How to snap yourself out of it

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Hey! Happy Sunday and thank you for opening this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter!

Let’s face it, we’ve all been there - stuck in a rut with the same old habit that you know you ought to break but for some reason can’t bring yourself to pull a Nike and just do it.

For me, something I’ve been trying to break out of in the past few weeks has been dragging myself out of bed right into my day. I hate the idea of getting out the door groggy and half-asleep, so I’ve been adding a 10-minute yoga flow every day as soon as I wake up to feel better about how I start my day.

The next thing I want to break out of is the insatiable desire to rot in bed after I come home from work, tired from the work day. But how??

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How’d I get in this rut in the first place?

Let’s face it, if you work anything resembling a 9-5, it’s really easy to feel drained after work, regardless of what your job entails. You come home, and all you wanna do is just relax and do nothing.

Go to the gym? Read a book? Do something else productive? No way! How can I do anything else after work when I’m oh… sooo… tired…??

It’s funny to me, because I’m in this rut myself, so I’m publicly teasing myself for feeling like this, but I know many of you share the same sentiment. And we got here because of a lack of routine.

We got here because we didn’t give ourselves anything to do after work, so obviously your brain is not going to want to do anything.

How I got out of my morning routine rut

While I’m still in the process of building the habit of doing yoga every morning (I’ve been pretty consistent the past 3 weeks), it wasn’t super hard to make an immediate change from rolling out of bed miserably to starting my mornings with intentional movement.

The first step was acknowledging that I had a problem with it. I outwardly expressed to myself and others that I was unhappy with my morning routine. I’ve known since high school that I didn’t like the feeling of rolling out of bed and going straight to class half-asleep, so once I started feeling like that’s what I was doing to go to work, I caught myself and acknowledged that there’s a problem.

Then, to solve the problem, it was as simple as building in a reason to wake up earlier. The only things I had to do in the morning before leaving the house were brush my teeth and get dressed, so why would I wake up more than 10 minutes before I had to leave?

To that morning routine of brushing my teeth and getting dressed though, I stacked on the habit of a 10 minute yoga practice, which essentially forced me to wake up in time to do it. Now, when I wake up, I know that my routine entails the added activity of yoga, so I need more time and therefore have to get up a bit earlier. It’s that simple.

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Is it really that simple?

Now I’m never going to be the one to lie to you and make it seem like reality is perfect. It’s not that simple. There’s still going to be many days where you fall back into the same habits.

You’ll hear that alarm go off 15 minutes earlier than it used to, hit snooze, roll over and skip the yoga. You’ll see it raining outside, and decide “well, rain means sleep more” and the whole morning routine goes out the window into the rain.

What it’s all about though - is trying. And trying again. And again. And again. 

In the process of building a new habit (or breaking an old habit), it’s inevitable that you will fail. You’ll be a victim of your old self - the person and mentality that you’re trying to overcome - and that’s completely okay.

You might lose a couple battles, but you have to remember that you’re trying to win a war.

So how do you get out of the rut?

The after-work tiredness is such a serious disease to fight, but as I said, the way to do it is to build something into your routine so that you have something to do.

For me, I’m thinking maybe I’ll hop in the gym, go for a walk, or just stay out of my bedroom altogether (where all the magical, amazing, post-work sleep happens).

The way to get out of that rut is to study what your routine is, and find out where you can stack a new habit onto it.

So if you get home from work and the first that you do is go upstairs and put your bag down and changing into comfy “house clothes” (this is my exact routine), well - the next thing that you should be doing instead of putting on house clothes is putting on your workout clothes.

Even if you don’t workout after putting on those clothes, hey, you’ve already begun the process of building the habit that will get you into the gym. It just got 1% easier to stack the next habit of actually going to workout.

Conclusion

My challenge to myself for the next few weeks is to get off my phone after work and get in the gym or get moving somehow. And how I’ll start to do it is exactly what I said above. I’ll keep you updated on how that goes.

But as for yourself - if you’re like me and you’re in that rut too - study your daily routine, and figure out where you’ve subconsciously built a habit.

Once you’ve pinpointed a habit, whether a good one or a bad one, stack a new easy to do activity onto it that's a first step to the goal you want to achieve.

Then, keep adding until you get out of the rut!

By the way, this process takes weeks - months even - so be patient with yourself. As usual, give yourself grace, allow yourself to fail, and fight each battle knowing that you’re in it to win the war.

Until next Sunday,

JLOWE