getting out of a funk

pulling yourself through the haze

Midnight by Kim Dorland

I’ve found myself wandering in and out of a funk over the last few weeks. While there were environmental factors I could use to explain this, I have come to see funks as an entirely internal phenomenon: a persistent psychological block that gets darker and denser each moment you stay in it. So, I’m writing about how to get out of one as a note to anyone in one right now, and to my future self who will probably (definitely) fall into one again.

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I was just talking with a friend about what it feels like to be in a funk. We agreed that in a funk, the world looks less colourful, more bleak. Things that usually feel easy suddenly feel super hard. Negative thoughts that rarely swim into your consciousness flood your mind. It’s like your worldview is contracting. It becomes harder to focus on the positive, harder to look forward to things, easier to fixate on the bad. It’s as if the lens of your life is filled with smoke: everything looks dark, grey, blurry. Your inputs might be the same, but the way you perceive them is completely different.

Funks make it harder to simply exist. Everything you would typically do to take care of yourself feels distinctly unappetizing. You only have an appetite for activities that would sink you deeper into your funk. Confronting yourself in this state feels impossible, so the funk ferments and worsens. Your interactions with others skew negative. You might unconsciously blame them for how you’re feeling even though they probably aren’t acting any different than usual—your mind is just perceiving them differently.

This is the essence of a funk: your mindset inverts. It emphasizes the bad and forgets the good. Sometimes not all at once, but over time, you start to see everything as an attack on you. You feel like life is happening “to you” instead of “for you.” A funk is this slow shift from positive to negative experience. But experience is just the effect of thought:

“Thoughts are like data programmed into a computer, registered on the screen of your life. If you don’t like what you see on the screen, there’s no point in going up to the screen and trying to erase it. Thought is cause; experience is effect. If you don’t like the effects of your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.” — a Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson

When you are having a negative experience, you are suffering from an infection of negative thoughts in your mind. We are shaped by the thoughts we let stay in our minds. From Swami Vivekananda’s “Inspired Talks”:

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care of what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live, they travel far. Each thought is [like] a little hammer blow on the lump of iron which our bodies are, manufacturing out of it what we want to be.”

getting into a funk

The mind reproduces whatever we put in it. So, all it takes for a funk to start is a single negative thought taking root in the psyche. From one seed, a whole forest of negativity can grow. Each negative thought is like the first node on a map of thoughts that will take you deeper into the darkness. If you trust that negative thought, you fall down that path and lose sight of the positive state you were in before you stepped onto it.

A funk makes us feel like a victim of our own lives, like the world is perpetually insulting us. In a funk, we are being defeated by your own mind. In a state like this, we need to remind ourselves that we cannot control the hand we are dealt on a macro scale (the circumstances of our life), or on a micro scale (the events of each day). But we can control how we process and respond to those inputs. In fact, this is the only thing we can control, and thus the most important thing to focus on (because focusing on what you cannot control leads to misery and frustration). When a funk settles in, it is you that has changed, and thus, it is you that can change again.

In the simplest possible terms, this is how to get out of a funk:

1. Recognize you are in a funk.

2. Write out what you feel like doing.

3. Write out the opposite of those things.

4. Do the opposite list.

5. You are out of the funk, back to being yourself.

When we are in a funk, we feel powerless. We think the universe wants us to fail (“why does this stuff keep happening to me???”) instead of thinking the universe is conspiring for our success (“everything is happening for me!!”). To reverse this feeling—we need to remind ourselves that we control how we feel.

getting out of a funk

1. Recognize the feeling as soon as it settles in. Falling into a funk is like accidentally wandering into a forest with no map. The shallower you are from the entrance, the easier it is to find your way out. You might get a weird feeling as you wander in, but if you’re not yet convinced you’re going in a bad direction, you may wander in deeper. The deeper you go, the harder it is to find your way back to the entrance. Simultaneously, the more time you spend in the forest, the more it starts to feel like home, the more it starts to feel normal. You may start to believe you belong in this forest—in this perpetual state of fear and loneliness—forgetting what it was like to be in an open field full of sunlight and freedom, unafraid of anything happening to you. You can learn to survive in this darkness, but why would you want to? If you don’t have that critical conversation with yourself right as the feeling settles in, saying: hey, this doesn’t look good, let’s turn back, then you might get stuck in there. You can’t implement a solution for a problem that you don’t believe exists.

2. Write out what you feel like doing. When you’re in a funk, you might feel low energy, out of control, unable to summon the power to do your normal things. The things you feel inclined to do are instructive insofar as they usually tell you exactly “what not do do.” Maybe you feel like laying in bed, being upset/angry, avoiding your responsibilities, over-eating, excessively watching shows, or indulging in any other vice just for the sake of it. This list is basically the map of how to get yourself deeper into your funk. If you want to rise above it, you need to do the opposite.

3. Write out a list of opposing tasks to the list you just created. Everything you don’t feel like doing is exactly what you need to do. The funk is a downwards spiral that wants to keep your momentum in that direction. If you want to beat it, you need to create acceleration in the opposite direction: you need to do the hard, frictional things that feel out of reach.

4. Do the opposite list. Maybe you need to fold your laundry, go see your friends, go for a walk/run/work out, clean up your room, talk to someone about how you are feeling. This will be HARD. Every time I am about to do something on this list when I’m in a funk, I would rather be doing anything else, but by the end of it, I feel 1000x better. Even something as simple as reading/writing can feel impossible in a funk, but if you manage to break the seal on completing this first task on the “opposite list”, you start an upwards spiral that will carry you back to the open clearing at the edge of the forest. The first task gives you a little confidence, reinstating your sense of self just enough to get you to the next task. And soon enough, you’ve worked out, cleaned your room, cooked a nice meal, and are feeling a heck of a lot better than when you were lying in your bed, feeling sorry for yourself a few hours earlier. It’s never easy, but as they say: Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

5. Funk starts to clear, you begin to feel like yourself again. It is amazing how quickly this method clears the funk. This is because a funk is simply a mindset shift. It is the beginning of your identity evolving into someone who thinks they are powerless, who cannot control how they feel and act. When you prove to yourself that you are the same person you always were (someone that takes care of themselves and does hard things!), you see that you are, in fact, that person. Your mindset begins to invert back towards its positive baseline state.

I believe that the key to a good life is having an unblocked, clear mind. With a clear mind, you see what you need to do, and feel strong enough to do it. A funk poses a massive threat, because it puts you in a deepening state of self-doubt that prevents you from going about your life with vigour.

Getting good at getting out of funks starts with getting good at recognizing them. Once you notice the feeling creeping in and recognize the self-sabotage behaviours you feel tempted to jump into, you start to do the opposite, using the awareness that the funk is just temporary.

When you have the humility to feel what you are feeling, you can exercise the strength to tackle unravel your funk and get back to your baseline. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to reject the negative thoughts that catalyze the funk. When you are too proud to admit you’re feeling a little off, the funk becomes even harder to tackle over time.

Funks are a part of life. Darkness helps us recognize light. What is important is to not let ourselves feel like darkness is our norm. I recently came across a quote that said something like: the sky is always blue, but sometimes there are days where the clouds convince us the sky is grey. But the clouds are just obstructing our view of the sunlight, not replacing it. The same goes for a funk: it’s just a temporary obstruction of the good—a reversible mindset shift.

Fortunately, we have more control over our minds than we do over the weather, so as long as we can recognize a funk as the mental cloudiness that it is, we can unblock our minds.

Be patient with yourself, feel what you’re feeling, and do your best to find your way back to the edge of the forest when you’re feeling a little lost. And if you don’t conquer the funk right away, have compassion for yourself. As I often need to remind myself:

Isabel⚡️ @isabelunraveled

life is this continuous process of stumbling off your path and then finding your way back to yourself

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Do you resonate with what I write about? Maybe we should work together: If you resonate with the ideas I write about and want to cultivate a life you genuinely enjoy living, where you align your actions with your values, move towards the changes you know you want to make, and consciously harvest self-knowledge in the process, send an email to isabel@mindmine.school or to isabel@mindmine.school or DM me on Twitter to explore what working together 1-1 would look like.

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PS—Find me on Twitter for more loose thoughts, and if you liked this, you might like another piece I wrote about dissonance.