What to Do When You're in a Funk (When You've Tried Everything)
Updated: 6 days ago
Disclaimer & Intended Use: The framework shared in this post and accompanying course 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.
TL;DR for my fellow skimmers 💕
If you're in a funk right now and can't get out of it, I'm pretty confident in saying it's probably not because you're lazy or broken. 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
A funk is a feedback loop: low energy leads to inaction, inaction makes you feel worse, feeling worse makes it harder to act.
Waiting to feel motivated keeps the loop running. Motivation follows action, not the other way around.
The way out is small, intentional action that breaks the loop and gives you back a sense of control.
That's exactly what Stop the Spiral: How to Get Out of a Funk teaches: my simple two-step framework created for those days you feel completely discouraged or bummed out. I'm sharing how I finally broke my own loop (and how fast it actually worked) below along with a preview clip! 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, and like you’re running on empty.
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 a funk right now, I need you to know something first: you are not lazy and this does not 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 was just floating on by, doing the same old routine every single day, it felt awful. I knew I had to do something to get out of this, it wasn’t going to just go away on its own, which was super annoying.
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.”
And 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 in a funk, 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.
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 or better.
But motivation doesn’t come first. Action does. Even the smallest, most targeted action breaks the loop and starts to shift things.
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. When I’m in a funk, I don’t guess at what the best thing to do is. I have a framework I use and it works every time because:
It was built around how behavior actually changes, not how we wish it would.
It doesn't involve generic advice that doesn't work.
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.
But here’s what is true: once you know exactly which small move to make, getting out of a funk can happen a lot faster than you could ever imagine.
The goal isn’t to rebound back to 100% in a day. The goal is to interrupt the downward spiral. Taking one intentional step restores a sense of control almost immediately. And that feeling of agency is what starts pulling you back up.
After being in endless funks over the past few years, 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 was feeling noticeably better within a day (yes, literally in 24 hours). Psst, my quiz walks you through a version of step one, take it here!
I put my framework, along with the mindset shifts I give myself during these times, into Stop the Spiral: How to Get Out of a Funk. It's not a massive life overhaul (I talk about my life reset here), a 30 day challenge, or 50 journaling prompts. It's everything I actually do to get out of a funk, broken into 4 short modules that run for only 29 minutes. That's less time than most of our favorite shows!
You can watch it or listen on the go, and it was built for exactly the moments when your capacity feels non-existent. It's $27 with lifetime access, so it'll be there every time you need it. Grab it here!
Comments