How I'm Clawing Myself Out Of A 4-Month Rut
The last 4 months have been the most challenging 4 months of my life.
Everything has felt difficult—business, relationships, health—all of them feeling like I’m stuck in a slog. My general resilience has been lower, with normally small things throwing me out of rhythm for an entire day or even multiple days. And my overall excitement has felt muted, like the usually rich colors of life have been turned down a few tones.
Now, during this time, my overall outcomes haven’t been bad at all—and that’s part of what’s frustrating.
My business had its best 4-month revenue run since inception. I’ve made some of the most beautiful memories of my life. I’ve started filming videos, gotten back to writing and publishing, and moved to a new country for continued exploration. But underneath the surface, like a slow simmer, there’s been a lingering (and building) feeling of dissatisfaction that I can’t quite put into words.
However, at the time of writing this, I feel momentum beginning to build as I claw my way out of what I can now realize has been an extended 4-month mental rut.
And the process I used to rebuild that momentum is what I’m going to talk about in this post.
Over the next few sections, I’m going to open source the entire line of thinking, reflection, and action plan I’m currently using to get myself back on the right emotional track.
And I’m doing this for 2 main reasons:
To crystallize the plan for myself, as writing something out is the only way I can work through all the thoughts swirling around in my brain
To share something that someone going through a similar kind of struggle could find useful in rebuilding momentum for themselves
But before we dive in, a couple quick disclaimers:
What I am going to share is what is working for me at the time of writing this. This is not advice whatsoever, and please don’t take it as such. Feel free to try things out that I share, keep what works, and discard the rest.
I hope you can read this with an open mind and through a frame of curiosity and exploration. If you use the lens that what I say is incorrect or won’t work for your circumstance, I promise you’ll find evidence that supports your belief.
I am not going to spend time reflecting on what led to the rut or how I felt throughout it, as you will see that goes against the ethos of the entire post. Instead, I am only focused on the path forward.
Now let’s get into it.
What we’re going to cover in this post
The 3 “foundational pillars” I’m starting with to get out of this rut
The 3 “lenses” I am using to redefine and refresh my perspective
The “back to basics” audit I completed with a gameplan to get back on track
7 lessons & realizations from this chapter I will take forward with me to prevent it from happening in the future
The 3 “foundational pillars” I’m starting with to get out of this rut
If I was going to mark a “low point” during this recent slog, it would be last Wednesday.
I sat outside a cafe, emotionally journaling about what type of drastic change I could make that could hopefully give me a boost back in the right direction.
But before the session began, I wrote to myself that everything I was about to say was just for the sake of the thought experiment and was not to be acted on. I know myself well enough to never, ever make decisions during a state of heightened emotions. But playing out these scenarios in my head allowed me the freedom to evaluate every decision I could make.
The one that felt most enticing to me was to take a 3-week solo trip to Japan. I had the flights pulled up, dates chosen, and seats selected.
Why was I drawn to this idea?
A few reasons:
I saw peace and quiet to think in the morning, exploring new cafes with nothing but a journal while every person who needed to reach me on a daily basis was sound asleep
I saw a 16-hour direct flight with no WiFi or distraction that I could use to write about everything that was on my mind, where I’d been the last few months, and where I wanted to go
I saw environmental novelty to explore, deepening my understanding of a culture to which I’ve always been drawn
And I saw new horizons to document and write about through the lens of “iteration” - the single topic I want to write about for the rest of my life
But this dramatic, emotional choice would have had serious negative implications for my relationship, my business, and more than likely my health.
On top of this, it wasn’t going to solve anything, and I knew that. I was simply running from what I thought was the problem—my external environment. But that 16-hour business class flight was a one-way ticket to the other side of the world, where upon landing I would realize I was still stuck with myself—the only person responsible for how I was feeling.
And so I talked myself out of the idea, and I’m glad I did. But I took being drawn to it as a signal that there were parts of that trip I needed to operationalize and bring into my day-to-day because that’s clearly where I felt a lack.
And that’s what led me to the creation of these 3 pillars. Throughout a couple of messy, emotional pages, I laid out what I saw as the requirements & acceptances I had to make if I was going to make upward progress of any kind:
Ownership. That trip attracted me because it provided a temporary escape. But what exactly was I escaping from? The things that I cast blame (and therefore my power) to as the main culprits for my negative state—all things outside of my control. But these were not to blame, I was. It wasn’t the external circumstances that led me to feel this way—it was my internal perception of them. And this is the most important realization I could make: I am 100% responsible for the way I feel at the moment. It’s not my business, it’s not my apartment, it’s not my family, it’s not my relationship. It’s me. And no one is going to save me from it or make it better for me—I have to take ownership. And so that’s where I started.
Space. For me to work on this problem, I needed dedicated time to do so. I was objectively in a more fragile state than I’d like to be, which is a sign there were too many open loops, unprocessed events, and unmade decisions in my head that were limiting my ability to act rationally. And this was another part that attracted me to the overseas escape—I would have large chunks of uninterrupted time to clear my mind. But this was a faulty way of thinking because I would then return and find myself falling back into the same habits that led me to feel like this in the first place. And so rather than fly across the world to create space, I’m taking steps toward building it into my current routine. That looks like getting back to super early wake-ups and distraction-free mornings from 5 AM to 11 AM, at least. And I’ll talk about what I plan to do with that space in a later section.
Commitment. Lastly, I needed a series of commitments—to myself and other people. It’s only through a set of commitments to uphold that I feel driven with a sense of purpose and accountability. So I needed to commit to clawing myself out of this, no matter how much effort it took. I needed to commit to something challenging that would force me to take action despite how I felt. I needed to commit to a bigger mission that created a misalignment between how I was acting and how the type of person who accomplished that mission would act. And that means setting ambitious business goals & personal goals, bigger than I’ve ever set before. Ones that scare me to write down and repeat every morning because of the type of person I must become to achieve them.
After writing out these pillars, I felt a rush of calmness, clarity, and direction.
And that led me to get to work on the single biggest culprit for my overall rundown feeling: my perspective.
The “lens audit” I am using to help refresh my perspective
Building on the first pillar of Ownership, I spent my next couple of mornings doing some work on the origin & reasons for these feelings of difficulty, desperation, and general lack of excitement.
Guiding my actions was a simple example given to me by my therapist who specializes in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Pretend there are two people seated next to each other listening to the same song through separate sets of headphones. The person on the left is smiling, daydreaming, and operating from a state of bliss of happiness. The other person is distraught, sobbing, and operating from a place of pure devastation.
How could this be?
Clearly it’s not the song causing it. If it were the lyrics or melody of the song causing the emotion, it would be impossible for two people to feel something do differently.
So what’s causing their emotions?
It’s their perception of the song and the series of thoughts that form that perception.
Upon hearing this example, it clicked for me. The events of the last 4 months did not cause the feelings I was experiencing. It was my perception of them, the stories I paired with them, and the beliefs I had about them that then led to difficult emotions.
So the solution was not to dramatically change my external circumstances—like booking a 16-hour flight to Japan.
Instead, I needed to go to war on re-establishing a healthy perception of events that happened and were happening in my life.
Said another way, I needed to change the lens.
And luckily, I had evidence of a time in my life when I felt dramatically different than I do right now—and it was only about 24 months ago.
It just so happened at the time, I was doing a ton of work on rewiring my internal beliefs.
Nearly every morning for about 6 months, I was reading and writing the same core beliefs over and over again as I started the day. Revisiting my journal from that time, I saw a constant repetition of the same 3 beliefs:
Everything in this world is rigged in my favor
Every circumstance is an opportunity to progress
Everything I feel is 100% my responsibility
And it was the repetition and visualization of these beliefs, repeated consistently every morning, that had me start to believe them.
And this was self-reinforcing, because the more I repeated them to myself, the more I looked for evidence to support them. And the more evidence I found to support them, the more I believed in them, so the more I repeated them to myself, and on and on.
And for whatever reason, I stopped doing them. I could point to tons of reasons as to why I stopped doing them:
Unexpectedly losing my dad in June 2023
Traveling a ton after that period and being constantly unsettled
Feeling that those beliefs had “stuck” and were now ingrained in me
But without this constant repetition, they slowly deteriorated over time into their opposites.
Self-doubt. Rather than seeing everything as rigged in my favor, I felt that things were rigged against me or that achieving what I wanted was impossibly difficult.
Bitterness. Rather than view every circumstance as an opportunity for progress, I fixated on the negative side of things that happened in the past or happened to me in the day-to-day.
Victimhood. And rather than seeing how I feel as my responsibility, I cast the blame on other people, lying to myself that if I was in a better environment or the other people around me just “got it” I would be much happier
And it became extremely clear to me that these negative lenses had crept into becoming my dominant belief system.
So - how was I going to fix that?
First, I needed to get back to the daily repetition that led me to having such a strong mindset two years ago. And so I am back to reaffirming and rebuilding these beliefs at the beginning of every day.
Ownership. Everything I feel is 100% my responsibility
Delusion. Everything in this world is rigged in my favor
Gratitude. Every circumstance is an opportunity for happiness & progress
For the first 10-15 minutes of my early-morning journal sessions, I am writing and rewriting these beliefs and some knock-on affirmations that reinforce them.
For example, here are 10 that I listed out this morning:
My life outcomes & how I feel about them are 100% my responsibility
I can choose to make today a great day
I can do anything I choose to do if the laws of physics allow it
Every problem is solvable & every skill is learnable
I can get one day closer to being in the best shape of my life
Every circumstance is an opportunity for progress
I am living a life that I used to dream about living
The world is hilariously rigged in my favor
I am grateful for every moment of my past that led me to this one
Future you would trade everything they have to be back in your shoes
This is all I need to commit to at the moment. I started by taking ownership of fixing my emotional state. And I’ve built in the space to work on it and committed to filling that space day in and day out.
On top of that daily morning journal commitment, I’ve recommitted to a handful of daily activities that I know contribute to me operating at my best.
And that leads me to the next section.
How I’m getting “back to basics” to put me back on track
With the idea in mind that I am not making drastic changes, I proceeded with a “basics” audit to help identify the little things that I’ve let slip over the past few months.
I started with a big brain dump list of all the things that make me feel good when I do them consistently. I drew from all the various buckets of my life from my health & fitness routines, work habits, hobbies, adventure, and time with friends. And luckily, I have been doing this type of self-awareness reflection for the last 5+ years, so I have a good sense of activities to draw from.
Importantly, I did this audit first thing in the morning with no input and no distractions—just my pen and my journal.
The initial list was just a big brain dump of everything I could think of. From there, I sorted them into two buckets: daily staples & weekly staples.
Here is the list I came up with:
Daily staples
Waking up early (before 5:30 AM)
Starting my day with mobility & light stretching
Priming myself by rereading my goals/vision/values
Meditating for 15+ minutes
Journaling to clear my mind
Writing for 60-90 minutes
Daily lift/workout/cardio sessions on a defined plan
Keeping my calendar clear of meetings until 2 PM or later
Getting 1-3 hours of direct sunlight in the afternoon
Walking to hit 12k+ steps per day
Eating with a defined meal plan & logging things with my nutritionist
Setting up my environment for ease in the morning the night before
Journaling on the day that was & making a plan for the day ahead
Weekly staples
Therapy session
Reflection & check in with my girlfriend
Fun date night activity with my girlfriend
Group community activity/sport/event with people on a similar mission as me
Extended time in nature without my phone
Extended time playing music/learning to DJ
Sauna/cold plunge session for mental/emotional recovery
Weekly review & planning session
With this list in hand, I then went one by one through each and asked myself if I had been doing these consistently over the last 3 months.
For everything I was doing consistently, I put a ✅. For everything that had slipped, I put a 🔴
This is what that breakdown looked like:
Daily staples
🔴 Waking up early (before 5:30 AM)
✅ Starting my day with mobility & light stretching
🔴 Priming myself by rereading my goals/vision/values
✅ Journaling to clear my mind & plan my day
✅ Meditating for 15+ minutes
✅ Writing for 60-90 minutes
✅ Daily lift/workout/cardio sessions on a defined plan
✅ Keeping my calendar clear of meetings until 2 PM or later
🔴 Getting 1-3 hours of direct sunlight in the afternoon
🔴 Walking to hit 12k+ steps per day
🔴 Eating with a defined meal plan & logging things to my nutritionist
🔴 Setting up my environment for ease in the morning the night before
🔴 Journaling on the day that was & making a plan for the day ahead
Weekly staples
✅ Therapy session
🔴 Reflection & emotional check-in with my girlfriend
✅ Fun date night activity with my girlfriend
🔴 Group community activity/sport/event with people on a similar mission as me
🔴 Extended time in nature without my phone
🔴 Extended time playing music/learning to DJ
🔴 Sauna/cold plunge session for mental/emotional recovery
✅ Weekly review & planning session
For those keeping track at home, that is a breakdown of 12 🔴 and 9 ✅—certainly an out-of-whack ratio.
But if you had asked me before doing this exercise, I would have likely said I was doing at least 15+ or more of them. Turns out, the number of environmental changes I’d gone through over the past 4 months meant many of these had started to slip.
After bringing awareness to this mismatch, I asked myself: how am I going to get back to implementing these consistently?
At first take, this is a pretty extensive list that seems almost impossible to hit on any given day or week. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that it only took a little bit of planning & tracking to set up a system that made it easy to hit them if I simply followed the plan.
Building on the daily and weekly grouping, I started by coming up with a planning system on both of those time horizons. The daily tracking system is simple. I put each of my daily activities into a simple Google Sheet that I fill out at the end of each day.
This gamifies the process which keeps it fun & allows me to keep tabs on my progress (or lack of it) so certain habits don’t start to slip.
From there, I grouped my daily staples into 3 main buckets.
Morning bucket
Afternoon bucket
Evening bucket
Trying to keep track of 13 daily staples was way too many—and I felt that the first couple of days trying to keep up with it. But by grouping them into 3 buckets, I can look at the part of the day I’m in and recall what I want to stay on top of during that time. This also helps me “save a day” if I find myself off track in the morning, as I can shift some of those morning habits to the afternoon if necessary, or I can just focus on winning the afternoon & evening rather than dwell on the morning.
As I begin to reintroduce several things in my life, I must be intentional in planning for them every day before they become automatic. That means writing out the list, by hand, every single morning making sure I’m planning for any obstacles and organizing my day to make sure I can hit as many of them as possible.
The daily planning time in the morning and evening helps me stay on top of my daily staples to fully reintegrate them back into my life. Of all the items on my list, these two are the most important by far - because they set the foundation for all of the others.
I know that if I consistently wake up early, I am going to have the time and space to take care of myself and my energy before I give my energy to anyone else. And I know that if I go to bed with a clear mind and a clear plan for the day ahead, sticking with these basics becomes much easier.
And this is all that I needed to begin the process of getting back on track.
The other part of the system is my weekly planning, which has two parts:
Batch scheduling in the weekly staples so they are on the calendar
Measuring my progress on my daily staples and making necessary adjustments
My weekly staples are things I know I should always do - but I find them difficult to schedule “in the moment.”
For example, it’s rare that I would spontaneously go for a hike in nature on a Tuesday afternoon or mix music for 3 hours on a Thursday evening. Unless those items were scheduled on the calendar in advance, I would find a way to either bring work into that period or waste it aimlessly scrolling my phone. But if it’s scheduled in advance, I’m always excited to do them and they recharge me energetically.
And so that’s what I try to do with my Sunday planning session. I go one by one down the list and make sure I’m blocking time for these activities. The nice part is finding some opportunities to hit multiple of them at once like getting my nature time & time with friends knocked out with a group hike. Or batching my relationship check-in with a sauna / cold plunge session.
Once I’ve batch scheduled in these weekly staples, I take a look at my daily staple tracker and see if there is anything that I’m clearly missing that needs iteration.
My current goal is to hit these 90% of the time over a trailing 30-day period, which is nice because it gives me a small amount of leeway when the inevitable volatility of life throws me off on certain things. But I know if I can get these knocked out 90% of the time, feeling better is inevitable.
Now - with all of these realizations, lens upgrades, and “back to basics” audits—what have I learned that I want to distill for the future? That’s where we will finish.
9 lessons & realizations from this chapter I will take forward with me to prevent it from happening in the future
The solution is a return the basics, not drastic change. Several times I considered a significant “upheaval” of a certain area of my life from a place of emotional desperation. I’d convinced myself the solution was some kind of business change, relationship change, or environment change. But again, these were signals that I was casting power to things outside of my control. The “easy choice” is to run from them, but I knew that would only make the problem worse. And it sets a precedent that I certainly do not want to take into fatherhood/long-term family dynamics as I get older. So instead, I took signal from what drew me to the drastic change and looked to reimplement those things as the “basics” of my day-to-day.
Keep your labels small. During this process, I am being extremely mindful of the words I cast over myself. It’s tempting to apply a label like “burnt out” or “depressed” or something like that, given how often those words are thrown around. But these “bundled terms” are helpful only when used to define a series of solvable behaviors & feelings. They become harmful when used as an identity, because that creates a self-reinforcing cycle of acting in accordance with the identity one has established. Are some of the feelings I’m experiencing similar to those described by people who label themselves as such? Sure. But I am confining them to the feelings themselves because those come and go.
Expect the process to be extremely hard. I am anchored that this will be the most challenging bit of work I have ever gone through. I expect it to feel like a series of jagged ups & downs, rather than a smooth linear ride. And with that expectation, I may be pleasantly surprised that it was not so hard after all. But I would rather air on this side of dramatically difficult expectations, so I’m not dissuaded if I start to feel as such.
You are writing the story you will someday tell. By open-sourcing my process for navigating this rut, hopefully I can help someone in real time struggling with something similar. But I also know that 85-year-old me is looking back on this chapter fondly, telling stories of the impactful times that helped transform me into the man I ultimately became.
Action is the antidote. Getting myself back to my ideal state will take significant amounts of active effort. I am not going to be able to think my way out of this. Or meditate my way out of this. Or talk my way out of this. All of these will help, but massive action is the only thing that reinforces to myself that I have the full ability to make the changes I want to make. And throughout the process, I’m reminding myself: you don’t have to feel good to act, but you do have to act to feel good.
You cannot be responsible for other people’s emotions. Of all the things that contributed to my feelings of being run down, it was the belief that I had to “fix things” when someone around me was feeling emotionally unsteady. This happened across all areas of my life - romantic relationships, business team members, and family. And if you had asked me several months ago, I would have said this was the correct belief through the lens of “extreme ownership.” However, this chapter showed me there is a limit to the things that you can healthily take responsibility for. Sure, you can help put people in circumstances that make it easier for them to feel good, but it’s ultimately on them to meet you halfway on doing the work themselves, just as I am doing now.
Your healthy, positive outlook is like a muscle that must be trained. I spent many mornings 2-3 years ago doing a ton of work on my mindset, belief, and perspective. And as a result, I started to take that outlook for granted, thinking it was fully “ingrained” in me. But just like working out in the gym, this type of thing must be consistently trained and worked at just to maintain. Otherwise, it will naturally deteriorate over time back to what is more or less the human status quo of negativity & victimhood.
You can push much harder when you prioritize recovery activities. All activities are either stressful (in that they expend energy) or restorative (in that they give you energy). And through this process, I’ve realized that it doesn’t work to program stressful things first and then look to fit in recovery around it. Instead, they should be programmed the other way around, so you are always in a recovery surplus. Now this doesn’t mean you spend your time in recovery mode. But it does mean you identify the core energetic recovery activities and then build your stressful activities around them. When done over the long run, you can push your stressful blocks much harder, knowing that you will recoup the reserves to go at them again the next day or next week. Tactically, this looks like the daily & weekly staples I laid out in my back-to-basics audit. If you look closely, every single one of them contributes in some way to physical, mental, or emotional recovery. And planning this way guarantees I don’t end up in the rundown state I ended up in after failing to prioritize them for so long.
You do not break yourself out of a rut overnight. But you can put yourself on the path to do so with 90 minutes of quiet intentional reflection today. Which is what I hoped to accomplish for myself in the writing of this post. I came in scrambled, drained, and unsure of exactly how I was going to break out of this. But I’m leaving with 9 good lessons, 3 clear lenses, 13 daily staples, and one refreshed perspective ready to put myself back on the right track.
—
And that about wraps it up for this piece. If you’ve read this far, I hope you found something valuable or useful you can apply in your daily life.
If you have any follow-up questions, please leave a comment or hit reply to this email and I’ll get back to you as best as I can.
Here’s to the rebuilding of momentum—and all of the good that comes from there.
-Dickie Bush
PS… If you missed last week’s edition, I broke down 9 painful (but useful) lessons I learned after failing to scale my business to $1m per month. This is the type of content I wish other business owners would publish, showing the realities of running a business, rather than saying it’s easy. You can check out my raw reflections here:
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You are a wonderful inspiration to all lucky enough to know you and or to read your impressive mind, so succinctly written in your works. I love you!
Really appreciate your vulnerability here, Dickie. What you’re walking through now is something that I’m experiencing myself. A return to the fundamentals is always the answer. Thank you for reminding me of that this morning.