How to get yourself out of a ditch

When life overwhelms your systems, what can you do to get moving again?

Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash

I remember one chilly October night in 1988 like it was yesterday. It was my first semester in college, and I was driving back to my dorm. Parking was scarce, and if you arrived there after dinner hours, the nearest space might be a half mile or more away. I was way past dinner hours. So imagine my surprise at finding a great parking spot, right next to my building. In disbelief, but with enthusiasm, I pulled in — and then found out why the spot was empty: it contained a three-foot deep hole in the earth, perfectly car-sized and invisible in the evening dark, that promptly swallowed me and my 1982 Renault Alliance.

As my front wheels went down and my rear wheels went up, I reflected on the fact that first of all, things in life are usually the way they are for a reason and things that seem too good to be true, usually are; and second of all, sometimes you can simply be living your life, and despite your best intentions and through no fault of your own, find yourself bottoms-up in a ditch.

While these “bottoms-up” experiences are far from enjoyable—even if they become amusing anecdotes later—they do offer a chance to reset. When you find your life or career in a similar ditch, what are some guidelines to extricate yourself, regain your momentum, and learn something useful from the ordeal?

What a ditch can look like

These experiences happen to all of us in academia. Sometimes they are the results of our own actions or inactions, and sometimes not.

Ditches that we get ourselves into, often result from poor boundary maintenance and saying “yes” to too many things. It could be something as simple as grading overwhelm — which, to be fair, is not always the result of bad planning or syllabus choices on our part (maybe we teach coordinated 200-student lecture courses and don’t have control over assessments) but many times is on us. Or agreeing to “do all the things” out of a belief, not always rationally placed, that to do otherwise is to risk employment insecurity. It could be something outside academia altogether, emanating from our personal lives.

But perhaps it’s not on us. Life can just happen and you get hit with an illness, a toxic workplace, an unexpected major expense, or some other setback that takes whatever plans you had and throws them into chaos.

Right now, for me, this isn’t theoretical. I’m in the middle of two or three major disruptions that I won’t detail here, but I can tell you what they feel like: a low-grade hum, that is a curious mix of excitement and dread, that follows me around — a mind that won’t fully settle even when the work in front of me deserves my full attention, and nights where sleep feels like a negotiation I keep losing. I didn’t go looking for these black swan events, but they found me, and it’s on me to navigate them.

Whatever the source, being in the ditch looks like my car: Wheels up in the air, no traction, totally helpless, going nowhere. It’s not a pleasant place to be. But it’s survivable, and I want to share what works for me, and for others I know who navigate the same situations.

Simplify

The first thing you might do if you find yourself in a ditch is to simplify everything: Identify what truly matters and ignore all the rest.

The 80/20 principle states that 80% of your results are determined by only 20% of your inputs, generally speaking. An elegant way of putting this is: most things don’t matter. How many items on your to-do list for today really need to get done today, or ever? How many topics in your syllabus really need to be there? And if you are in a ditch right now, how much of what you are holding on to and paying attention to, is really vital for you? The answer is probably about 20%. The other 80% can almost certainly be dropped, at least for now and maybe longer than just now.

We’re not good at dropping things in academia — until we’re overwhelmed in which case “dropped balls” become endemic. The trick to navigating ditches is to drop the inessential balls, before the overwhelm sets in. That requires a particular skill, namely ruthlessly identifying the vital 20% and ignoring the rest. At least for the time being.

In an earlier post, I used grading overload as a particular example of an opportunity to simplify my entire GTD system: Put away all complex task management machinery. Write everything you need to grade, down onto a single sticky note and stop when the sticky note is full. Then pretend that there are no other things in the universe to attend to other than what’s on that note, and execute on those one by one until it’s done. In other words, treat that vital 20% – the grading items – as your all in all and, at least temporarily, ignore the rest.

You can replace grading with anything that has put you into a ditch. If you’re overloaded with tasks to do or you don’t know where to start, keep it very simple and try this sticky note system.

Get clear on higher horizons

One of the worst things about being in a ditch is that you can lose track not only of what you have to do but who you are, as a person and a professional. The inner critic can be very loud and you can begin to give that person more time at the microphone than they deserve.

It becomes important to check in with your higher horizons at that point. In GTD language there are three of these that guide the lower-level world of projects and tasks:

• Horizon 5: Your purpose and principles across your whole life. I wrote about Horizon 5 specifically at this post about Life Plans.

• Horizon 4: Your 3- to 5-year vision for yourself

• Horizon 3: Your 1- to 2-year goals

You might have a very clear idea of your higher horizons and still something happens external to you, which sends everything spiraling out of control. This is less like driving into a car-shaped hole and more like going into a chaotic tailspin while driving on the ice. In that situation, the main thing is to regain control over your motion and get things pointed in the right direction.

Take even just a few minutes to sketch out who you are as a person. What drives you? What matters to you, and who matters to you? What’s your operating system? What do you want to see for yourself in three to five years? How do those translate into one to two year goals? Even if these answers to these questions feel aspirational to the point of being absurd, they can still inspire you and still put a vision of your true authentic self in front of you that can provide you with the direction you need to orient yourself in a chaotic situation.

Take care of your body

In academia, we spend so much time in the life of the mind that it can be easy to forget that we have bodies. And when things go off the rails, often the first thing that falls to the wayside is proper care of your physical body. This might be a good first place to start if you find yourself in a ditch.

First of all, make sure you’re getting adequate sleep, and get back on track if you aren’t. Most adults should get at least seven hours of sleep every night, although this varies from person to person. As this website from Harvard Medical School explains, sleep is critical for your brain’s ability to process information and store it in long-term memory, for improving your mood, and for your ability to manage daily stress. A lack of adequate sleep can cause problems with your immune system, your metabolism, and your overall safety because you tend to have more accidents if you are sleep deprived.

Second, you should probably eat more¹. That sounds strange, because our culture preaches against overeating almost exclusively, and high-stress situations are often triggers for stress-eating. But under-eating is just as dangerous and arguably more likely. Our brains run almost exclusively on glucose, and they require a steady supply. If you don’t give yourself enough nutrition, you can end up with brain fog, poor concentration, irritability, and bad decision making. A low caloric intake can lead to increased anxiety and depressive symptoms by suppressing production of serotonin and dopamine. Additionally, you can see a degradation in your sleep quality, which we just talked about. So when in a ditch, don’t eat terrible food, but make sure you’re eating lots of good food, to give your body and your brain some strength.

Third, move your body by taking a walk. I’ve often found myself practically paralyzed by situations that have decidedly not gone according to plan. And one of the first things that helps is for me simply to shut my laptop and step outside and take a brief walk around my neighborhood. It requires no special equipment, can be done practically anywhere, under any conditions, and it gets your blood flowing and your body moving so that you have a true experience of being an active participant in your own life in a very simple way.

Do something small

Sometimes you will find yourself in a hole and it can feel like the proper response is to stay there. It isn’t. And even the slightest bit of movement in any direction can put you in the proper frame of mind.

If you’ve gotten clear on your higher horizons, then the first thing you can do is reestablish and maintain your personal and professional boundaries. Those higher horizons give you an outline for what you can and should say yes to, and therefore what you are also going to say no to. Around here we believe that everyone is responsible for their own career and you have the right to say no to things based on the Law of the Whole Person. Many of these ditches we find ourselves in happen because somebody ran right over our boundaries. It’s never a bad time to reconnect and reassert those.

A powerful way to gain control over whatever chaotic situation you’re in is to assert control over your calendar. Plan stuff. Put things in time boxes. Stop being pushed around by the calendar. Tell your time where to go rather than let the time tell you where to go.

When I say do something, I don’t mean do something big. I just mean something. Even if it’s a small thing, remember that small wins are still wins. If you can plan one thing that moves you in a direction that fits with your higher horizons and your personal identity, you have permission to sit back and appreciate that small thing that you just did. What you did is a thing that is getting done, and it instantiates the persona that you want to be, and it has moved the needle. It just needs to be repeated, and at that point, you’re putting one foot in front of the other and getting out of the ditch.

Furthermore…

When I think back to that night in October where I landed in the hole, the first thing I did was walk somewhat shell-shocked into my dorm to find a small crowd of dudes looking out the window and laughing at the fact that some idiot just drove into the hole. And I did something that actually takes some bravery: I asked for help. The dudes sobered up, and I remember one of them said, “I’ll get you out presently”. A few minutes and one dude’s truck later, I was out of the hole and off to find a parking spot that was safe.

It’s hard to remember that it’s okay to ask for help, and it’s also okay to accept help when it’s offered. We love our rugged individualism in academia, but in fact, we’re all human beings who end up in ditches sometimes, and we have an obligation to each other to be kind and help out when we see each other in need. I know that on that night, it was awfully nice to get moving again.

1. I am indebted to my friend April N. Hackert — a dietitian, chef, expert and pioneer in nutritional neuropsychology, soon-to-be Ph.D. in Human Nutrition, and overall science wizard — for this part. April has taught me a lot about the impact of nutrition on the brain and the consequences of underfeeding ourselves. Check out her TED talk on this subject here.