I’m writing this at 3:15 in the afternoon and my motivation is the lowest I have felt it be in a while. The last three days I have woken up sore and tired. I usually work out first thing in the morning, so I decided to sleep a bit more instead. My first instinct is that my body needs more sleep. I am not the kind of guy to force my body through a workout when my body feels off.
However, three days of not working out and I am struggling to stay focused with work. At times it feels like I am moving through molasses. It’s starting to feel like a rut.
I’ve been writing these posts for a couple of weeks now, wondering when I would start to feel attacked. It was bound to happen; I just had to allow for the right circumstances to line up.
I used to get myself into ruts regularly. The rut would happen because some set of thoughts would come up and I would get stuck thinking about them. It might be some uncertainty with work, something I was looking forward to not happening, or having made a mistake. It used to be pretty easy for me to get stuck in these ruts.
I obsessed over my routine, trying to keep everything away that might contribute to me getting stuck. It always started with an external trigger of some sort. Nothing seemed to work long term at the time. I even talked to a doctor about it and was prescribed something for it, but that didn’t help either, so I stopped taking it.
I finally figured out that there are things I could do to help prevent these triggers from derailing me so quickly:
1. Quitting alcohol: I have never been a heavy drinker, but with the increased stress of work and family, I found myself having something small almost every night. One day I thought to myself, what value is alcohol providing me? I couldn’t find one positive, so I decided that night I was done with it. It’s almost been three years since making that decision.
2. Getting good sleep: If you’re a parent, chances are your sleep has been disrupted. I have never gotten used to peculiar noises in the middle of the night. I sleep best in total silence, but my wife likes to have a fan on. So I try my best not to introduce things that might inhibit my sleep. Alcohol certainly affected my sleep. Scrolling my phone before bed has been a hard habit to break, but I know that when I don’t do it, I sleep better.
3. Working out daily: When I get up early and workout, I feel better throughout the day. Not once have I felt worse because I worked out. There have been times where I cut it short because something felt off, but it always helps.
4. Food intake: I used to struggle with some sort of acid reflux issue. I was also put on medication for this and told to adapt. I didn’t feel any better with that medication either, so I drastically changed my diet, stopped taking the medication, and along with being more active, I stopped having stomach issues.
Now I find myself having skipped a few days of workouts, experiencing an uncertainty with work, my sleep having been disrupted from traveling for a week and then trying to get back into my normal routine, and then throw in all of the other distractions that come with summertime, and I am struggling today.
I decided to write about this now because it’s raw and it’s how I am feeling. As soon as I finish, I am going to get on the treadmill and listen to some loud music. I know that when I get done, I will feel great. I should have done this first thing this morning, or better yet, two mornings ago, so that I wouldn’t have ended up here.
The important thing for me to remember is that my ruts used to last weeks, sometimes months. Now they last hours.
While most would be busy looking for a diagnosis to justify their situation, I certainly did at one point. I instead chose to take control and get my focus and motivation back myself, because that is how God designed us. “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5)
The simple solution isn’t going to result in sustainable change. We have to be willing to do the hard work and get ourselves to a place where the issues we allowed to take control no longer have that control.
What hard work are you avoiding that could set you free from what’s controlling you?