many of them draw to one of two conclusions: there's something chemically wrong with you, or you've made a massive mistake in life and you need to immediately change every decision you've made up to this point.
Sometimes life lulls. Unless there is something wrong —and yes professional assessment might help here— making massive and/or pharmacological changes to your life might be worse than just riding it out.
I'd personally just shoot for happy first. Treat this as burnout —as anybody working might call it— and take small corrective measures to improve you. If you need an extension to your studies, you can get an extension to your studies. Life isn't going to leave you behind.