Things I do when I'm stuck in a rut

It’s 2 am. Your ceiling changing colors with every reel you scroll. Cats rolling and foods cooking and someone jumps off a cliff and splashes into the ocean. You laugh. A laugh that doesn’t even reach your lips. Just air out your nose.

You don’t even know why you’re scrolling.

You lock the phone. Stare at the ceiling for a while. Open Twitter. Find something deep. Stop scrolling. Think about how it fits your situation. But the last insight didn’t work either. Will this one? You open Google. Start searching. Fall into a Reddit thread. One comment says it’s all bs. Maybe he’s right, you think.

More reels. Cats. Food. Cliff jumping.

Being stuck in a rut feels like a dull pain. It’s there. But you don’t know where.

And the more self-aware your are, the longer it stays.

Because self-awareness without self-compassion is just self-torture. You notice everything. You analyze everything. You know exactly that you’re stuck, exactly that the scrolling isn’t helping, exactly that you should put the phone down. And you still can’t stop. Because the rut isn’t in the phone. The rut is in you. And you can’t put yourself down.

A tab is always open at the back of your mind. It feels like you have to do something important. Something big. But you can’t quite put your finger on it.

And when you can’t figure out what it is, the only option is to escape it.

And if you’re lucky enough to figure it out, your mind goes into spirals.

Where do I even start?
What if I mess up?
What if I'm completely wrong about this?
What if I fail and lose everything I built?

So you scroll more reels instead.

I have been there. More times than I can count. And every single time, I have tried to fight my way out of it. Research my way out. Meditate my way out. Discipline my way out.

It never worked.

With my countless encounters with this rut, I’ve learned one thing: You have to stop fighting it first.

Surrender…

Sounds wrong. Doesn’t it? Everything in you wants to “do” something. To fix it. To solve it. To find the answer that finally works. The podcast, the book, the framework, the morning routine that will break the cycle.

But here’s what I’ve noticed. The rut tightens every time you fight it. Like a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull, the more stuck you become.

So stop figuring out what the rut is. Stop searching for it. Stop finding new frameworks to fix it. No meditation app. No journaling. No more scrolling looking for the answer.

Just put life on pause for a moment.

Lie down on your bed. Or walk to a park and find an empty bench and just breathe.

That rut is like a throbbing vein. It won’t calm down until you do first.

So quiet down first.

You calm now? Good.

Now listen.

What a rut actually is?

A rut is an unmet expectation.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s the painful gap between how you thought your life would go and the reality of where you actually are.

It was something you really believed in. Something you gave your energy to. A dream, a project, a relationship, a version of yourself you were building toward. A seed you planted with love. But the expectation and potential you once committed to didn’t materialize.

And now, it makes you feel rotten inside. It makes you question yourself at 2am. “Am I good enough? Was I ever good enough? Did I completely misjudge myself?”

Let me stop here and tell you something I really mean.

Yes. You are good enough.

You are a human being. We are all imperfect. We are all stumbling through this life. Trying to figure out what we're doing here. Every single person you admire has lain awake at 2am staring at the ceiling with the same stone in their chest. Hemingway. Dostoevsky. Woolf. Bukowski. Every writer whose books changed your life. Every filmmaker whose work broke something open in you. Every person who ever built anything real.

Shit happens. Even to the most disciplined, the most talented, the most deserving. A rut is not a failure. It's evidence that you cared about something enough to be hurt by it.

When I was writing my book ‘Born to Stand Out’, I got to 80 pages. Eighty pages. Months of work. Hundreds of hours. And then I got stuck. I sat with it everyday, but it just didn’t feel right where it was going. I tried editing it, changed the chapter titles, rearranged paragraphs. Nothing felt right.

After struggling for a week, I made the decision. I deleted the whole 80-page draft. Didn’t even keep a copy for later. Deleted it entirely.

Three weeks later, I started again. From a blank page. With new energy and a cleaner vision.

That book became one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever made.

Stop taking it so seriously.

You know what what we never get? The things we put up on a pedestal. The more desperately we chase something, the more it seems to slide away. I've learned to take the rut as a phase. A situation that’s going to pass with time.

When you treat the rut as something that will naturally pass, it immediately loses its power over you. The mountain you thought you had to climb turns into a hill. And sometimes it turns out there was a path around it the whole time. You just couldn't see it while you were staring up at the peak.

Reducing the importance reduces the anxiety. And a calm mind sees clearly in ways a panicked one never can.

Let it go. Actually let it go.

I’m a obsessive person. I don’t let go easily. Especially the things I care about. Like that 80-page draft I wrote. And then I hit a wall. I sat with the manuscript every day. But the whole thing felt like a lie I was telling myself on paper.

Deleting that draft felt like giving away one of my kidneys. But I did it. I had to be done. Because if I hadn’t, it would’ve been a shitty book.

Here's what I've learned: the thing keeping you in the rut is usually the plan itself. Burn your plans. Delete your do to lists. Shred the roadmap you drew six months ago for a version of yourself that no longer exists.

Start over. With new energy, a new perspective, a vision that fits who you are right now.

You will do much, much better the second time.

Trust your intuition… it knows more than you do.

Intuition isn’t loud. It doesn’t have logic. It’s doesn’t have PowerPoint deck of pros and cons. It just is. It whispers. That’s why most people never hear it.

Mind on the other hand has 10 rational reasons for why you should or shouldn’t do something. So, naturally minds feels more believable. It speaks the language we’ve been taught to value: logic, evidence, reason.

But here’s the thing I’ve come to believe: your mind is only as old as you are. Your intuition has been evolving for millions of years. Refined by every ancestor. They fought. They struggled. They survived long enough to pass something down to you. It holds a kind of intelligence that no amount of analysis can replicate.

There’s a simple test I use when I’m trying to decide something.

I ask myself: Why should I choose this?

My mind immediately starts defending itself. It pulls out its logic, its justifications, its stories about why this path makes sense.

But intuition? Intuition stays quiet. It doesn’t need to defend itself because it already knows. Truth doesn’t have to argue. It just is.

When your mind and your intuition disagree. And they will. Go with the quiet one.

It has never been wrong about the things that actually matter.

The rut is a sign…

The rut feels like a problem. It’s not. The rut is never the problem. The rut is a sign. A sign of when your life is not aligned with who you are becoming.

It shows up when you have outgrown something. A plan. A direction. A version of yourself. It shows up when you need to let something go. And you haven’t done it yet. It shows up when your intuition has something important to say and you’ve been too busy, too distracted, too committed to your existing plan to hear it.

Don’t drink it away. Don’t smoke it away. Don’t scroll it into silence. Don’t sleep through it until it becomes something worse.

Sit with it. Be quiet with it. Let it tell you what it came to say.

Slow down. Breathe. Listen to the whisper of your soul.

Every rut came into my life as a gift. But silly me fought it. Ignored it. Tried to escape it. But when I surrendered, it showed me a version of myself I never met before. A better version. A deeper version. A version aligned with my soul. A version that could only be born after I stopped fighting and started listening.

Every rut I’ve ever been in eventually led me to the same place.

Slower. Quieter. More myself.

I wrote a free book about that place. It’s called ‘Depth Over Noise’. Find a quiet evening, make yourself something warm, and read it slowly.

That’s the whole instruction.

Download it free here.

A higher version of you is waiting. The rut is a sign it’s there.

Follow it inward.

— Karun 🌿