Are you feeling unmotivated, in a funk and having a hard time getting inspired? It can be hard to get moving when you just don’t have the energy or enthusiasm you need. Don’t worry, in this video podcast I’m going to show you some simple and practical steps to get out of a funk and get motivated. From finding our what is causing the issue to easy and practical strategies, I’ll walk you through the process of getting back on track and feeling inspired again. So if you’re ready to get motivated and make a change, hit play and let’s get started!
ad disclosure – this post may contain affiliate links
Table Of Contents
Can’t Listen Right Now? Read On Instead…
Hi guys! Welcome back to the Real Talk with Rhi Podcast. I am Rhi from MummyOfFour.com. I am so delighted you have joined me today, thank you so much for tuning in.
Now today we are going to talk about something that we all need to do from time to time, and that is, how to get out of a funk.
I feel that this is something that I’ve had to do quite recently.
I definitely felt like I was in a massive funk.
We got back from an amazing trip. If you’re subscribed to my Mummy Of Four Does Disney Channel, you know that over February half term we went to Disneyland Paris. It was amazing. But then I caught the flu and when we got back I was feeling really, really rough.
There were a whole load of family issues going on, and I just felt with my health issues combined with all the extra stress of things going on, I was in such a funk.
I didn’t know what I should be doing with my channel and for work, I felt like I was out of ideas. I just could not shake it and pull myself together.
So I did a number of things that I’m going to chat about today. All of these are kind of tried and tested methods to get myself feeling more like myself again, because let’s face. We could all do with that, can’t we?
Call It Out
So the first step that I would say when you are feeling in a bit of a funk, like a low energy, low vibe kind of place, is to identify it.
The simple act of identifying you don’t feel right, you don’t feel like yourself. You’re not firing on all cylinders, or whichever analogy you want to use. That very first step of acknowledging it can be really powerful.
It is so easy to just feel in these low moods and to just be in these low moods without even acknowledging that it’s happening, and that way the low mood has all the power and we cannot take it back.
Find The Cause
The next thing I would probably tend to do when I have identified I’m in a said funk is to look at what might be causing it. Again, identifying the cause and just knowing why you’re feeling like that can in itself be really healing , and help you start to climb out of it and feel a lot better.
So is there a situation that is causing you to feel really low energy? Is it a relationship with a coworker or a friend or a family member that’s dragging you down? Are there specific health issues? Is it your time of the month?
Now, if you’ve been following me on my YouTube channel for a while or over on Instagram,
you can check those out, they’re both Mummy Of Four UK.
You’ll know that I’ve actually had some serious kind of women’s problem, shall we say, with my cycles and things. And at the point of recording this podcast I’m due to have, but I’ve not yet [00:03:00] had an operation to kind of sort it all out. But for me, I’ve never had this kind of regular cycle.
And I realised recently , that people with a, in inverted commas “normal cycle” can actually identify, during exact periods of the month when they’re going to be feeling better or feeling more kind of in a funky low vibration. And understanding your body like this. I mean, they should teach this stuff in school.
We should not have to figure out, out ourselves as adults, but we, that’s a talk for another podcast all about female cycles. But if you have one of these normal cycles, literally identifying where you are in your cycle, and if that could be the cause, could be like, oh, it’s okay. So it’s not like this isn’t a permanent thing, this isn’t me, this is my nasty hormones just playing tricks with me.
Reach For Your Journal
So another way that’s really good to get out of a funk is to
journal on something.
Journaling can look different for lots of different people.
I’ve talked about journaling quite a lot on my YouTube channel. I’ve written blog posts and things about it.
You can do it whichever way it suits you, but to be honest, if you’re in a funk, just journaling about the problem that you are having, the way you would chat to a friend. But this is something that could be done without to involve other people in any time of other day or night.
This could look like writing just sort of free consciousness.
Whatever you want to just get out onto the page. It could be spidered diagrams, whatever it might be.
I know some people worry a bit about writing, you know, negative things down. And from a law of attraction point of view, are you attracting negativity into your life. But honestly, if these things are going on in your subconscious and they really are running the show, these negative thoughts, by calling them out into the light of day, , you can take back control and realise, do you know what this thing I was worrying about was not as big an issue as I originally thought.
This has happened to me so, so many times.
A problem, shared is a problem halved.
Pick up the phone and meet up with a friend. Have a good old chat.
I am very lucky to still have a best friend that I’ve had since I was, let me see, 12 years old. She is a week younger than me and we’ve been friends since we were 12 I’m so lucky to have her, she really, really gets me. So I’m hoping that you have someone that you can kind of go to in your life and vent, discuss the problem with,
and so often, especially if you’ve got someone that really understands you, when you are in one of these funks, they can be far more objective than you can be when you’re stuck in your own head. Problem shared is definitely a problem halved. I know that’s a bit of a cliche, but that’s because it’s just true.
But you know what? If you’ve not got a person in real life that you can go to, luckily we’ve got the internet now, and there are so many supportive groups on Facebook, Instagram accounts, places where you can talk with like-minded people, often people that are going through similar things to you.
So for example, when you have a very, very small baby, it can sometimes feel really, really isolating and sometimes the problems that you are having at the time with your small, small baby, can be easily forgotten even by mums as their children are older.
In this situation where perhaps you have a very small baby, baby groups where you can meet mums with babies exactly the same age can be so helpful.
When your babies are really tiny, a baby of two months compared to a baby of 12 months is such a different experience.
And when you are put in a situation where you can meet mums with babies almost exactly the same age, it can be so helpful and freeing to be like, oh, well what are you going through with this?
And just to bounce off each other and realise that actually everyone is in the same boat.
Well, everyone’s in the same storm anyway. People are probably in slightly different size boats, depending on how much support they have, what their home situation is. But definitely they’re all in the same storm.
So if you are listening or watching this podcast on YouTube, you can let me know in the comments.
Do you have that one person you can go to or is your place to go, a family member, a friend online community. Where do you go for your support when you’re in that funk and you really need to vent?
A Word From Future Rhi
Editing Rhi here, which you may not notice the difference if you are just listening, but if you’re watching the video podcast on YouTube, yes, you can now see I got headphones and my microphone in the shot. And there is a reason for this. It’s because I was editing this podcast that you are listening to and I heard some kind of audio squeaks and weirdness, and I had two options.
I could rerecord it from scratch, and the perfectionist in me wanted to do that. The perfectionist in me wanted to just start again, and I could have done that, but it would mean that I’d be one more [00:08:00] podcast behind. And to be honest, it’s probably best to just record something totally different. Then I’ve got an extra piece of content out there in the world for you guys to listen to. So then , the second option would be to just chuck it out there as it was, hope no one noticed. Which actually when I put a little poll on my Instagram stories, that’s what 99% of you voted for. They said it’ll be fine Rhi, just chuck it up.
I have gone for secret option three, which is to very briefly interrupt this podcast to discuss it because it harps back to something I was talking about in my very first podcast, which is overthinking and perfectionism.
Yet I overthink so much. I think so many of us do, and I think according to my dms and all the messages and comments I get from you guys, so many of you do too. And it would’ve been so easy to be like, oh, it’s not perfect. I’ll do it again. But then where does it stop? Something else isn’t perfect.
I’ll record it again. I’ll end up never uploading a [00:09:00] podcast. And that would be so easy to do. It’s what I did when I launched my planner. I put it off and off and off, and eventually I just have to think Done is better than best and I’m putting it out there. So how may this apply to you in your real life as a mum going about your business?
It’s so applicable. Imagine now let’s take our children. So imagine your toddler starts to walk, you manage to catch it on camera, but then you say to them, oh, do you know what darling?
You did wobble a bit. So should we film it again to see if we can get a better version? If every time as our children tried something, they felt criticised and it wasn’t perfect, they’d eventually give up and none of us would walk or learn to read or write or anything. But yet we do this to ourselves as adults all the time.
We beat ourselves up for things not being perfect. So this podcasting thing, although I’ve been doing videos for quite a long time, is really new to me. I’m having two, if you are watching the video, I’ve got headphones on now so I can listen to the audio to check it’s not going all squiffy. So far [00:10:00] so good. I think.
I have to take the audio for the audio podcast and then for the video podcast, I have to go together with the video and like have to like stick it all together in post production in my editing software. Oh, hang on. Someone’s at the door.
Okay, I’m back. Yes. Someone is at the door because of real life. You know what I mean? Real life happens sometimes. And could I start recording this whole segment again? Yes. But it’s defeating the object of what I’m trying to say, and that is, Progress over perfection. It’s what I talked about in that last podcast.
So I’m asking you to forgive some of the audio little squiggles that you’re going to hear in the rest of this podcast when we’re talking back about getting out of a funk and, and I’ve got to say, when I am in a funk, I am far less forgiving of imperfections. But we’re all human. And as Mums definitely we beat ourselves up way too much.
So I want you to have a little think where in your life perfectionism is just procrastination, dressed up as perfectionism.
Maybe you’re thinking, oh, I haven’t got enough time to clean the whole kitchen, so I won’t bother. I just will leave it. Whereas actually you’re better off doing a little bit of it and getting it done might not be perfect. Do a little power hour. I don’t have time to change all the beds, so I won’t bother doing any.
Just change one. Just do one progress over perfection.
So I might be recording future podcast episodes with my headphones on, and you can see my microphone and all the gubbins, but I think that has to be okay. I want this podcast to be a little bit more about real life.
I mean, I’ve called it Real Talk with Rhi not a perfect name. It is what I want to do, which is just keep everything a little more real.
So now I’m gonna hand you back to back in time Rhi who is going to continue to talk about how to get out of a funk.
Let it out
If that means a good cry, maybe put on a really sappy movie, some sad songs.
If you need to feel your feelings, sometimes it’s better to just feel them, let them out. They can be really, really cathartic, and then you can move on. Rather than feeling kind of stuck in that funk.
Especially as a mum, that can be really challenging because if you’re feeling in a funk and you’re feeling really low energy, you’ve still got tiny humans that you have to care for, who still need you to be at your best.
So sometimes the quickest way out of it, is to stop pushing through, let the feelings out, feel the feelings so you can get past them.
Create A Plan
Next thing you can do sort of related to journaling, I suppose. And again, this is something that you can do when you phone your friend, and that’s make a bit of a plan and a brainstorm of things that you can do in your specific situation to work out your issue, the thing that’s causing you to feel in the funk.
Or quite often we lead such busy lives. It’s when a number of things come at us from different directions that you just feel like don’t feel like yourself and you don’t know which way to turn.
I know those are the times that I really struggle. It’s like you can have one thing,
you know, one extra ball to juggle amongst all of the life of the children and all the things, but you throw a few extras in.
You then got family problems and work problems and health problems. That’s when it just becomes totally overwhelming.
Make this plan, whether you do this on your own, with your journal with a friend, I definitely recommend if you’re not speaking it through with someone to get pen to paper. I find that really helps me clarify in my mind, and then you can add to that list of ideas of how you can help improve your situation.
Is it that you need to ask for more help?
Are you struggling with the housework?
So you need to outsource and perhaps get a cleaner in, be it once a month just to help you get back to it.
If it’s financial issue, where can you go for advice? Sort that out.
Which action steps can you take to make that better?
If your job is becoming too stressful, who do you speak to at work to help you take the steps to make it more manageable?
They say a goal that a plan is just a wish, so make that plan and then you’ve got some action steps, some structure to follow so you can start feeling more like you again.
If In Doubt, Get Out
One very quick and easy solution when you’re feeling in a funk is just to get outside and get some fresh air.
Maybe that’s sit in a garden, go for a walk, sit in a park, sit outdoors in a cafe.
Fresh air really can be so underrated for blowing away the cobwebs.
It’s funny because we’re in that kind of funk,
or at least when I’m in that kind of funk, the last thing I wanna do is go anywhere.
I just want to stay in and become more introverted.
But actually getting outside just helps so much every time.
Switch It Up
And then the next thing you can do, rather than changing your environment by literally just stepping outside, is physically switching up your environment.
I have always found that sometimes when you’re in a massive funk, you associate your home and the way it is at the moment by feeling really stuck.
So sometimes by refreshing your home or the place you work or just the place you spend the most time, you can really help to feel like you’ve had a fresh start.
Maybe if you know you are struggling to sleep, rearrange your bedroom, stop staring at the same bit of ceiling where you associate your insomnia switch around your bedroom, feel like you’ve got a nice fresh bedroom, perhaps with blackout curtains added a place where you really can sleep better.
So if you watch some of my recent YouTube videos, you’ll know that I’ve just had a recent refresh in my office and part of that was because I was in a massive funk.
So following the flu, which took me the best part of the month to get over, I was feeling really creatively stuck. I didn’t know what to make videos about.
I mean, part of that was probably because I had brain fog from the flu, but I was just generally feeling like I don’t know what to do. I didn’t feel creative.
So I thought, you know what? I’m going to switch around my office. I’m going to fall back in love with making videos by making my home office a nice space to be by making my home office’s an easier place to film.
By having everything I need where I need it, I’m more likely to actually get stuff done.
Maybe you’re in a rut and you’re fed up cooking. Swap around some of the things in your kitchen cupboards. For example, when we lived in our last house. And shout out if you’re one of the OG followers and you remember when my YouTube channel was in our old house, but we had a much bigger kitchen.
This kitchen is actually easier to use the smaller kitchen in our current home. And I could have done something so, so simple in the old house that I just didn’t even think of, and that’s switching around the internals of the cupboards.
We’d have the dishwash at our one end, and then the plates lived up to the other end and.
You had to walk them back past the dishwasher to get to the table. With hindsight, it was ridiculous. But by switching those things around, that would’ve made me fall back in love with that kitchen because it would’ve been easier to use.
So switching up your space, really I cannot rave about enough. I’ve spent a little bit of money buying some new desks or this room, and yes, I did have a new chair as I wanted something with a lower back, but my original plan was just to swap around the front chair.
You can literally freshen up a room without spending any money at all and just switching things around.
I did a similar thing in our living room where it just didn’t sit right and I actually put some different, which way round shall I have this room options on my Instagram stories? And one of my lovely followers came up with the idea for how the room is now, and I absolutely love it.
Our living room went from being a room that didn’t quite sit right to being something amazing without spending any extra money and just having a switch around.
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) Tapping
Another really great technique for getting out of a funk is tapping, and this really helps if you’ve got an especially stressful situation.
If you are suffering from anxiety out something, and this is. Tapping on certain points on your hand, your face, your collarbone, and under your arm in order to relieve stress. The idea is think about the thing that’s making you stressed at the beginning of the exercise as you sit and tap on the side of your hand.
Check out the video below that explains tapping.
If you tap on the side of your hand, you tap on certain points on your face.
I’ve tried this so many times. It’s the technique I do with my children who have autism.
Granted, it doesn’t work with every single meltdown, but it’s such a great asset to have in our toolkit because it works most of the time.
Dance It Out
The next one as they say in Grey’s Anatomy is to dance it out. Any other Grey’s Anatomy fans out there by the way? I have been watching that show since my eldest child was newborn, and I love it. I’m so obsessed with it. I think I’ve seen every episode multiple times .Anyway, in Grey’s Anatomy, whenever they were having a bit of moment, whenever they were in a funk, they would dance it out.
I do this with the children all the time. I think I’ve done this my whole life really. I used to dance when I was younger, so I’ve always associated dancing with feeling better, elevated mood. It was just Grey’s Anatomy that referred to that term. But dance it out just really speaks to me because you can literally dance out the stress, dance out the funk. Stick on some really loud music, just jump around your kitchen dance like no one’s watching because no one will be watching.
Dance out the funk until its if not gone east a lot.
And if dancing doesn’t speak to you, then you could do something like going for a run, going to the gym, doing a class, any form of moving your body, even if it’s just going for a walk, we’ll raise your endorphins and help you get out of that funk.
Though personally, running has just never been my thing. It’s been one of those things I’d love to do. I’d love to be a runner. I would love the idea of being someone that goes for a run, but it’s just not me. I guess it’s not for everyone, is it? And I think as I’m getting older, I’ve realised that if I want to do something exercise base, I’m actually going to stick to it’s got to be [00:20:00] something that’s more inflow and less something I kind of hate.
Anyway, I digress. We were talking about getting out of a funk, weren’t we?
Wash The Funk Away
A really quick fix, I find for getting out of a funk while I’m feeling really overwhelmed is simply to have a shower. I literally feel it’s the last thing I want to do when I’m really feeling in a funk, but the warm water, it just feels like it’s washing all the stress away and down the plug hole.
I can’t think of a time in my life where I’ve ever had a shower and did not feel better whether I’ve been feeling mentally or physically out of sync.
In fact, I do remember when my youngest was born and my youngest is now six and she was three weeks early, she was induced.
I have talked on my YouTube channel before now about birth story and things, but let me know if you’d like to have a podcast or we chat all things this because that would be a good thing to have a little chit chat about.
Anyway, so she was born three weeks early and then several days after she was born, I think it was three days after she was born, cause I was over 48 hours postnatal. I started violently shaking and I ended up back in hospital with a really nasty infection. I had sepsis and I have one of those drip things in my arm and I just felt the roughest I’ve ever felt in my whole life.
And a few days in. So bear in mind I’ve, I’ve got like a thing in my arm like. Tap things to stick the the drip in, and I just feel disgusting and I’ve got a newborn baby that I’m caring for.
My other children had come down with chicken pox and my husband was at home with them. They weren’t allowed to come in and see me.
I was being barrier nursed. The whole thing was a mess and I just felt so ill, and then a few days in, Because I had been too ill to do anything other than going to the toilets. I cared for my baby just trying to feed through the night and still have no sleep and have sepsis all at once. So a few days in, I managed to drag myself into the shower, holding, hanging my arm outta the shower to try not get the plug thing in my arm, I can’t even think what it’s called, it called a cannula. Someone will film it, I’m sure on what it’s actually called. So I managed to have a shower and while I was in the shower, my think my auntie or someone I think had perhaps come to visit and was sitting with Zara, who was the baby, and the nurses, because I’d finally got out to the bed and managed to change my sheets.
For days and days I’d been sitting in just disgusting sheets, not showered, and I got out of that shower and sat in fresh sheets and I thought I was healed. I felt so much better. My medical status had not changed in that 20 minutes, but I felt so much better. I felt healed. I felt me mentally better, and therefore I got physically better.
So while a shower may not be actual magic. It can sometimes feel like it.
And if you just really, really don’t want to, then it’s worth dragging yourself into a shower if you are in a funk and you will feel better. I guarantee it.
Be Realistic About Moving Up The Scale
And if not a hundred percent better, just a step better. And sometimes when we’re in a funk that can be important to realise that we can’t go from, if it’s a scale of one to 10, 10 being like you are having the best day ever and zero being like you’re having the worst day ever. You can’t expect to go from a zero one or a two to a 10 in one step. It’s more about thinking about improving, how we can move up that scale in order to out of a funk.
We’ve got so much pressure on ourselves, on our lives these days, especially as Mums. The mental load we have to juggle is insane. The comparison trap is real and social media does not help with that. And sometimes when it’s just all too much saying, right, we need to feel like a 10 outta 10 now it’s just not achievable.
But by thinking we can kind of just step a rung up the ladder, I rung up the ladder by hanging out with a friend.
Thank you so much to everyone that has message to say that listening to my videos and things does, I feel like hanging out with a friend that really does mean so much because that’s kind of how I want it to feel. That just means so much to me. So thank you.
But think about working your way if you out of the ladder.
Know When To Seek Help
Which brings me to another point, which is just really, really important and that’s knowing when. It’s time to get some proper help. I’m no doctor. I am not mental health professional, but I think it’s just so important to be aware for the sake of ourselves and the sake of our children when it is just like a funk.
It is just a situational thing. And when things like align and we can, we can kind of feel better and, and do things like exercise and take these little steps that we’ve chatted about today. To feel better and when it’s something more. If you’re concerned that it might be something more, it is worth speaking to your doctor.
Just to ask then, could this be something more? Because let’s face it guys, if it was our children, if our children were struggling with something, we would take them to the doctor, wouldn’t we? So if we would do it for our children, why not do it for ourselves?
And remember that by taking care of your own mental health, you are setting that amazing example for your children as they grow up.
That if they’re struggling, they will then be more likely to ask for and get help. If they’ve known it’s okay to do that because you have modeled that for them.
So this has been Real Talk With Rhi! Thank you so, so much for tuning in. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and I shall catch you guys in the next episode.
Love Rhi x
My Planner
Get The Ultimate Mum Bundle Now
Join my email club and get your hands on my free “Ultimate Mum Bundle” of organisation printables.
