How to Get Out of a Funk (When You've Tried Everything)
Updated: Oct 30
Disclaimer & Intended Use: The framework shared in this post and accompanying video guide reflect my personal experience with low motivation, temporary life ruts, and burnout. This material is designed for personal support and structured reflection only. It is not clinical therapy, medical advice, or a treatment plan for clinical depression or mental health conditions.
TLDR for my fellow skimmers đź’•
If you're in a funk right now and can't get out of it, here's the short version:
Generic self-care advice (bubble baths, journaling, gratitude lists) assumes you have capacity. A funk = low capacity, so those tips never work long-term. I wrote a whole post on this because the self-care trap is real.
A funk is a feedback loop: low energy leads to inaction, inaction makes you feel worse, feeling worse makes it harder to act. Motivation follows action, not the other way around.
The loop is oddly comfortable: A negative headspace is predictable and takes zero effort to stay in, which is why downward spirals continue.
Getting out takes longer than you want: By the time you notice a funk, it's usually bigger than you realized. Staying realistic is what helps you feel better faster, not delulu goals.
The way out is small, intentional action: That's what my 2-step framework inside Stop the Spiral: How to Get Out of a Funk, walks you through! The last time I used it I went from 30% capacity to 50% in 24 hours. There's a short preview clip below too!
Want to know which funk you're in? Take my free 2 minute funk quiz.
Girl I know you know the feeling
Everything feels heavy and like it’s in slow-mo. Tasks that should take five minutes somehow feel impossible. You’re not exactly sad but you’re not okay either. You just feel like you’re stuck in the mud, disconnected, or more exhausted than usual, and sleep doesn't fix it.
There are many ways to describe it: burnt out, a bad mood, down in the dumps, bummed out, in a funk, etc. And if you’re in one right now, I need you to know something first: you aren't lazy and this doesn't make you a bad person for feeling this way.
I was in a funk this past August where I assumed it would pass as time went on and it didn’t. I didn’t realize till almost a month in what was going on...
I wasn’t eating great.
Working out (something I loved doing) bored me and I kept skipping it.
I wasn’t even gaming or wanting to watch my favorite videos anymore.
I felt like I had completely lost my spark.
I was just floating on by, doing the same old routine every single day. It felt awful. And I knew I had to do something about it, because it wasn't going to just go away, which was super annoying.
And for a lot of us, the funk starts at work. I wrote a whole post on what to do when work burnout is ruining your life reset.
The advice you’ve been given isn’t created for where you are right now
You’ve probably seen them, the “how to get out of a funk” advice lists like:
“Take a bubble bath.”
“Journal your feelings.”
“Go for a long walk.”
“Practice gratitude.”
Maybe you've tried some of those things. Or maybe you looked at the list and felt even worse because you couldn't bring yourself to do any of it.
Here’s why: that advice assumes you have capacity. And when you’re burned out, capacity is exactly what you don’t have.
Suggesting a five mile walk to someone who is struggling to even brush their hair isn’t helpful. It just adds guilt to an already miserable situation. You don’t need more things on a to-do list you can’t even fathom looking at right now.
Your reset rarely stalls because you don't know what to do. It stalls when a funk flattens your energy. And shaming yourself doesn't do anything except put you back in a negative headspace. It never helped in the past, so why would it help now?
The actual problem isn’t that you need to try harder
A funk is a feedback loop:
Low energy leads to inaction →
Inaction makes you feel worse →
Feeling worse makes it harder to act. And around it goes.
The mistake most people make is waiting to feel better before they do anything. Waiting for motivation to show up. Waiting to feel ready.
But motivation doesn’t come first. Action does. Even the smallest, most targeted action breaks the loop and starts shifting things.
And let's be real about why the loop holds on so strong: staying in it is comfortable. A negative headspace is predictable, and it takes zero effort to remain there. When your capacity is at an all time low, zero effort is a huge perk. That's not a ding on your character either, that's just how spirals work.
And if the loop started because you're waiting on something you can't control (a job, a test result, someone else's decision), that's a specific kind of limbo with its own annoyances.
As someone with a Master's in Behavior Analysis and one in Organizational Leadership, behavior change, creating efficient systems, and tackling bottlenecks are my absolute jam. So when I'm in a funk, I don't guess at what the best thing to do is. I run a framework, and it works every single time because:
It was built around how behavior actually changes, not how we wish it would.
It doesn't involve generic advice that ignores where you are, energy wise.
It was built with my low capacity in mind, that’s the key to this working.
Let’s be honest about the timeline
I’m not going to tell you there’s a five minute fix. There isn’t.
And here's something else that's true: by the time you notice you're in a funk, it's usually bigger than you realized. Which means getting out can take longer than you want it to. Staying realistic about that actually helps you feel better faster, because you stop treating a slow climb like a failure.
The goal isn’t to rebound back to 100% in a day. Honestly, getting back to your previous energy output may never happen, and that's okay! The real goal is to interrupt the downward spiral, get a sense of control back on your life, and get back to a point where you can take care of yourself and find little joys throughout the day again.
After years of endless funks, I built myself a framework (video preview below) so I never have to guess what to do when one hits. It's a repeatable system and it works beautifully on the days when I barely have any mental energy to spare.
The last time I used it, I started at 30% capacity. Twenty-four hours later, I was at 50%. By the end of the month, 85%. And my goal was never 100%. I just wanted to feel better, and I did.
What you can actually do tonight
Here's the short version of what can help while you decide what's next:
Name it. Say it out loud or write it down: "something's off." Acknowledging it is the key first step, and skipping it is why generic advice keeps failing you because different types of funk require different solutions. My Funk Archetype quiz does this part for you in two minutes if you want help there.
Do what you can with what you have, and nothing more. If the bar tonight is shower and nothing more, that's the bar. Lowering the bar during a funk is a tool for surviving those low-capacity days, not an embarrassing surrender.
Let one tiny thing count as a win. Three minutes of anything beats an ambitious plan you never even start. Getting out of a funk is hard work, and putting in the work is something to celebrate, not something to guilt yourself over.
When you're ready for more than another "Go touch grass" tip
Everything above helps you understand your funk: what's causing it and why the generic advice keeps failing you. But understanding why you're stuck isn't the same as having a plan for the moment you're in it, and this is the piece that keeps a life reset alive. Because funks don't stop happening just because you're making changes.
That's why I created Stop the Spiral: How to Get Out of a Funk. It's a 29-minute video guide that walks you through the exact 2-step framework I use when I'm in a funk myself, plus the mindset shifts we easily forget when we're stuck in our own heads. The four main things it helps you do:
Acknowledge the downward spiral
Stop it
Rebuild momentum back to feeling like yourself
Keep the game plan so the next funk is shorter than this one
You can listen to it like a podcast, there's nothing to fill out. And it covers the part nobody else really talks about: how to handle the daily basics, showers, dishes, laundry, the whole "being a person" checklist, when you're running on empty. The doable, realistic version too, not the Instagram version.
Will you feel fully like yourself again in 29 minutes? No, and I'll never promise that. But you will feel a little better, and you'll have a game plan for everything after. And if you can't bring yourself to implement anything the day you watch it? Watching still counts. That's still you taking care of yourself.
It's $27 with lifetime access, so it'll be there every single time a funk hits. If that's the game plan you've been missing...
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