Youth Incorporated Magazine

Whether you’re going through some really tough times right now or you’re just feeling a little bit stuck, do you ever get the feeling that your life could be, well, better? It can be a hard feeling to deal with because it is so non-specific. It’s one thing to be able to pinpoint what’s wrong, like knowing that you’re in the wrong job or the wrong relationship. It’s something else when you have little more to go on than a nagging feeling that there must be more out there. Below are a few suggestions for how you can beat inertia, often in some indefinable way.

Introduce Some Fun

There’s a reason someone somewhere coined the word adulting to refer to all the tedious tasks of being a grown up. You need a word to describe how you can get ground down in all the administrative details of running a life. If you feel like all you do is go to work, come home and do housework and paperwork, what you might need is some kind of circuit breaker to shake you out of that rut. This is why many people take vacations, but if that isn’t practical for you right now, there are plenty of other, more low-key things you can do to make life a little more fun. 

For example, if you love to travel, consider a snack subscription box. These boxes can deliver snacks from all over the world each month. They give good variety of different kinds of food and can set you daydreaming about faraway places. There are other things you can do as well. Take an impromptu road trip. Try creating something, such as a song or a painting. Pitch a tent and sleep in your backyard. Anything that is silly and spontaneous can reignite those parts of you that too much adulting has ground down.

Empower Yourself

It can be easy to start thinking of yourself as someone to whom things happen instead of someone who makes things happen. If this is the case, put yourself back in the driver’s seat of your life. Ask out that person you’ve been admiring, apply for a job you keep telling yourself you’re not qualified for, or go back to school. 

If you feel too overwhelmed by everything to take any of these steps, take one or two mental health days that begin or end with your weekend. On the first day, just do whatever you want, even if it’s lying in bed bingeing TV. On the second day, get up and work on clearing out some tasks you’ve been putting off. This gives you one or two additional days to make a new plan of action with the cobwebs cleared away.

Practice Acceptance

This might sound a little too much like defeat, but it’s an addition to and not an instead of the suggestions above. Sometimes, you just have to slog your way through a bad or boring period in life. It can often be easier to cope with it if you acknowledge that things aren’t great and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it right now. Put your head down, power through and take comfort in knowing that better times are ahead.