How To Get Out Of A Slump: A Full AM-to-PM Routine

There are slump days and then there are slump weeks, and the week I am thinking of right now was genuinely one of the worst stretches of the past few years.

Nothing catastrophic had happened. Work was fine. Relationships were fine.

But I had been waking up with that flat, grey feeling for about eight days in a row — the kind where even things you normally enjoy feel effortful and slightly pointless.

I was going through the motions of my routine without actually being present in any of it. I was tired in a way that sleep was not fixing.

What eventually pulled me out was not one dramatic intervention.

It was a specific sequence of small choices across a day that, when I followed them consistently, changed the quality of how I felt.

I have used this same structure on bad mornings since and it works often enough to trust.

Here it is.

What Does It Mean to Be in a Slump?

Being in a slump is when you experience a drop in your mood, a lack of motivation, and a feeling of burnout.

It’s that time when you just can’t seem to get things done, and everything feels like it’s dragging.

You might lose interest in things you once enjoyed, whether it’s work, your relationships, your hobbies, or activities that usually bring you joy.

Slumps can be temporary, but if they’re not addressed, they can linger longer.

I. The Morning

Step 1: Be deliberate with your phone, not absent from it

The instinct on a slump morning is to reach for the phone immediately, which usually means starting the day inside someone else’s anxiety or highlight reel.

The scrolling that follows tends to make the flat feeling worse rather than better.

What actually helps is using the phone actively rather than passively.

Searching for something specific that you know shifts your state — a particular kind of music, a motivational video from someone whose perspective you trust, something that produces energy rather than comparison.

The difference is intentionality.

You are choosing what to put into your brain in the first five minutes of the day rather than absorbing whatever the algorithm decided to show you.

Also Read: Start These Habits in January to Completely Transform Your Year

Step 2: Meditate before you leave the bed

I do not mean a formal meditation practice, though if you have one it serves you here.

I mean five minutes of lying still with your eyes closed, breathing slowly and deliberately, before you start the day.

No checking what time it is, no planning the day in your head yet, no running through the to-do list.

Just arrive in your body before you start moving.

This is not transformative on its own.

What it does is create a tiny buffer between waking and reacting, which makes everything that follows slightly more intentional.

Step 3: Decide who you are going to be today

This came from Atomic Habits and I resisted it for a while because it sounds like a self-help cliché.

Then I tried it on a morning when I felt genuinely terrible and discovered it actually does something.

The question is: what would the version of me who is not in a slump do right now?

Not the aspirational, perfect version — just a slightly better functioning version who is not being run by the flat feeling.

She would probably get out of bed. She would probably make something real for breakfast. She would probably get dressed.

Then do those things.

Not because you feel like them but because she would, and right now you are practicing being her rather than waiting to feel like her.

The behavior often precedes the feeling, not the other way around.

Step 4: Eat something that actually fuels you

On slump days the temptation is to either skip breakfast or eat something sugary that will produce a brief lift followed by a crash by mid-morning. Neither helps.

I make a smoothie or something with protein in it.

Not because I particularly feel like cooking on a bad morning but because the blood sugar crash that follows a bad breakfast makes the slump significantly worse and this is an easy thing to control.

It takes ten minutes and the afternoon is different because of it.

Step 5: Make a to-do list that has one win in it

The overwhelming version of a slump is when the to-do list looks like a mountain and all of it feels urgent and impossible simultaneously.

The fix is to shrink the frame.

What are the two or three things that actually need to happen today? Not the whole list — those specific things. Write them down.

Then add one thing you are looking forward to, even if small. Lunch outside.

A walk after work. A show you have been saving. The list is no longer only obligation when there is something in it you chose.

Also Read: 10 Important Things To Do at the Beginning of Every Month

Step 6: Get dressed properly

This is the one that feels most optional and is not.

Getting ready for the day — shower, clothes that are not the clothes you slept in, whatever the morning version of your appearance care looks like — changes your nervous system’s read of what kind of day this is.

On the days I have worked in pajamas on a slump day, the slump consistently lasted longer.

On the days I got ready even when I did not feel like it, something shifted by around ten in the morning.

This is not about looking good for other people. It is about signaling to yourself that the day has started.

II. The Midday

Step 1: Five minutes to break the procrastination loop

By midday on a slump day there is usually something I have been avoiding — a task that has been sitting at the top of the list accumulating low-grade dread.

The five-minute rule is reliable here: commit to just five minutes of the thing, then stop if you want to.

Most of the time the inertia breaks inside the five minutes and continuing becomes easier than stopping.

Occasionally you do the five minutes and stop, which is also fine because you have interrupted the avoidance loop.

Either way, the worst outcome is five minutes of uncomfortable work, which is manageable.

Also Read: How to Become the Best Version of Myself

Step 2: Make lunch something rather than nothing

On bad days I tend to eat whatever is fastest while standing up and looking at my phone, which is the eating equivalent of not eating at all in terms of what it does for how I feel about the day.

Taking twenty minutes to make something I actually want to eat, putting it on a plate, sitting down somewhere I want to sit — this is a small act of self-care that is so unglamorous nobody writes about it, and it changes the quality of the afternoon every single time.

If the weather is decent, taking the lunch outside changes it even more.

Step 3: Check your energy and adjust accordingly

Midafternoon is when slump days tend to bottom out. The morning momentum fades, the afternoon stretches out, and the pull toward passive consumption is strong.

The useful question is: what has been draining me today and what would actually restore me? Sometimes the answer is movement.

Sometimes it is water and a change of location. Sometimes it is ten minutes of something completely unrelated to work.

The answers are specific to you but they exist and the day gets better when you act on them rather than pushing through in a depleted state.

III. The Evening

Step 1: Give yourself actual credit for making it through

Not in a performative way, just genuinely.

Slump days require more energy than regular days because you are doing everything against resistance. Getting through one is a real achievement.

Acknowledging that rather than immediately inventorying what you failed to do creates a different entry point to the evening.

Something cozy. A blanket, some warm lighting, a small treat, something to watch or listen to that you actually enjoy.

You have done enough for the day. Let the evening be recovery.

Step 2: Write before you sleep, not just consume

The journal entry on a slump day does not need to be profound. Write what was hard today. Write one thing that was okay.

Write what you are going to do first tomorrow.

These three things take ten minutes and do several useful things: they clear the mental clutter that otherwise circulates while you are trying to sleep, they create a record of having gotten through it that you can look at on the next bad day, and they give tomorrow a starting point rather than leaving it as another open question.

If writing feels like too much, three things you are grateful for. Specific ones, not generic ones.

The cup of tea you had that was actually good. The moment in the afternoon when the light was nice. Something real.

Step 3: Close the day deliberately

Five minutes of breathing with your eyes closed before sleep, the same way the day started.

Not meditation with goals attached to it, just the quieting of whatever is still running. The phone in another room. The day actually finished.

Slumps are temporary. Every one I have been in eventually ended, usually not because something external changed but because I did enough small things in the right direction that the momentum shifted.

Follow the sequence on the next bad morning. Not all of it perfectly. Enough of it to give the day somewhere to go.