Episode 5 – Being in a rut

Hello and Welcome back to Being Meraklis, a podcast by Shwetha Sivaraman. 

Hope you all had a great week! This week for me has just been – catching up with old friends – great conversations, reminiscing the past, and just been feeling warm and fuzzy all over. Not to mention all the nostalgia that came along with it.

Just like any conversation about the past, we went down the memory lane, reminiscing the good old times. Back to those simpler times when everything was good – but still all we wanted was for the misery to over and now that it is – all you want to do is go back in time. But this is a fallacy, our mind has a way of romanticizing the past as if it was some easier phase of life – Whereas the fact is that that period in your life was equally challenging for you at that point in time. It is easier to look back positively in retrospection cause your mind knows NOW how it turned out to be.

But when it was happening to you, it felt real. The uncertainty could consume you in whole, the not knowing how this is going to turn out was all you could think about. That is why all you wanted then was for it to be over.

But today, I want to talk about situations that were much tougher – beyond just uncertainty. Those periods in time where you felt stuck, where it felt like there was no way out. In today’s episode, I want to talk about being in rut.

For those periods when time feels like a blur, where you cannot distinguish a Tuesday from a Thursday. For those times where no motivation had any use and all you wanted was to get through the day, and then another day. For those times when exhaustion or stress or anxiety remained an eternal feeling and all you wanted to do was go away to a far off place – not a vacation, just permanently relocate some place far from where you are currently.

I have had such phases of being in a rut. A time where thinking about the past and digging deep into your memories was a preferred option than to think of the now. That phase where life continues to happen without you even paying attention to whats going on. The phase where all that you want seems out of reach and just impossible. Where you are not okay with what is happening with your life, but you feel powerless to take efforts to come out of it. Or even if you take efforts, they do not seem to yield results in the direction you were hoping for.

We have all felt like a hamster on a wheel, where we keep running like clockwork week after week hoping that the dread you feel will eventually fade out. But it never really does, does it? Not unless we make a move. But the dread has been around for so long now that even the dread has become comfortable – do you get what I mean? We as humans are such creatures of habit, that we can get used to anything including dread, feeling powerless and all the negativity that comes with it. Even if we know we are unhappy in the current state, the status quo has become comfortable, our safe haven.

This does not necessarily have to be work, it could be life in general, relationships, education – just about anything stagnant.
The biggest challenge with being in a rut is our inability to identify that we are actually in a rut. We as humans have tremendous courage to carry on despite everything, so life as such doesn’t pause to announce being trapped in a rut. But the feeling slowly seeps in to every aspect of our life. You feel uninspired, you keep going through the motions but are constantly disengaged, you lose interest in everything and lose meaning in the simplest of tasks, you isolate yourself losing interest in friendships, relationships, and before you know it you are sinking deeper and deeper into an abyss of nothingness.

Also, by the time you realize you are in a rut, you have lost interest in so many other aspects of life as well – that distinguishing the cause of what got you in this in the first place becomes a challenge. I wish I could tell you that there was a spell to shake this feeling off in a second. I wish, but there isnt.

The recovery from a rut is a slow process of discovery. But first, It requires you to clear your head. Change your routine, go out with friends, read a book or many books, flex your muscles, go out for a run, play some music, watch a movie, take that vacation, meditate, journal – Do what it takes for you to cleanse your mind. It is hard to do a clean sweep when you are in rut, but do it as best as you can given the circumstances.

Shake off the inertia that has firmly placed itself in your life, and try and identify the origin. Gradually examine each aspect of your life, where is the unhappiness stemming from, probe deeper till you touch a nerve. Is it work? If yes, what in work? Is it your role, manager, hierarchy, company, or industry? What about it is threatening? Where is this feeling of being stuck coming from? Do you feel stuck in the role, or with a person, or with a company you see no future in? This probe might leave you with more questions than answers and can be unnerving, but is necessary.

As I was seeking answers to questions that I really did not have a grip on, someone referred me to this book called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. If you have not read that book, I would strongly recommend a read. Being a book junkie and seeker that I am, I have read lots of self-help books, but nothing comes close to how practical this one is.

Anyways, this book in just a few lines gave me an approach to deal with being in a rut – It went something like this

“If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity.” ~Eckhart Tolle

And there it was clear as day. Once I identified what all were the cause of my unhappiness all I did was bifurcate it into three buckets

1.Remove it – Remove and stay away from things that were completely unnecessary and can be easily removed from your life. This could be a toxic friendship relationship or an individual that leaves you disheartened. If that is the cause of your unhappiness and it is as simple as you being able to remove yourself from such a situation then do it. Cut yourself off from such people who do not help with your self-esteem, from those who put you down, and from those who keep making you feel small or insignificant or worthless.

2.Change it – Easier said than done, but if it is an essential aspect of your life that cannot be removed it, change it so that it stops being such a burden on you. If it is a job or a manager or a company – driving you nuts – Change it. Work is a means to live the life the way you want it, it shouldn’t be a burden in itself. Identify what about the job is annoying you – are you just looking for a change from the work or the person or the company? Is the role stagnant or the work culture toxic? Or Are you looking for something else altogether? Depending on your answer identify places where you’d rather be and get started – Apply, move and change it.

3.Accept it – But what if neither are an alternative? What if it is something really beyond your hands – something that cannot be removed or changed. If it’s a relationship you are obligated to maintain – then accept it in totality and slowly learn to live with it. Or a job you cannot switch because of your visa/immigration process, accept it as is. Find ways instead to work around it – maybe have a passion project on the side – dedicate your time and attention to learning a new language or honing a new skill. Anything that will make acceptance tolerable.

And the biggest key being YOU MUST CHOOSE, and Choose now. The problem with being in a rut is that you do not see a light in the end of the tunnel, and frankly have no motivation to work on it till you reach the light at the end of the tunnel. That is how the grip of the rut is never ending. It sinks its teeth in deeply, and never lets go. So make that decision to choose and stick with it no matter what.

Cause at the end of the day, we all have just this one life to make it count right? And it is criminal to waste it away thinking we are trapped. The traps are in our mind and we need to make an effort to set ourselves free. It took me a while to come out of it – it is not an easy move, but here I am.

And this is also not like chicken pox, that once you come out of it – it will not recur again. No different stages in our lives could lead us to feeling uninspired and stuck. And we need to evolve, constantly to keep ourselves afloat.

Make it a point to watch for the tell-tale signs – the lack of motivation, nothing to look forward to, the constant dread. And fight it before it gets worse the next time around.

I know that this was slightly longer than my usual podcast, but I hope this helps even if it is just the comfort of knowing you are not alone. From my own experience, being in a rut is not a pleasant experience. It is the lowest one can feel just one step above outright depression, and I would not want anyone to go through it, if its avoidable.

Have you ever been in a rut? Would you consider yourself completely out of it? What did you do to get yourself out of the situation? Share your story with me, we could just end up exchanging notes.

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Thank you for listening, Grateful as ever for your support.

This is Shwetha Sivaraman signing out, hoping you have a great week ahead.