3 Ways to Get Out of a Rut in Life
By: Nathan Kim ‘24
As we are reaching the midway point of the semester, it’s easy to become unmotivated and exhausted from the ever increasing pile of work. I know that for me, I’m finding it harder to get up each day and consistently keep up with balancing my school, social, and personal life. It’s a constant battle to not feel burnt out and keep working hard each day, but I’ve tried to combat this by utilizing methods to regain that drive again and get out of this rut in my life. So here are 3 ways you, too, can escape that feeling of being stuck and unable to move forward.
1. Take a walk outside and just observe!
You’ve probably heard of the concept of mindfulness, but the purpose of this is to be in a state of mindlessness. It’s best to do this without thinking much about where you’re going to go or how long you’re going to walk. Adding some nature and listening to the ambient sounds of your environment is a surefire way to heal your body and your mind. This helps you clear your head and take a step back from the burdens of life and appreciate your circumstance as it is in that moment. As you walk around, you should simply observe what’s happening around you and let your thoughts pass by without dwelling on them too much.
2. Clean your physical and digital clutter.
We all have things in our lives that need some cleaning, and it’s rather therapeutic to set things back into their place and tidy up your life a bit. At first, it might seem overwhelming to take on such a large task, but approaching messy situations in a step-by-step fashion is the best antidote to a chaotic life. For physical clutter, it starts by putting one item back in place. For digital clutter, cleaning your busy inbox might be a good idea to implement. Cleaning gives you another opportunity to not have to think about other appointments in the future and engage in some introspection on how you’re feeling and your life in general. It’s important to have an organized environment since that is the location where you will be doing your school and/or work at.
3. Create a master list of things to do.
Often, there are just too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Because there’s so much to tackle, one might freeze and end up completing nothing. In the moments where a mountain of endless responsibilities causes you distress, it can be helpful to spew everything that you have in your mind out onto a massive list. Usually, I prefer to separate the tasks I need to complete into different categories such as school, personal, work, and even social. Then, I tend to write whatever comes to mind and clump them together based on their similarities with the other tasks. This helps to free my mind from the mental strain of having to remember all the things that I have to do and instead lets me focus on the immediate task at hand.
Having time to reset your life and find rest from the busyness of your day should be a scheduled part of your week. It is definitely hard to keep on trying to balance clubs, schoolwork, and other responsibilities, which is why these anti-rut strategies are quite useful to do. While there isn’t a single, definite way to get back into the rhythm of working, I do hope that you can employ some of these techniques in your life to keep you pushing on till the end of the semester.
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