How to Pull Yourself out of a Slump, Take Back Control of Your Life, and Start Living

Stop finding fulfillment on Netflix and social media, and start looking within.

Four, five, six hours. That’s how many hours of Netflix I would watch every day. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The 100, Lost Girl — you name it. Why? I thought it was because the shows were good. I just had to know what would happen after that cliffhanger.

The truth was, I watched episode after episode because I had nothing else to do with my life. I didn’t have a vision, goals, or passions. I wasn’t the main actor in my own movie but a spectator.

The thing about fiction, whether it’s through TV shows or books, is that it makes you feel alive. You get to travel, fall in love, and go on all kinds of adventures without having to move off the couch. It gives you what you’re seeking without all the work. It fills the void you feel inside because as a friend of mine said, no one watches hours of Netflix unless they feel empty.

In this era, we’ve become accustomed to getting our fulfillment and validation through outside sources. If you’re not using Netflix to fill the gap within you, you’re scrolling through social media to feel validated and connected. Social media likes and notifications give us hits of dopamine, the hormone that makes us feel pleasure, but despite these tiny dopamine shots, people develop depressive signs as they spend more time on social media.

I was at my lowest. Tired of living a boring life but not having the knowledge to change it. I had no purpose or place. I lived through a screen — it was my lifeline. But I wanted to be able to breathe on my own. These were the questions that plagued me:

• How do I turn to myself for fulfillment?
• How do I stop turning to unhealthy forms of numbing and deal with stress head-on?
• What do I do when I can’t deal with my reality and feel overwhelmed?

Whether you’ve just graduated high school or college, joining the real world is intimidating, especially when you don’t know your place in it. But you don’t have to lose yourself and avoid reality. Here’s what I did to pull myself out of a slump, take back control of my life, and start living.

Why We Escape Reality In the First Place

Escapism is a coping mechanism. It’s how — described in this thesis — we avoid the unpleasantness of reality: “People engage in escapist activities to withdraw from daily activities, distract from negative self-awareness, gain fantasizing gratifications, and regulate unpleasant emotions.”

Escapism isn’t bad. It’s another form of dealing with our realities. There’s nothing wrong with relaxing with, say, YouTube videos at the end of the day. Escapism becomes detrimental when you want to avoid your life every day. Maybe the damages aren’t as dangerous as they would be if you turned to drugs and alcohol, but you’re essentially doing the same thing as addicts: you’re numbing yourself so you don’t have to face reality.

You don’t like your reality, so you jump into another one. You’re bored. You’re lonely. You’re melancholic. You’re angry. You feel like nothing. (I know because I felt all of this.) Your solution is to fill that emptiness you feel with faux happiness.

Even work can be a distraction. Some workaholics throw themselves into their job not because they love what they do, but because they have nothing else in their lives. They’ve pushed their family away, they have no hobbies. Everything that fills them comes from the outside.

The problem with relying on outside sources is that it works the same way gluing a leg to a chair would — only for a little bit. It’s not permanent.

Television, for example, “as a coping strategy for stress may be effective if the stress is related to factors outside the subject’s direct control.” Take the pandemic — that’s out of your control, which is why escapism can prove to be beneficial. However, when it comes to internal problems, you can’t run away from yourself.

Through streaming and tweets, we find temporary solutions, but you need to find a permanent one. The lasting solution to feeling unfulfilled doesn’t come from outside sources. It comes from within. Here’s how.

Acknowledge the Problem

At the same time that I was watching hours of tv shows, I was managing a personal blog I thought I loved running. But one day I realized I hadn’t uploaded any articles or YouTube videos in over a month. This realization made me feel guilty, so I turned to my coping mechanism: watching Netflix — the thing that caused the problem in the first place.

The pain is only bearable for so long. One day, you wake up and realize that something needs to change. It comes out of nowhere — or, in this case, since you’re reading this article, it hits you straight in the face. Your first reaction will probably be denial, as you’ll see later, was my reaction, too. But the first step to change is acceptance.

To move on, it’s important to accept where we are without judgment. Once you start bullying yourself (i.e., I’m useless for having wasted hours of my life on social media), you’ll feel worse, and what will you turn to? Your usual vices, thus beginning an endless cycle.

Psychology Today said that you don’t accept something to get over it or to feel better about it. “We accept [the problem] because it’s the only logical thing to do. Whatever is happening is happening; whatever occurred already occurred. We embrace reality because it’s already here, right now, and resisting it won’t make it go away.”

I had to accept that I let myself fall deep into fiction to escape my life, even if I didn’t know the reason why I was doing so. Accepting that situation hurt, but it was a crucial step to be able to move on. It might not feel like it right now, but you’re in control of your life. And if you really want to, you can pull yourself out of this mess.

One of the best ways to accept your situation is to talk about it with someone. Call your mom or tell you’re partner how you’re feeling. Tell them about how you’re spending your time, and why you think it’s a problem. If you’re unable to talk with someone, try journaling. A conversation with yourself can be just as powerful.

Get to the Core of the Problem

As I said, there’s a reason you watch all those movies and spend hours on Instagram and Facebook every day. Ask yourself: Why do I spend a copious amount of time on social media? Why am I watching so much Netflix? Why do I spend my days reading, watching YouTube videos, and playing video games?

Answering these questions isn’t easy. All the reasons why you escape are there, but they’re piled under a block of denial and false assurances. But if you want to uncover the core of the problem, you can’t be afraid to lift that block, no matter how heavy.

I watched all those hours of Netflix because I had nothing to fill my life. I was bored. Most of all, I didn’t want to run a personal blog. This was the hardest reality to accept because that was what I’d chosen to do with my life. What was I going to do now? It terrified me, which is why it took me so long to be honest with myself. But what about you?

Maybe you’re not happy with your job. Hell, you hate it. It drains you of energy. Every night, you go back home and watch four episodes of Friends because you need some laughs. You need an outside source to make you happy.

Maybe you feel lonely. You’ve lost contact with your friends, and have accidentally pushed your family away. That’s why you spend hours on social media, talking, and connecting with people you don’t know by liking their tweets and hearting their Instagram posts.

Perhaps you’re bored. You don’t have any hobbies or passions. The most exciting thing in your life is playing video games. At least there, you think, you have something to aim for: reaching the next level.

How do you escape and why? You need to know why first. Moving on without a reason is like trying to settle a fight when you don’t know what the problem is.

What Do You Want and How Can You Get It?

You want something. Need it, even. It took me a few weeks to figure out why I kept wanting to escape. In the back of your mind, you always know, but as I said, denial is a heavy block.

Some of you might already know exactly what you want. You want to follow your dream of becoming a full-time writer or an artist. You want to reconnect with your best friends.

What I needed was a challenge, to feel alive, and a different path in writing. Running a blog in which I put on a mask wasn’t fun anymore. It took me another few weeks to figure out how I was going to get that. Any chance I got to think or journal, I would ask myself what I wanted to do with my life. What I loved. What I wasn’t interested in.

If you feel bored, maybe what you need is a challenge. Despite how intimidating and scary it seems to pick up a new skill or set off on a new career, humans not only love challenges, they crave them.

Are you interested in writing a book? Picking up an instrument? The key is to genuinely be interested. If you have no interest in music, picking up a guitar won’t be helpful.

If you feel lonely, why? Who do you want to connect with? Maybe you accidentally pushed your family away because you worked too hard. Start with a call and an invitation to a homemade dinner. Your best friend of ages hasn’t called you in a month. Reach out first, and ask her to FaceTime.

If you seek validation from others and their Instagram likes, what you need is to learn to love yourself. You wish to be liked, but you need to like yourself first. Psychology Today wrote:

“The key to transforming… is the recognition and acceptance that we have all been socialized to value ourselves through the eyes of other people and the understanding that we can learn to value ourselves.”

Pick a challenge, a goal. I concluded that I wanted to write. No matter what, I wanted to tell stories — both fiction and non-fiction. So, I started writing fanfiction. It might sound silly, but it was my saving grace and gave me a specific goal to center on. You need focus. Something to take you away from opening Facebook again or re-watching a show you’ve seen too many times.

The Solution in Action

Here’s what happened when I asked myself what I wanted and started working toward it. As I said, I dove into writing fanfiction. It gave me the challenge I was looking for and it was so fun, I spent hours writing. I’d finally found something I was passionate about. Those hours replaced the amount of time I spent watching Netflix.

I started to miss writing articles. Expressing vulnerability in fanfiction taught me that I had to do the same in non-fiction articles. That led me here. I wrote for years, but I didn’t fall in love with writing until I started taking it seriously.

I’m not a popular writer nor am I making thousands of dollars, but I have drive and motivation. And that is the best start. I even started writing a book, and while it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I like it. It keeps me busy.

I’m happy. I’m the complete opposite of that girl who watched hours of Netflix every day. I could never imagine doing that now.

It’s easy to think you’re happy when there’s nothing glaring making you sad. If your partner didn’t break up with you or if you haven’t lost your job, it’s easy to think there’s nothing wrong. Loneliness, worthlessness — these are silent forms of sadness. You don’t know they’re there until one day, they hit you in the face. The only sign is this — a quote from Fredrik Backman’s latest book Anxious People:

“The truth, of course, is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves.”

Once you start replacing your hours wasted on social media and tv shows with productive or fun tasks, you’ll realize how long you fooled yourself into thinking you were happy.

5 Questions to Maintain Control Instead of Giving In to Your Vices

Old habits die hard. So, how do we stop ourselves from turning back to hours of tv and tweets? It’s especially hard when you feel stressed or overwhelmed, but you must persist in the face of resistance.

Even after figuring everything out, I tended to go back to watching tv when I need to de-stress or to avoid a particularly hard task instead of facing it. These are the questions I ask myself to deal with it.

1. What do I feel like doing right now?

I feel like laying in bed and watching Netflix. I don’t want to think or do anything. Everything is just too hard to deal with.

2. Why do you feel this way?

I’m struggling with writing this article. I don’t know how to word my thoughts, and I feel like a bad writer. What if my career is over?

3. Are your thoughts true?

*After a long sigh*: No. I’ve struggled before, and I’ve managed to write the articles anyway. Creativity doesn’t go away.

4. How would you feel if you watched Netflix?

I’d probably feel good while doing it, but after, I would feel the same as I did before. Caving in never solves anything.

5. Is there a better way to deal with this?

I can take a better, active break. I can read for twenty minutes or play Sudoku. I can do a breathing exercise or even a nap. Then, after I feel rested and my heart has stopped beating so hard, I can get back to work.

By asking yourself these series of questions, you’ll stop yourself from doing something you know you’ll regret. The best part is, you can get back to work or face the challenge you were avoiding.

Here’s another way the conversation might go for someone who feels lonely and spends too much time scrolling through Facebook.

1. What do I feel like doing right now?

I feel like going on Facebook and just… wasting time. Is that so wrong?

2. Why do you feel this way?

I feel like no one likes me. My friends haven’t answered my text in two hours. What if they’re tired of me.

3. Are your thoughts true?

*After a long sigh*: Probably not. They’re probably busy or haven’t seen the text. And even if they did see it and ignored it — haven’t I done that before? And it’s not because I don’t like them, I just don’t feel like texting.

4. How would you feel if you went on Facebook?

I’d feel like crap. I always do when I look at the clock and realize an hour has passed and all I’ve done is sit on the couch and watch stupid videos.

5. Is there a better way to deal with this?

I can learn to accept that just because I’m alone doesn’t mean I’m lonely. Then, call my mom or sister just for a few laughs. That always picks me up.

See how a couple of questions can flip your entire situation around? A simple conversation is all you need to stop turning back to your old habits.

Final Words

Watching TV, playing video games, reading — these are not bad things. I don’t want to give you the impression that I never stream tv shows. I do. I watch three to five hours of television or movies every week. The difference is that I watch it for fun, not escapism. (Plus, I typically watch with others since it’s a lot less lonely.)

You’re a lot stronger than you think. You can deal with problems head-on and find solutions. On the days when I feel particularly stressed, I still get the urge to want to escape. I want to sit on the couch in the middle of the day when I know I should be writing and just pop open my laptop to jump onto Netflix.

But then I remember how crappy I would feel afterward. How disappointed I would be in myself. That, too, can be enough motivation to hold you back. It’s like knowing you shouldn’t touch fire because it’s hot.

Despite what you may feel, you’re in control. If you’re sad or angry or stressed, you can do something about it. You can make a plan or call out for help. You don’t have to be a victim of your circumstances.

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