How to get out of a slump without overhauling your life

I have to be honest about the stretch that produced this one.

After I came back from a speaking tour in East Africa, I went into a kind of tunnel. Some of it was uncertainty about my visa status in Canada, some of it was not knowing what my life looked like after school, and I could not point at any single cause. I was unmotivated and doing the bare minimum.

The clearest evidence: I did not send the newsletter for over two months. The one thing I had publicly committed to doing every week, and I just stopped.

What got me moving again was not a decision to try harder. It was changing a handful of small daily things, and noticing about a week later that I felt different.

The framing that made it stick

The prompt was an episode of Ali Abdaal's podcast with TJ Power, which organises daily habits around four brain chemicals: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins.

A caveat I want to be straight about, because it matters more on a page than it did in an email. I am not a neuroscientist and I have not verified the underlying science. Popular versions of brain chemistry are heavily simplified, and I would not want you to take anything below as a physiological claim.

What I found useful was not the biology. It was that four categories are easier to hold in your head than a list of twenty habits, and each category points at a genuinely different kind of input. Treat it as a filing system rather than an explanation. The habits are worth doing on their own terms, and you can test every one of them against your own week.

One: effort, early

The category that deals with motivation and drive.

The thing I found counterintuitive is that reward arriving without effort seems to leave you flatter afterwards, not better. An hour of scrolling and an hour of difficult work can both end in tiredness, but only one of them ends with you wanting to continue.

What changed things for me:

• No phone for the first fifteen minutes after waking. This one did the most work of anything on this list.
• One block of genuinely focused attention on a single task. Fifteen minutes counts.
• Thirty seconds of cold water at the end of a shower. Unpleasant, effective, free.
• Small acts of order. Making the bed, clearing the desk. It feels trivial and it is not.
• Having one goal large enough that it is worth the effort. Without that, the rest is maintenance with nothing to maintain.

The general shape: do something requiring effort before you do something requiring none.

Two: people, properly

The category about connection, and the one most likely to be quietly missing when you feel bad.

Scrolling through other people's lives is not the same input as being with someone, even though it occupies the same slot in the day. You can be in contact constantly and still be short of this.

• Do one thing for one person daily. Small. Buy someone a coffee, send the message you have been meaning to send.
• Physical contact with people you are close to. Hug your friends and family more than you currently do.
• Actual eye contact and actual listening in conversations, instead of waiting for your turn.
• Start the day with something you are grateful for rather than something you are behind on.
• At night, name one thing that went well, however small.

That last one sounds soft and did more for me than most of the productivity advice I have taken.

Three: outside, before screens

The category about baseline mood and steadiness.

• Get outside into natural light before you look at your phone.
• Slow breathing when you notice yourself accelerating. Four seconds in, six out.
• Eat food that is recognisably food, most of the time.
• Spend real time outdoors, ideally walking without headphones.
• Protect sleep. Screens away for half an hour beforehand.

None of this is new information. That is rather the point. Everybody knows this list and almost nobody is running it, and the gap between knowing and running is where a slump lives.

Four: move your body

The category about stress and physical relief.

• Move daily. A walk counts, and on a bad day a walk is the correct answer.
• Heat. A hot bath, a sauna if you have access.
• Sing. In the shower, in the car, badly.
• Laugh properly, with people, until it is uncomfortable.
• Stretch, or do some yoga.

The bar here is lower than people set it. Any movement beats the workout you skipped because you did not have ninety minutes.

What I would actually do

If you are in this right now, do not run all twenty. That is how you get two good days and then nothing.

Pick one from each of the four and hold it for a week. Mine were the phone rule, one message to one person, getting outside before screens, and moving daily. Four things, none of them impressive individually.

The reason to take one from each rather than four from one is that they cover different failure modes. Four habits about effort will not help if what is actually missing is people.

And be honest about which problem you have. If a week or two of the basics changes nothing, this is probably not a habits problem. It might be that you have lost the thread of why you are doing the thing at all, which is a different diagnosis with a different fix, and I wrote about that in how to avoid burnout with the three Ps. If it goes deeper than either, that deserves actual support and not a routine.

I got out of that stretch. Not through a decision, through about a week of unremarkable mornings.