It's 10 am in the morning and I have been stuck in bed scrolling on social media for two hours straight. I want to get up and make myself breakfast but the kitchen is a mess and the coffee filter from yesterday is still in the machine and urgently needs cleaning. Dishes are piling up in the sink and around my bed, clothes from the last week are splattered all across the floor. My eyes are watering from staring at the phone screen for too long and I can already feel a slight headache coming up. It's 10 am in the morning and I already feel like shit. Eventually, I roll out of bed and put on my pants, realising how cold it is because I left both windows open all night. I make myself cereal and slouch down on the couch. Because I'm bored I hop on my phone again and get lost in addictive Insta and TikTok content. It's 11 am and I decide I'll take a shower to wake myself up. I stay in the shower for an hour and afterwards I put my pyjamas back on. I sit down to write something. Anything. But I end up just staring at the blank Word page. I realise I indeed really do need coffee to function, so I quickly cleanse the filter of the coffee machine, promising myself I will clean it properly later that day. With my coffee in hand, I sit back at my desk and open my pretty 2022 calendar. I write down some To-Dos that I have been planning for weeks now. I can already spoiler you all, I didn't end up doing them anyway. Instead of that I go to the bathroom and straighten my hair. I'm not going anywhere today but maybe it will make me feel motivated. Turns out it does not have that effect. It's 2 pm and I still feel shit.
It's just the case for me that I have been drowning in "simply existing" and even worse, I have been letting myself drown.
Lately, I've been stuck in a slump. I haven't been focused and I have lost myself stuck between self-pity and anger. I want to get my life together and start a routine to structure my days better but at the same time, I keep convincing myself that I can just start tomorrow and give myself more time to be lazy. Don't get this wrong, there is nothing wrong with being cosy and taking your time, not at all. It's actually quite important to have those days of rest and comfort when we can just "exist" for a day. It's just the case for me that I have been drowning in "simply existing" and even worse, I have been actively letting myself drown. The problem is that once you've let go it's hard to get back into it. We convince ourselves that we can continue our behaviour a little while longer and then that "little while longer" quickly turns into another few weeks, another few months and we're back at New Year Celebrations making resolutions for the next year. So how do we break out of that slump? How do we push ourselves to get our juices flowing again and move our bodies?
That's what I have been trying to figure out the past weeks and I've come to some conclusions. Before I dive into those I have to say that they are connected to one another. I think if I only change one thing I will tend to leave it at that and nothing will really change so I've realised that for me the sequence of different steps is key to the success of my "de-slumping". I can't get super creative and start being productive if prior to it I've been on my phone for one-hour scrolling through entertainment that has emptied my head in a way that there is no room for my own imagination left... if that makes sense? What I'm trying to say is that to me it's a routine thing - I need to start my days in a certain order to distract myself from my habits sneaking up on me. So this is what I have discovered to be working quite well for me:
Ignore your damn phone in the mornings! I mean why is the first thing we reach for when we have just opened our eyes a screen if we can look out the window to see the sunshine? (at least most of the time...) By grabbing our phone first thing in the morning and staring at others' Insta feed we lose the opportunity to have a fresh start in the morning. We will probably get lost on social media or stress out thinking about our schedule and checking our emails, although we haven't even left the bed yet... so let's not do that! Don't touch your phone and maybe invest in an alarm clock so you can maybe even leave your phone in another room while sleeping.
Stretch! Give your body time to wake up. One thing that I have never properly done in my life and have just now found to be the best medicine when it comes to waking up is stretching. And no, I'm not talking about one little bend to the side, I'm talking about a proper stretching session. So what I do is I put down my yoga mat and do about five different stretches directly after waking up. Nothing super complicated but I do each stretch 30 seconds. This lead directly to the next step,
...meditation! I know it sounds cliche... but it really does the trick if you want to start your day with a good mindset. We tend to wake up and our brains directly take us to whatever stressful tasks we will have to get done for the day and we automatically dive into a negative vibe that drains our freshly produced energy. So instead of thinking of our job, appointments, uni, school, drama and our never-ending To Dos, let's close our eyes and think of...well nothing! Or maybe just listen to the sounds outside, maybe the cars on the street or if you don't live in the city as I do, focus on the birds and the wind rustling the trees. Or just turn on your favourite relaxing music and let yourself float with it for five minutes. You don't have to be amazing at meditation, you just have to try.
Get yourself a drink and be productive and creative first thing in the morning! Why wait to get something done? My main revelation of how to get out of my slump was literally doing something creative early in the morning. I got up and directly grabbed my brushes and started painting. After an hour I had completely lost myself in the process and it felt amazing. When I finished I felt so good that I sat down and started writing. Afterwards, I washed the dishes and did the laundry. Being productive had given me energy instead of taking it from me. So I decided to make that habit and you should too! Doing something fun and productive first thing in the morning sets the tone for the day.
I feel like this list could continue on but I know that everybody has a different feel-good routine and needs to find their own groove. But remember that especially in the morning time, it's good to have a few steps to follow up on to get yourself rolling. Though I want to say, I still have days where I do NOT pull through with this and fall back into my habits of binging Netflix till 4 am and following that up with a 2 pm breakfast and that is completely okay. We are not robots and we don't need to act like them. Just if we feel that our mental wellness is suffering from the consequences of our slump activities, we should step up for our own good and put our minds at ease. We don't have to become "that girl" that we see all over YouTube and Instagram and commit to living off smoothies, getting up at 6 am and a thorough journaling every morning but we can observe certain trends that we feel help us help ourselves and that's what it's all about. Filter the behaviour that makes you feel good and dump the rest. And when you feel like after a while you need a day of slump again, slump away!
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