Ep. 169: 5 Signs You're in A Funk (and how to get your momentum back!)

You know the feeling.

Nothing is terribly wrong in your life… but everything just feels a little harder than it should. Tasks feel heavier, motivation disappears, and you start questioning everything you're doing.

Lately, I’ve been feeling this way myself — with my exercise routine, my creative work, and even the behind-the-scenes work of podcasting, writing, and speaking.

Instead of pretending it isn’t happening, I decided to talk about it.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that momentum usually comes after action — not before it.

You don’t need a huge breakthrough to get unstuck.

Sometimes you just need one small step forward.

If you’ve been feeling a little stuck lately, this conversation is for you.

🎙 Listen to the full episode and let me know:

What’s one small step you can take today?

Transcript

When Nothing Is Wrong But Heavy

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Maybe I Can podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Weiss, and thank you so much for joining me today. So let me ask you something. Have you ever had a period where nothing is terribly wrong in your life, but everything just feels a little harder than it should? Maybe you're not excited about the things you normally would be, or everything like your tasks just feel heavier, or you keep putting things off. Sometimes we might call it being stuck or burnout, but sometimes it's just a funk. And I gotta tell you, that's how I've been feeling lately. I feel like I'm in a funk. And sometimes you feel like you're in a funk in one area of your life, and you decide that your whole life that everything needs an overhaul, which is typically not the case. So let me share with you what I feel stuck or funky or burnt out on. The first thing was really my exercise routine. I go to my current exercise routine is that three mornings a week at 6 a.m. I attend a strength training class. It's functional fitness for women over 40. And I've probably been going for about four years now, and I enjoy it. If I'm being honest, I don't care for strength training, but I like community, and so I love the fact that I'm with other women, and typically there's not too many of us. It is 6 a.m. after all. I would say we average about six people in the class, and so it's intimate, it's comfortable, everybody knows each other. There's just so many great things about it. But sometimes when you're doing something for a long time, it gets stale. And your body gets used to the exercises, even though we do vary the exercises every day. And I decided that maybe I've got to explore other alternatives. And so I've started doing that, and I'm still not sure where I'm going to land. But just taking that exploration step has helped me and actually made me reflect on my current routine and take a look at what I like and what I don't like, which has definitely been helpful. The other area that I feel like I'm in a funk is with my business. And when I say my business, I'm not, so those of you who've been listening know I do have a full-time job. I am an insurance agent. I'm not talking about that business. That's another whole animal unto itself, but I'm talking about being a podcaster, being an author, being a speaker. It all takes behind the scenes work. And right now it feels like a lot. And everything feels hard. And everything makes me think, oh, what am I doing this for? I don't feel like making any more videos for social media because it's very hard to imagine that I'm helping people or that people are listening. When you're only talking to yourself and your phone, you create all these ideas in your head. And I feel, you know, oh, it just feels hard and stale. And I've been doing it for so long now, and I don't feel like making the videos, and I don't know if I feel like recording this podcast, and what am I gonna talk about? And I don't even want to answer emails, and then I start questioning everything, right? Should I even be doing this? Maybe I'm not doing the right things. Why are isn't it moving faster? Why are more people listening? Why aren't I helping more people? Why aren't they contacting me? But I've lived long enough to know that this feeling doesn't necessarily mean something's wrong. It could just be that I've been pushing too hard. Or I am in a period of uncertainty. Or how about the fact that I'm just human? We are just human. And being in a funk, feeling stuck, that is human. It happens, right? So what are five signs that you might be in a funk? All right, the first one is everything feels harder than usual. Like making simple decisions, getting started, answering emails, just taking action feels harder than usual. Number two, you're distracted. You find yourself scrolling. Oh my goodness, I've got to tell you, I was never a scroller. Even though I do post on social media, here's a little behind the scenes glimpse, which I always am trying to explain to my mother, that I make the videos, and then luckily, I have an assistant, a wonderful assistant named Kennedy, who's in her 20s, and she takes it and then she does everything with it. She posts it, she does the hashtags, she writes the catch caption up. So I make the videos, but I really honestly don't very often go on. I first of all, I never watch the video. I don't really know when she posts it or which platform she's posting it on. And sorry, mom, that I'm calling you out, but she my mom will say to me sometimes after she watched a video, oh, I saw you. And over time, when you're making these videos, it gets a little monotonous because it doesn't get monotonous. I feel like the message doesn't change. And I guess that makes sense, but I it's hard coming up with different ideas to convey a similar message that are people that people are going to pay attention to. And so for me, that is a tough one. So I'm avoiding that. How about you start tasks but you just don't finish them? Oh my gosh, that's another one for me. I feel like, oh, let me sit down and start to answer my emails or go through my emails, I get a lot of opportunities for PR kind of things. Oh, somebody needs someone to comment on a particular situation. It could be, I don't know, women over 50 in transition. And then you, if you want to do that, and it might be used for a publication or on a podcast, well, then you have to sit down and you have to write and you have to answer them. And it's a time-consuming process. So I find myself avoiding that. So sometimes I'll click on the link. I'll think, oh yeah, that's something I would like to respond to, but I don't feel like doing it now. The third way, if you're in a funk, is you start questioning everything. Am I doing the right thing? Is this even worth my time doing this? And in my example, is this worth my time figuring out how to answer this reporter or journalist or whatever it is? Chances are they're not going to respond. Is it really worth it? Number four, you feel disconnected. You're functioning, but you're not energized. You're just going through the motions. And number five, you start being hard on yourself. You start saying things to yourself like, what's wrong with me? Or why can't I just get this together? So this is where you are right now. What do you actually do about it? When we feel stuck, we often think that we need to fix everything immediately. We think we need motivation first. Oh, I'm in a funk and I'm not doing anything because I just don't feel motivated. The minute that I do, then I'll take action. Or we think we need complete clarity first. For me, this is a big one. I can remember when I was writing my memoir, and this was my first experience with writing a book, I needed to understand the format of the book. It couldn't be in my own mind. I'll just start writing stories. Then what? Where is that gonna go? How do stories make a book? I didn't understand. I needed complete clarity. But it didn't come. It didn't come for weeks and weeks. So I learned that just write the story. And then later on, you'll decide and you'll figure out the clarity will come. The clarity will come, but you just have to start taking action. And I do remember when the clarity came. And I said, okay, here's how I can see these stories coming together and creating an overall story. And then I had an outline, and then once I had an outline, it was like bam, I was good to go. But leading up to that moment, it was tough. But if I hadn't taken action, the clarity never would have come. Momentum usually comes after you take action, not before. And so many of us believe just the opposite, that we have to wait for motivation to take the action to build the momentum. But honestly, taking action is the first step, not the second step. So what can we do when we find ourselves in a funk to actually move through it? The first thing is we just lower the bar a little bit. It doesn't have to be that we have to do every single thing that we need to. We lower the bar. We pick, let's say for the day, you pick three small things that you would consider a win for the day. So instead of answering a hundred emails, you're gonna answer five. You're gonna clean one junk drawer today instead of cleaning your entire house. You're gonna take a walk. And maybe, you know what? You're gonna say, I am gonna take a walk to the end of the block and back. And that's it. And if I do it, I'm proud of myself. That's a win. Look at something that is too big or too overwhelming. We freeze. And so lower the bar for the day, figure out what three things I can do, three small little things that at the end of the day I'll consider that to be a win. Another thing we can do when we're in a funk is change our physical state. I do find that maybe it's going outside and getting a breath of fresh air. For me, actually, movement, some type of movement, does help. Just change everything, change my perspective, get my energy going. It could be go take a shower. That also is right. That's energizing and wakes you up. Doing something, some small thing to change your current physical state can definitely help. I love the next one. Do the one thing you've been avoiding. Oh boy. It is so hard to do that. But thinking back to what I described about my 6 a.m. exercise class, we do these sets of exercises that we usually go through the whole entire set, maybe four times. And each exercise is somewhere between, it varies in each set, but it could be anywhere from let's say 30 seconds to 45 seconds. And typically I don't like what exercise I'm doing. But I tell myself, Deb, you can do anything for 30 seconds, 40 seconds, whatever it is. Come on, you can do it. Motivates me. That gets me through it. It's oh, really? You can't do something for 40 seconds? And taking that concept and applying it to anything really does help. So let's say that you create a 10-minute rule. Because come on, 30 seconds, all right. Maybe in my sets of exercises, that's different. And if it's exercising and that's what works for you, great. Pick some small period of time. So let's say that I'm sitting down and I'm going to, in my case, I'm going to, I have a bunch of videos to create. I'm going to say, I am going to create videos for five minutes. And I set the timer on my phone, and that's it. I do it for five minutes. Just work on something for five minutes. And maybe it's 10 minutes. And maybe the next time it's 12 minutes. But start small. Five or ten minutes. Do that one thing you've been avoiding and only do it for a short period of time. Spoiler alert, sometimes you start it and you actually find yourself continuing. But that's not the goal. The goal is to set that timer and do that one thing you've been avoiding for a short period of time. The next thing is that we can stop consuming videos on social media, scrolling, whatever it is your social media drug of choice, stop scrolling and start creating something. Doesn't have to be okay, like me, if you like to write, then write in one page of your journal. Organize one little area of your house, your desk, your nightstand. I look at my nightstand all the time. I have a stack of books on my nightstand. I haven't been reading in bed for pretty much uh a year or so, and I have these books just still sitting there. Why? And it's it actually clutters up my space. As a matter of fact, that's there you go, that's what I'm gonna do once I'm done with this podcast. Just one thing, it helps you gain a sense of control. Another thing we can do to try and get out of a funk is talk to someone. Phone a friend, take a walk with a friend, meet someone for coffee. Even if you're not going to share your funk with them, if you don't want to talk about it, just getting out of that funk by focusing on something or someone else, it is really helpful. You have to remember, and I'm telling myself this too, that you don't need to fix your entire life. You don't need a huge breakthrough. You just need one small step forward. And that's really what the sprinkle effect is all about. These little small shifts that create some type of movement. So if you're in a funk right now, like me, don't assume it means something's wrong with your life. Sometimes it just means you're in a moment that requires a little more patience and one small step forward. When you don't feel motivated, take the step anyway. One small step is often the sprinkle that brings your momentum back. So go out there, go take that one small action. Like I said, right now, I am going upstairs and I am going to clean my nightstand. What's one small step that you're gonna take to get yourself out of that funk? I'd love to know, so make sure that you either DM me on Instagram at debi.r.wiss, shoot me an email, Debbie at Debirwiss.com. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.