Prevent a Rut: 5 Effective Strategies and New Method

Prevent a Rut: 5 Effective Strategies and New Methode

The main cause of a rut

Did you fall back into a rut recently in the past? It is very likely you experienced this trap of falling back into your old behaviours. There is a way to stop these ruts before they start, but first, we have to know what could be the cause of your fallback. There could exist many problems that could lead to you falling into a rut. When reading, you should check if these apply to you, or if you have a different cause that makes you fall back into a rut. If you have already fallen deep into a rut, here is how to get out of it!

One of the biggest issues is, when you don’t have a well-organized life. In the worst case, you don’t have any Habits established, no Goals in life and no motivation. This means you will most likely fail, whatever you do or try. Another case is emotional baggage, which makes your life harder. If mental health is not taken care of, you will have issues getting the work done. All these issues could be the cause of your fallback into a rut, so to help you, here are 5 effective strategies that will prevent a rut from happening.

1. Improve your Habit

How many Habits are you doing right now? Is it just one or more? Good Habits can change your life for good, but bad habits will make it worse. Some habits are more effective than others, but at most, they are a great strategy to change your life. Do you always brush your teeth in the morning and evening? Weird question right, because you probably see it as nothing. You do it every day and it doesn’t make you sweat. This is because it is a habit as well, one you did so often in your life, that it feels like nothing. No work, no thinking and no effort does it take you to brush your teeth. Same as this habit, you can establish other ones as well. It takes time and dedication, but the longer you maintain it, the easier it becomes. This makes it one of the best strategies you could use to prevent a rut. Here are also some suggestions on what habits you could do!

Do a cold shower daily, this is both good for your health and makes it easier for you to do hard things. The best is doing an ice-cold shower because it will train your discipline if you do it daily. Another habit you need to do is workouts. This could be daily, but should at least be a few times a week. It improves your overall fitness and there gives you more energy for your daily work. Thirdly, you should read a book at least 30 Minutes a day, which will make you more educated and knowledgeable.

More about these Habits here:

Doing habits daily, which one you chose, will make it less likely that you fall back to your old ways. The longer you do these good habits, the longer you will last without a rut.

2. Take care of Mental Health

Doing habits daily, which one you chose, will make it less likely that you fall back to your old ways. The longer you do these good habits, the longer you will last without a rut. Habits are not the only thing you will need, as it is hard to establish them at first. If you want to succeed, there is no way around a healthy Mind. Before you improve it, you need to make sure what are you lacking. Most of you probably feel lonely, depressed or sad. These feelings can drag you down like an anchor and will stop your progress, so not dealing with them is a big mistake. First you need to improve your Four Pillars of Happiness. These Strategies to improve your mental health, are invented by Matthieu Ricard.

A. Altruistic Love and Compassion

You must improve your compassion and love towards other humans. We as humans are a society that doesn’t function without help. If you care for others, they will ultimately care back to you. This improves their and your life, which will make both happier. But make sure you don’t confuse kindness with being nice! Significantly, you don’t expect something in return for your kindness, or it will lose its value. To improve your kindness, you could first do Meditations with a focus on kindness. Secondly, you could do little kind things in your life, to both random strangers and your friends and family. Ultimately these things will improve your social connections with your family, friends and other relationships. If you notice that you do a large amount of things for a person, but they never do anything in return, you should reconsider if this friendship is worth your time.

B. Mindfulness

Be Mindful about yourself, both your feelings and sensations. This can be done by meditation, but also with daily journaling of your thoughts and feelings. Don’t judge those, just experience what is there. With this strategy, you will greatly reduce your stress and anxiety, but also you could find things about yourself that you ignored for a longer time. Maybe you are unhappy with your job, your university subject or anything else. This strategy is effective in finding out more about yourself and your dreams.

C. Althruistic Joy

This one might be hard at first for some of you, but you have to find joy not only in your success but in others as well. When you feel enjoyment for others, you will greatly improve your social connections. Those that you care for, will notice your true enjoyment of their success. Next time a friend of you achieves something, try to not feel jealous about their success, but instead try to feel happy for them. If you do this for a while, you will notice stronger connections and bonds in your life with your family, friends, and relationships.

D. Resilience

Resilience is an effective strategy to prevent yourself from downfalls do tho hard events, that could in worsted cases drag you down. Life has many sides, good and bad. Whatever we do, bad things will happen in life, but getting dragged down by those is a decision. Instead, you should train your resilience, to make sure you will always stay strong and enjoy life. This is a Mindset, that needs time to be established. Develop inner strength that helps you in bad times. This can also be done by Meditation and by noticing how life works, and it’s mechanism. Stuff will always happen, good and bad, but giving up because of them will only make you more sad. Instead, try to believe in hope, that things will come better. Most times things will also be better.

3. Check if you have good Goals

In advance of those points, you also need a goal in life, that paves the road forwards. Those should not be a dream-like getting rich, and having as many material possessions as possible, but should be something you truly love to do for your life. It is not the end of the Goal, that makes it so important, it is the way towards the goal.

Before you establish your goals, make sure where you want to be in the future. This is some work to do, so put out a pen and a piece of paper. You want to write down where you want to be in 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, 6 months and 1 month. This will give you a plan, now you only need to find a way towards those Goals. So find out and write down what you need to do so you can achieve your dream.

Next to your Life goals, you also need daily and weekly goals. This is important because you won’t reach your long-term goals shortly. So if you go on your long-term journey with small steps, you will experience small feelings of success that will keep you motivated. But you should also always try to enjoy your tasks, in any case, you should enjoy those tasks that will lead you to your dream.

4. Make sure you have a good Work-Life Balance

Next to all those habits, work and your mental health, there is one important thing. You should always have a good work-life balance between working and free time. However, you should use your free time with more careful activities, instead of scrolling Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Playing a videogame on one point is always more proactive than just watching a movie. However, you should have some activities with friends or family as well. Going outside and doing activities you like will improve your life and help you with the recovery from long working sessions. Also, you should add hobbies to your life, that are more proactive and in the best cases creative. With this work-life balance, you find an effective way to a great life.

5. Find an accountability partner

The last strategy is to work with a friend, that has the same goals as you. Someone who wants to beat the same bad habits wants a productive life like you, workout etc. You can meet with this person, and share your failures and successes, therefore staying on track. An accountability partner will boost your motivation. Because we humans work better together than alone, you will increase your productivity and accountability even more.

Extra: New method, rate your daily productivity

In the last step, I want to share a new method that I developed to predict when a rut is going to happen, to prevent it before it starts. So to start you need a chequered piece of paper, a pen, and a ruler. The object is to have a graph with two sides, up you put your productivity and down you put the days of the month. Now rate each day’s productivity with a rating of 1- 10 and put a cross to each day. At least you drew lines between those crosses and therefore see a genuine graph of your monthly productivity.

In the graph above we see that during the month the productivity had its downfall of 3 on the 18. of the month. But we also see that the productivity did not go down from a 7 to a 3, it took some time to change. When we work on our goals, we losed focus and productivity over time, with this method we can prevent it before it even starts and therefore take any precautions when we notice it goes down again. This makes your life much more productive and you will improve way quicker than before.

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