How To NEVER Fall Into A Rut Again (Not Clickbait)

Have you ever felt like there’s two different versions of you?

One version of you is ultra-productive, getting important things done with speed.

The other version of you procrastinates, skips habits, and doesn’t get any work done?

If you have, you’re experiencing something I call “The Swinging Pendulum”

Meaning, for every area of your life. Business, fitness, health, sleep, diet, discipline, relationships, etc, there is constant swinging.

Because, you need to understand: What goes up, must come down. What goes down, must come up. It’s a universal law.

And this swinging pendulum has been governing your life this entire time.

I’ll give you an example.

For a week straight, you’ve just been completely dialed in on EVERYTHING.

You’re sleeping 8-10 hours a night, your diet is locked in, you’re getting all your deep work done, your energy is higher than ever, etc,

So you feel accomplished. You’re proud of the work you’ve gotten done.

But here’s where things start to take a turn.

The motivation that got you there in the first place turns into pride because you’re accomplishing so many things, so you get an ego boost out of it.

And that pride turns into comfort, so you lose your initial motivation to improve.

And that comfort turns into apathy, because now you’re not as interested in improving because you’re already doing great.

And that comfort combined with that apathy turns into justification for destruction.

So you lose it all and go back to where you were before - 6 hours of sleep, not working out, eating junk foods, procrastinating on business work, low energy levels, etc.

Now you’re in a “rut”.

But like I said earlier, what goes down must come up.

So once you’ve been in the rut for a long enough period of time, you just can’t live with yourself anymore.

You feel so much self-hatred, anger, shame, that it’s just intolerable.

Then that self-hatred and anger turns into motivation and focus when you decide that you’re going to redeem yourself.

And then you hit your best again.

And the cycle repeats. Again. And. Again.

And that’s exactly why you feel like there’s two different versions of yourself that exist.

One is you at your best. One is you in a rut.

And the key to reaching all your goals is to simply break this cycle, which is exactly why I’m going to create a 3 part series of posts on this topic.

In this post, I’m covering what a rut is, what causes it, and how you can avoid them.

In the next post, I’ll cover how you can manipulate ruts so that you can transmute your current best into your new worst and drastically improve your standards.

Because you don’t become the highest version of yourself imaginable, you become the lowest version of yourself acceptable.

And in the third and final post, I’ll give you a few of the best tactics I’ve curated over the years to immediately get out of a rut

(The reason why I’m doing this in a 3 post series is because it would be too long if I had everything in just this one post)

So you can follow me here on Skool so you can be notified when I drop the other 2 posts.

Or if you don’t want to follow me, then don’t. I don’t really care. Just try to keep an eye out for when I post the other 2, but you might miss them.

Anyways, let’s get back into this post.

What causes a rut to happen?

There’s 3 things. And they’re all completely in your control.

Before I tell you what they are, I need you to understand the snowball concept first.

Whether you realize it or not, every single rut you’ve ever been in is a result of one little thing that created a negative downward spiral of momentum that eventually created that rut.

This is also called second/third order effects - the concept that your consequences have consequences.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say it’s time for you to get into bed to sleep, but you think “It’s been a hard and productive day. I’m just going to chill and scroll on my phone for a few minutes, I’ve earned it anyways”

Those few minutes turn into an hour, plus the time it takes you to fall asleep because of the stimulation.

So those “few minutes” turn into 1-2 hours of lost sleep. (Not to mention the blue light from your phone which made your deep sleep even worse)

So you wake up the next day feeling far less energized, and you move through your day more sluggishly with less focus and mental energy.

And because you feel tired, you skip a couple deep work sessions and a workout.

And because you skipped deep work and a workout, you start skipping other habits as well, you start eating junk foods, start doing bad habits, and all of that makes your focus and energy even worse.

So you wake up the next day with even more fatigue, so you take the day off. That day off turns into 2 days off. Then 3. And before you know it, you’ve procrastinated and gotten nothing done for a full week.

And I could keep going further into the effects. But you get the point.

ALL of that. From a harmless “few minutes of scrolling”

So now that you understand how one small thing creates a rut because of the negative momentum, we can move on to the 3 things that cause you to do that one small thing in the first place.

The three things are emotions, resistance, & dissatisfaction.

I’ll cover emotions first.

I want you to think of a time where EVERYTHING in your life was just annoying.

No matter what someone said or did, it was just annoying. You were just completely mad and frustrated at everything.

You were probably experiencing emotions like sadness, anxiety, stress, anger, etc.

Your mind was probably flooded with negative thoughts and emotions.

Now try to remember what happened after. Did things start to get better? Or did everything fall apart even more?

Things probably got a lot worse. Because when you’re experiencing lower vibrational emotions, you’re significantly more susceptible to doing bad habits.

(This is why people stress eat, procrastinate when they’re fearful or anxious, abuse substances when they’re sad, neglect good habits when they’re stressed, etc)

So negative emotions create a vicious, negative cycle.

You feel negative emotion → You cope with negative emotion by doing bad habit → You feel even more negative emotions → You cope by doing even more bad habits → Rut

So you have to become conscious of your emotions and catch yourself when you start to get annoyed, frustrated, sad, stressed, etc.

I’ll go deeper into how you can do that in the third post of the series.

The next thing that creates ruts - resistance.

By resistance, I simply mean the mental resistance you feel towards doing a difficult task.

Because when you give in to resistance and avoid doing painful work, that creates negative momentum of avoiding other things in your life as well.

So if you skip a gym session because you were tired, that’s going to lead to you skipping other important things in your business and personal life as well, because how you do one thing is how you do everything.

So by skipping “one little thing”, it leads you to skipping a bunch of other “little things”, which can also lead you to falling into a rut.

(By the way, I made a full guide on how to conquer resistance titled “How I Consistently Trick My Brain Into Doing Painful Work”. Go find that post and read it if you haven’t already).

And the last thing that creates ruts is your feeling of dissatisfaction.

Just think about it. You feel the most dissatisfaction directly after the rut when you have feelings of self-hatred, shame, guilt, etc, which leads you to building back up everything again.

And you feel the least level of dissatisfaction when you’re doing amazing, which eventually leads you to losing it all and falling into a rut.

So the more dissatisfied you feel, the more motivated and focused you’ll be.

BUT, there’s a balance.

Feeling too much dissatisfaction can cause you to feel depressed, it will lower your mental health, which will then cause you to feel lower emotions (which is the 1st cause of ruts like I explained earlier), and you’re just going to burn out and quit.

So you need to find a level of dissatisfaction that’s just enough to motivate you to improve.

But no more than that. Because then you’re going to end up putting your mind into a state of lack and scarcity, which will do far more harm than good.

So whenever you start to feel lazy, and you’re in that mood where you just want to scroll, eat, and chill, remind yourself of something that creates dissatisfaction.

It could be the thought of failing to retire your parents, it could be comparing yourself to someone ahead of you (DON’T overdo this), reminding yourself of your purpose, etc.

So that’s everything I wanted to cover in this post (you can probably start to see why I made this a 3 post series, there’s just too many important things to cover)

To give you a summary

What goes up, must come down. What goes down, must come up. This is the swinging pendulum.

In a high, your motivation turns into pride, comfort, and apathy, which creates justification for destruction.

In a low, self-hatred, anger, and shame turn into focus and motivation. Cycle repeats.

Snowball concept: Your consequences have consequences. Ruts are created by “one little thing”

There’s three things that cause you to indulge in that “one little thing”

Emotions: You’re more likely to do bad habits when you’re experiencing lower vibrational emotions.

Resistance: Skipping “one little thing” causes you to skip a bunch of other “little things”, because how you do one thing is how you do everything.

Dissatisfaction: You build when you’re dissatisfied. You destroy when you’re satisfied. Remind yourself of dissatisfying things when you feel comfortable. Don’t overdo it though.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you in the next post of the series.

Andrew

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