414. How to get out of a funk

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here, back for another episode as we break down the psychology of our twenties. Before we get into it, I know I said this in the last episode, but I want to keep reminding you all that this episode of the podcast and many others are now on Netflix in the UK, Australia, Canada, US, Germany, Malaysia, South Africa. I don't know there's a lot of them, just to name a few. So if you're a fan of watching the watching podcasts, watching this podcast as you listen to it, this is your chance. You can go and watch the video version of this very episode right now. Just go and search the Psychology of Your Twenties on your Netflix app. Give it a go, see what all the fuss is about, see what I can't shut up about, and I hope you enjoy it. Today we are talking about how to get out of a funk, how to get out of a season of life that honestly just feels very bland, and more than just bland, feels very boring, frustrating, maybe even slightly depressing. I think it is so totally normal to go through periods like this, to go through periods where things are just not on the vibrational length that you want them to be. But what can be worrying is when it begins to tank our entire perception of life and we think that we're never going to get out of this state of mind, and it changes what we think we're capable of, it changes what we think the world is capable of. I found myself in a funk these past few months. I was just angry. I was just really angry at how much is required to say simply be an adult. And I was angry at the world, and I was angry at everybody around me. And it really sucked. But luckily I've been kind of clawing my way out of that. And whether it's because it's suddenly summer in the UK spring but the sun is peeking through, or whether it is the fact that I've been having some hard but very kind chats with myself. I have been feeling like this is paid off and I'm out of this like little chapter, I was in it for a while, so I wanted to kind of share what I did share why we end up in these kind of low points. And yeah, of course some tips, some tips that you could put into place literally after you listen to this episode to get yourself out of a funk. So, without further ado, let's get into it. So what do we mean by being in a funk? Right? I think we all know what it feels like to be in a bad mood. There's a very normal part of being human and of experiencing kind of like the ups and downs of life. Life. We all know the experience of waking up and just feeling like the world is against us. But sometimes that feeling, that terrible mood lingers, and it's not just one morning, it's every morning, it's every evening, and it's every lunchtime, and it just becomes so all encompassing. I think the biggest sign you are in a funk right now is when you find yourself taking every single neutral situation and unconsciously without choosing to turning them into negatives. Right, everything that happens to you ends up being terrible. Everything that happens to you interpret to be negative. It might feel like you just can't catch a break, whether it's to do with work, love, money, friendships, all of the above, or even just like daily existence. Everything is annoying, everything is slow, everything goes wrong. In addition, I think what compounds this is that it can be really unclear as to why we're feeling this way, And I think feeling stuck and helpless are often signs of being in a funk as well. Knowing you are the bad mood and not being able to change it. You might be thinking, Gemma, that sounds very similar to being depressed, and yeah, I get why you would think that, honestly, and we can't deny they definitely go hand in hand a lot of the time, and often the funk is the precursor. But being in a funk is not clinical and it's temporary. Depression is chronic often and it's all encompassing, and it involves chemical, biological, and social and environmental triggers. What really differentiates a funk from a depressive state is that underneath it all, your capacity for pleasure is still intact. A good conversation with somebody that you love, or like a really beautiful sunny day, or like a really great meal. These things still register on your radar when you are in a f in contrast with depression situations that would normally bring you joy. You know, you could literally land your dream job, you could be on holiday, you could be spending quality time with your family. Even those moments cannot lift the black cloud that is present. So it's important to know the difference because if it is a depressed state you are dealing with, obviously most, if not all, of the stuff we're talking about today probably isn't going to register and isn't going to help in the same way if you are just in a funk, and I think it's rather dismissive to conflate the two. Both stuck a lot, but depression needs more of a clinical intervention, just so we are very clear on that before we get into kind of the origins of being in the state of mind. So back to the funk. What creates this? You would probably know this. It's not just one thing. It's often the cumulative load of what we call major and minus stras. Work sucks, that's the first thing, and then you're not getting enough sleep, and then you're really struggling to make new friends, and then you're really kind of tired with your old friends, and then you really can't find the time to go to the gym. And then you know, all these things on one on top of the other, and you're not making as much money and you're feeling detached from your hobbies. One thing on its own would probably be fine, but with multiple things, essentially you don't know what to focus on first, And secondly, it's just the weight of it all just gets a lot heavier. Naturally. Here is something we talk about a lot in psychology. When stresses aren't acute but instead small, ongoing, and unresolved, your brain doesn't get the same signal that the threat has passed. Instead, your threat detection system, your anxious thoughts, whatever it is, stay mildly activated over long periods of time. This means cortisol and other stress hormones are not being released in sharp berths that then peek and plateau and decline, but in a sustained, lower level way constantly over time. This means that your alo static load, which is essentially the wear and tear on your body and brain from adjusting to repeated stress, it just gets higher and higher. Your system is constantly trying to maintain balance and recover. But if you can't keep up, that comes at a cost, the fatigue you feel, the reduced executive functioning, which also means that you then find it harder to think of a solution. That is the cost of all of this, and often the only natural response is for your brain, your mind, your body to go, let's just shut it all down. Let's numb ourselves out, Let's blunt all the senses so that we can get through this. So that's the first contributing factor to being in a funk, combine cumulative stresses. The second is actually something quite simple, which is a lack of novelty. Novelty and having new experiences. I feel like we talk about this a lot, but seeing new things, having small shifts in routine, being excited about something that's not just a luxury that has been proven and shown to be psychologically both necessary and protective. You need to have new experiences if you want to feel like yourself. In fact, there was a twenty nineteen study and I think it was done in California, that found that novelty is not only enjoyable dah. It actually sparks the brain to explore more, meaning we find more novelty, meaning we find more things that we find fund more good things and also more solutions because it switches on a curiosity exploratory mindset when everything is the same as it's always been or has been for a while. You know, our brain is kind of like a zoo animal or like an animal in captivity. It like becomes accustomed to things simply being the way they are, and it's kind of like gnawing at the bars, being like let me out. So boredom is a big factor here. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, boredom is doesn't get It doesn't get a research spotlight. Has been researched far less than other emotions like happiness or sadness or like the big flashy ones because I think scientifically people think if boredom is quite trivial, but it's such an unexplored emotion and it sits so closely to other more headline grabbing emotions like loneliness and sadness when it comes to our emotional well being. Here's the thing. Boredom, when practiced, when welcomed, can do wonderful things. For your imagination, wonderful things for your creativity because your brain basically has to entertain in itself and be imaginative. But when boredom is involuntary, persistent, chronic, it literally shrinks our perspective of the world and makes it narrower. For example, a study from twenty fifteen on Like It Was Like eight hundred students found that students who scored high on a boredom scale also tended to score very high on a depression scale. Boredom is a psychological feature of depressed states, which we know are linked to being in this funk light state as well. It can also make us more impulsive, can drive us more towards harmful behaviors. A very famous study from the University of Virginia in twenty fourteen recruited like hundreds of undergrads, hundreds of community members and they got them to take part in these like what they called prolonged thinking periods. Participants were placed in these like empty rooms on like a chair with a desk in front of them, and they were asked they weren't allowed to bring in any of their belongings, no books, no nothing, no pens, no phones, and they were asked to sit there and think, and during that time, they were given the option to give themselves an electric shock if they wanted to, or to just sit quietly. The results were drastic, even though all participants had previously stated they would not even accept money to be shocked and they would not pay they would pay money to avoid being shocked. When they were in this situation of boredom, sixty seven percent of men twenty five percent of women chose to continue to inflict themselves with this electric shock rather than sit there and think quietly and be bored. Sometimes, like, that's a great example of how much we try and avoid boredom. And sometimes the things we do when we're bored might not be actively harmful, like an electric shock, but they're not great either, you know. They it drives us to just continue spiraling into the state of doing behaviors and performing behaviors that aren't helpful. And so when we are in a funk and kind of questioning like why am I doing all these things that like actually aren't helping me, but I can't stop? Why am I drinking all the time? Like why am I not reading before bed? Why am I like continuing to not make moves that I want to make. That boredom that you are experiencing all the time is actually shutting down your brain's ability to make creative, new, fresh choices towards your life. Besides those two factors, I do think there's a third thing, and I do think that that is acknowledging that sometimes, yes, the world around us is boring, is difficult, it's putting us in a funk. Sometimes it's not fun to admit, but sometimes times we are the funk though. We have become the bad day. We have become the bad mood. We become the one ruining things for ourselves and sometimes ruining things for others, and it can create quite a self fulfilling prophecy that we do need to snap out of. Like there is a level of acknowledgment and accountability with certain funk states that maybe we are we're kind of playing into it a little bit literally. This is a realization I've kind of had to sit within recent months. Again. I went through this period when I first moved to London where every day was a bad day, and I realized that was probably because I was waking up expecting it to be a bad day. So I unconsciously. Throughout every day, I would wake up and I would be searching for evidence of this pre existing expectation, and I was probably even creating situations that matched my expectations without realizing it. Like when I was on the train, I started to realize that I would only notice the people who didn't give up their seats for the elderly. I would only notice the people who bumped into me, or the people who wouldn't move out of somebody's way. I never at the time noticed the people who were being kind, or the kid with like the new Barbie doll, or like the couple in love. Both of those groups of people were present, but I was only noticing one half. It was this filter I was applying onto the world around me, when in fact, like the world was rather neutral. There were some people who were being annoying, some people who were being fantastic, most people who were just existing. I could only see the annoying people. Psychologically, to give this a name, this is called mood congruent perception. Basically, our pre existing feelings about something go on to incorrectly dictate what we see, what we remember, what we experience in a way that does not match objective reality. This was actually first described by Gordon Bauer. He is like one of the most You might not know this, he's one of the most famous cognitive psychologists. Fun fact, Gordon Bauer is actually the creator of mnemonic devices. He's also responsible for, like so much of what we know about memory and short term and long term memory and working memory. But he identified this specific phenomena mood congruent perception in the eighties when he noticed that he could get people to remember different aspects of a situation not by changing the situation, but by changing how they felt. So he would deliberately, you know, make them angry, make them sad, make them frustrated, and then be like, what did you notice about the situation? Whatever mental and mood like state he put them in would actually almost systematically change what they saw. We have to be aware of this attentional bias. It's tricky when you're already in it. But genuinely call yourself out when you are being the bad mood, call yourself out when you have bad expectations at the start of every day that this day is can turn out just like the others, it's gonna be shit. Genuinely, I think that really snapped me out of it was realizing that the distance between being annoyed and amused is quite small, and if you can just shift across those mood states, the load becomes lighter, Like if I was really annoyed at something, I'd be like. But also this is kind of funny, right shift from annoyed to amuse, because they sit very close together on like the emotional scale. Let's talk about some of the worst things that you can do when you are in a funk. We're going to take a short break. When we return, we're going to jump into it. So there are some things that are gonna make your funk worse scientifically. The first is when you chase or soothe with quick dope mean constantly, or when you involve yourself in passive consumption rather than turning your attention towards long term gratification. We all know it, but when you're in a funk, your phone scrolling may feel temporarily soothing, but it's actually just emotional avoidance and at times like it really is just like an unsustainable form of emotional regulation, because it's just covering up the bad feelings without interrogating them and not doing anything to really investigate the root cause of why you feel so terrible, Like this is not going to pull you out of a funk. Consuming more is not going to help you. It may distract you from your thoughts for a little while, which you know sometimes is necessary. It may give you a little burst of dopamine, but you need to shift away from consumption to creation if you want, if you actually want something to change. Literally nothing changes. If nothing changes, doom scrolling or distraction feels like something's changing because the hard feelings are being quieted for a while, like they're kind of going away. Nothing, it's just turning down the volume. You know, we have to get into this creation mindset, which we're going to talk about in a second. But there's some other things that you can that you are probably doing that aren't good for you being in this funk. The second one is self isolating. It feels like the easiest thing in the world, right to doomscrob but also to self isolate, especially since, let's be honest, when we're in a funk, people are just really annoying. Even the people you love most. You just don't want them in your space because your entire nervous system is already being like repeatedly graded by life, like a frickin cheese grater. But you need to fight that urge to push people aside and to withdraw from them and realize this is what you have to realize it for what it is, which is your brain is trying to avoid stimulation, friction, and oversaturation of any kind. The problem is this instinct becomes self reinforcing. Social withdrawal reduces opportunity is for positive reinforcement, like connection, like laughter, like support, and that in itself would provide proof that life is better than you think it is. But when we are withdrawing, we're essentially shutting down opportunities for life to give us evidence for its own goodness. I do think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes we don't want to see others and we don't want to be around others because of feelings of shame that arise from being in a funk. Definitely in today's hyper productive society, always working, always hustling, always making big moves, always happy, you know, sometimes we don't want to be the buzzkill. You don't want to be the one who's like throwing that off. But it's unrealistic. To think that we will always be like that. And something I've been saying to myself more and more is that giving people the opportunity to love you through ugly seasons of life is a gift to them as much as it is a gift to you. Seriously, ask yourself. I'll think about it as well. But I kind of remember my I already know the question I'm gonna ask. But do you get a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction from helping your friends? Like, isn't it a great feeling when somebody wants your advice or asks you for help, Because it's like, it's this beautiful thing if like, oh my god, you thought of me, you wanted me during this time, Like I'll be right over. That's a great feeling to feel wanted, even if it's to help somebody. If you feel that joy in helping others, don't deprive them from getting to have that same feeling as well with you. Also, just from a purely scientific perspective, study after study will tell you that even if self isolating feels good temporarily, your brain just does cope better with people around you. Even the deepest of introverts still needs to be seen sometimes and we're not just talking physically here, we're talking emotionally. We thrive best in the safety of others. So those are two things that I definitely don't think you should be doing and you should be conscious of. Let's talk about the positive things that you can be adding back into your life or the strategies. I should say, not all of these are about adding things. Some of the strategies that could maybe help you get out of a funk. What actually works in these situations is a couple of things. I think. My very simple advice is, like get off your phone and see your friends only takes us so far. But you really need to be conscious of again the factors in your life that are making it harder for you to feel optimistic about life. And I know I said some things that you could add. Let's start with the things that you need to subtract before you try and add more things into your routine, more novelty, more creation. It's very easy to just add more things in, but at some point you are going to have to sit down with a piece of paper, sit down and look at your life and just have an honesty moment and list everything that is making your life suck. Sometimes you need to do a bit of an audit every habit, every weekly activity, every obligation. I want you to write it down. What do you think the reason your life sucks right now? Where is it coming from. This could be seeing friends that you've outgrown. It could be drinking alcohol. It could be a really long and inefficient community. It could be where you live. It could be reading the comments on reels. It could be looking at your phone first thing in the morning. It could be always doing everything from eating to showering to exercising in a very rushed, frantic manner. I need you to really do an audit. Think about whether the things that are genuinely making your life worse are essentials or they could be changed. And think about as well why you are doing them. Why are you drinking, Why are you still seeing these people, Why are you still living in the city? Do you need these things in your life if they make life harder? Sometimes being in a funk is made worse by looking at all the things you have to go through in the next few weeks and months ahead, looking at all the things on your to do list and wanting to do none of them, and just feeling a deep sense of like there is nothing to look forward to because my circumstance is a crap. This has a name, It's called anticipatory dread. Basically, our brain scans the future, thinks about all the horrible things waiting for us that could or couldn't happen, and that makes us feel terrible because it borrows all the future frustration, anchor annoyance, and it makes it your current problem again, have a genuine sit down, have an intervention with yourself tonight. What are the pain points in your life? What are the points? What are the things you keep bumping up against and keep going out and haven't thought to remove. Once you do that, then you can get down to kind of adding things in. And the first thing I think everyone should be prescribed more of is time and nature. People are increasingly turning to nature based interventions to deal with like the cognitive overload of modern life, because it resets something really fundamental in us, mainly our natural human drives. Being in nature resets our curiosity, resets our attentional systems, resets our sense of awe. In fact, there is this fascinating idea I personally love called the biophilia hypothesis, which basically says that every human, all of us, we are innately driven to seek out a connection with nature and to return to nature, and when that is prevented, we suffer. When we haven't had enough time in the woods, by the ocean, in the trees, in the bush, there's a part of us that switches off. A meta analysis from twenty twenty two actually looked at thirty nine studies that examin ment to the link between spending time in nature and mental health conditions. Ninety two percent of these studies demonstrated consistent improvements across any and every health outcome when individuals engaged with natural outdoor environments. Mental health outcomes specifically improved in ninety eight percent of these studies, so not in ninety eight percent of people. Ninety eight percent of these studies. Physical and cognitive health outcomes as well showed improvements around eighty three and seventy five percent, respectively. That is a huge success rate. If those studies were investigating a cure for a deadly disease, an eighty three seventy five ninety eight percent improvement like that would represent a seismic result. It would be in it would be making headlines. Nature resets our brain like nothing else. So if you are in a funk and you have the time, or you can make the time, dedicate yourself to an outdoor day or an outdoor afternoon, or an outdoor three or four hours once a week, and even if it requires a little bit of travel, if you live in a big city, I really do think it's worth it. It's fundamental whilst you are outside. I have another strategy that you can combine with your prescribed nature time. This is a combo and this is an exercise I started doing a little while ago to kind of overcome against some of that projected negativity I was having, specifically towards others, which I'm not proud of, but it was happening. What I did to counteract that sense of like everybody's annoying, everybody's in my way, everybody's blah blah blah, was that as I was walking, running, riding, whatever it was, as people passed me by, I made myself focus in on one person at a time, one after another, and every single person I had to give them a compliment in my mind. So if I were sitting on the tube and there was five people in front of me. I would silently have to go one, two, three, for five and give them all a compliment. I must have talked about this for but like it's a habit that truly shifted me out of a really dark, pessimistic time. It forced my brain to have to see the good in everyone and everything when it was looking for the worst. Even the most like unassuming person, you can find something cool or interesting about them, Like you can be like, wow, her hair color, his choice of tie. I can tell he's really enjoying his music. Oh, what a beautiful relationship he has with his daughter. It becomes this really nice ritual of looking for the good. A twenty seventeen paper also found habits like this. Rituals like this orient you towards the good side of humanity, and they actually do, in fact make people nicer to you, which in turn changes your expectations about how nice people actually are. Becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. In the opposite direction, another thing we need to make sure we're doing is fulfilling our core soul needs the concept I talked about it in our episode quite a similar episode actually, now that I think about it. On How to Rediscover Your personality. It just like from Earl January this year. You know, now that I think about it, probably is like an amazing Companion episode to this one. But in that episode I talk about soul needs. Soul needs are the spiritual things you do to fill your cup. And when I say spiritual, I don't mean religious, although that can definitely be a big part of it. I mean the stuff that makes you feel human, feel individual, feel like you are connected to others, and you are connected to the world that isn't always fulfilled by other things. And guess what, your soul needs aren't productive the way your other needs are. In fact, they don't need to achieve anything. They actually become more worthwhile if they're not achieving anything. And they include things that inspire adventure, that inspire curiosity. They include needs like playfulness, silliness, humor, kinship, indulgence, or savoring things soul needs Filling your soul needs, you know, might include listening to your favorite album. It might include having great sex. It might include well having great sex with yourself or somebody else. It might include really laboring over a meal, really like getting fresh, tasty ingredients, making that meal as an act of love to yourself, having a bath, laying in the grass, anything that reminds you that you are not a machine, which is hard to come by in this day and age. Protect your soul needs, view them as just as important as your physical needs, and try and fulfill just one soul need per day outside of your normal habits as a person. Make it a priority again, almost prescribe this to yourself like an intervention, like a medication. Sprinkle them back into your life like a soul needs supplement, like your frickin' tinker bell. Remember, when we are in a funk, it's often an aggregation of just like little things that have let us down or got us down, but it's also an aggregation of the loss of the little things that lift us up as well. Like I genuinely think, it's like two sides of the same coin. So make sure that that that is an active priority for you. Of course, on top of that, and following on from before, try and also commit to doing new things, practicing small deviations from the routine. If novelty and a lack of it is why we end up in a funk, and obviously makes sense logically that adding it back in might reverse the funk. But like, it doesn't have to be monumental, just like taking a different route on your way home from work, going to the supermarket and only buying from brands you've never tried, or only getting stuff you've always been like, Oh my god, I always wanted to try that, Like that kind of novelty, reshuffling the layout of your house, listening to a new album every single day instead of the same stuff. Checking out a film you probably wouldn't normally watch, maybe something with subtitles like all these things. Meeting your friends at different places rather than just the same old pub, like switching up your gym routine. These things are so small and they are not life changing, but they fundamentally change your brain and your perception of reality because they just make you see that in different reality is possible, even if it is only a degree of separation away from your previous reality. If you want to commit to something more major, if your funk is really get into an intense level, perhaps you could request like a few days off work and use those days to do something brand new for yourself. My friend she did a my friends Shelby amazing woman did a surfing course last year because she's the coolest person alive and that she was like that was a reset for me, just creating new distinct memories you never thought you were going to create, especially in your twenties. Firstly, medicine to cure the funk. Also psychologically protective long term, so that when you perhaps are in the state again, you can come back to this time when you really pushed yourself out of this moment and feel confident that you will survive again again. Novel experiences are so valuable. They trigger slow dopamine release, They improve neuroplasticity, They give us a sense that there is more to live for, and so especially especially if like you've just started a nine to five job, especially if you've just moved into a corporate career, especially if like you're finding work in life and relationships overwhelming. This needs. I literally cannot stress enough how mentally vital this is for you. I think being stuck in a funk because obviously something that can feel never ending. I've been there, I'm in it with you at times. I probably was a couple months ago, very deep in it. But I promise you it will end feeling flat and unmotivated, terrible ways to feel. But they aren't permanent. You guys know how I feel about the winters of life. But I truly believe that some years and months are filled with activity, filled with harvest, filled with new opportunities, filled with feelings of optimism. That cannot be the season all the time. You need the seasons where things are slow and dull and not necessarily what you want them to be to support the summers of life. It's just natural. As much as like winter, autumn, spring, summer are natural parts of how nature regenerates itself and cycles through itself and has different periods for different seasons and different feelings like you have that as well, And not to put like a toxic positive spin on it, but sometimes when I am in a funk, and you know, the one I was in previously, I was like, what is this trying to tell me about how I can deepen my experience of being alive? And what is this current state trying to tell me about what I need to reprioritize in my life and the rest that I need and the habits that need to change. And so I think, even though it's terrible, it is still a valuable experience. Obviously, do all these things and Obviously we want to rush out of these moments as fast as possible, and we want to like feel better as fast as possible. But it's also important to just use this as a queue for what isn't going right and what temporary fixes maybe aren't working, and do a full reset, do a full seasonal winter reset, so that you can kind of come alive in this next season of life having kind of plowed and replanted. Oh my god, I'm really taking this metaphor for a run, but like having really, yeah, replanted your garden with more fertile, more blossoming habits, practices and routines that match you better. So that is all we have time for today. I really hope that this episode. I hope it gets you out of a funk. I hope it gets you thinking about maybe what needs to change in your life and not feeling ashamed that maybe something in your life isn't going right, and it is that you do have the opportunity to fix it. Like I think, just taking accountability for the fact that your life isn't perfect, it's not a shameful thing. It's like the best part of new beginnings is like the beginning is the beginning stages and is this moment of recognition. So I hope you're able to take some motivation and inspiration from this and like change something in your life, whether it is dramatic or not. Thank you as always to our researcher Lucy Davidson for doing a lot of the research and looking into a lot of the papers for today's episode. I feel like they were so cool and fascinating to read through. You can follow us on social substack, you can buy a book. You can look at our website. I don't know if anybody looks at websites anymore, but the option is there. In the links below. We also always include some of our favorite sources, so if you want to go deep into this episode and some of the research we spoke about, you can do so below. If you haven't yet watching watch an episode on Netflix just for me, just you can check it out and see what it looks like. I do think our set is really really cool, so we'd love to see you over there. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. I hope you get out of your funk soon. We will talk later.