After shutting down my first business, I felt completely lost.

I had no idea what my next move should be.

Should I go back to school and get my honours degree? Should I start another business?

I knew I wanted to work on something meaningful, something that gave me freedom.

But I had no idea what or how.

It felt like hell.

I was in mental turmoil.

My chest was tight every day.

Anxiety followed me like a shadow.

I found myself falling back into old patterns of overthinking, procrastination, anxiety and fear.

I thought I had overcome them, especially because I had done so much of the work in the beginning.

Why was I back here?

Why was I struggling to get out?

This was a really challenging time that lasted 3-4 months, but I managed to pull myself out of it and get back on the path I want to be on.

In hindsight — as often is the case — I learned a valuable lesson:

That phase of my life wasn’t meant to break me. It was meant to wake me up.

And the biggest difference was that instead of resisting, I leaned in.

I got curious.

I explored.

I researched.

I experimented.

And I’m so glad I did.

That’s how I stumbled onto Twitter/X. That’s how I started creating content. Eventually, that’s how I found my way to building my one-person business.

The path forward wasn’t a single aha moment. It was a process of allowing myself to be lost on purpose and using that period to grow into the next version of myself.

You might be in that phase right now. And if you are, I offer some insight and perspective.

I wanna talk about how these periods of feeling lost, confused and falling into a rut can be foundations for your next level of growth and not your downfall.

Falling and Getting Stuck In Old Patterns

You’ve fallen into one of your negative cycles again.

You’ve given in to the pattern that takes more than it gives.

You know it doesn’t serve you.

You know it’s bad for you, yet here you are in the same situation you wanted to get out of.

Breaking out of these patterns and cycles isn’t easy.

And it isn’t easy for 1 simple reason:

You’ve been asleep/ unconscious longer than you’ve been awake/ conscious.

For most of your life, you’ve been acting in one way for so long that it’s become your default. Your norm.

You recently became conscious that there is a different world out there.

A world different from the one you’ve been living.

You’ve just woken up from a long, deep sleep.

But your mind doesn’t know anything else.

So it’s not out of spite or hate that it pulls you back to sleep.

It doesn’t know anything better.

There is a part of you (or parts of you) that only knows how to exist in one way.

And when you begin to change that, that part(s) of you senses a threat and strives to protect itself.

To keep living and surviving as it has, because who or what wants to die?

So when you are working on making changes in your life and fall back and down into a rut, don’t punish yourself.

Don’t hate yourself for falling off.

You’re basically a 1 year old going against an opponent with 20+ years of skin in the game.

This opponent knows you better.

They know your triggers and weak spots, and it pokes at them to keep you in the same cycles.

Because when you are in the same cycles, it gets to survive.

And that’s all it what’s to do: survive.

So, when you find yourself in a rut, don’t judge yourself.

Instead, give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You’re doing the best you can with what you have and what you know.

The fact that you’re in a rut is a clear indication that you cared (and still care) enough to want more for yourself, to try and pursue better for yourself.

So, if you fall back into the old patterns and cycles, give yourself grace while holding yourself accountable.

Reality vs Expectations

“I thought it would be different.”

“I thought it would be better.”

“I thought it would be it.”

“I thought it would make me happy”

One or more of these are clear indications of why you fall into ruts and feel lost and confused:

Your expectations didn’t align with reality.

And when that happens, you have a really hard time consoling the two together.

Wanting to get to a new level of our lives without it being hard is delusion.

We expect it to be easy, but then we face reality and find it to be hard.

We get upset and disheartened because what we expect doesn’t align with reality.

It should be like this.

It should be like that.

But it’s neither.

And we sink.

We sink into a kind of a void to escape the pain of our expectations not being met.

But instead of avoiding the pain, what if you learned to sit in it?

To sit in that pain and discomfort and learn that they are part of the human experience. All of this is an experience.

An experience that is here to serve you.

Your Mind Makes the Experience Good or Bad

When you can sit with the pain and discomfort as an experience, you’ll learn something surprising.

(Well, it was to me, at least).

The experience itself is not painful or uncomfortable.

It’s the mind that makes it so.

Your thoughts and perception of the situation lead to suffering or joy.

For one person, shutting down a business could be painful because that was their livelihood, and they had to close down because they weren’t making enough sales.

For another person, it could be the end of a chapter and the beginning of another.

But the experience of shutting down the business itself is void of suffering or joy.

It’s only experienced as so through labels that come from the mind.

Nothing in the world is inherently good or bad.

It is the mind that labels things as good or bad and then gets attached to one state of being.

This is the biggest cause of your suffering: the mind’s inability to flow from one state to another without getting attached.

The experiences you go through aren’t inherently good or bad.

It’s through the experiences that your perception changes.

It’s through the experiences that you gain lessons, insight and a new perspective.

And the lessons you gain from these experiences can’t be taught to you any other way than through the experience itself.

It’s through these lessons and perceptions that you can respond to life differently, make different decisions and ultimately live a different life.

But what happens when we don’t sit with the pain and discomfort?

What happens when we don’t see the lack of inherent good or bad in experiences and choose to view them in only one way?

What happens when we refuse to see the lessons and learn?

We descend into personal hells.

We fall into ruts.

We feel confused and lost.

All because we avoided looking.

The Trap Of Looking Away

We avoid.

We avoid what’s coming up and put it away, believing that by doing so, we’ve resolved the issue.

But that’s hardly how it plays out.

You’ve consciously put the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings outside your mind.

But it’s a different story with the subconscious mind.

The problem you’re avoiding is still very real to the subconscious.

A rule of the subconscious mind: “Whatever is held in the mind tends to manifest.”

This manifests in 1 of 2 ways:

1. Operating as The Thoughts and Feelings

When you avoid the thoughts and feelings that come up and push them to the back, you fall asleep.

You fall asleep to what the experience is trying to wake you up to and make you aware of.

By falling unconscious, you stay in the same patterns and cycles because you’ve lost control of your awareness.

By losing control of your awareness, of your ability to observe what is happening and choose a different path, you begin to identify with the thoughts and feelings.

You take them personally and believe they are you.

They are not thoughts, feelings or problems happening to you. They are YOUR thoughts, feelings and problems.

This self-identification leads you to play out the same patterns and cycles on repeat. The same programme is on because you haven’t changed it.

It’s only when the pattern and cycle have finished playing out that you return to baseline, and the thought, feeling, and problem come up again.

Life is trying to make you aware.

To wake you up to a greater level of consciousness and awareness.

To allow you to choose better and more for yourself.

But unless you break that cycle of identifying as the thoughts, feelings and problems, you’ll keep repeating them and going further down into a negative spiral.

You identify and operate through the world as if they are you.

Your awareness shuts down, and you are unable to see beyond and above the things happening because you are so attached and identified with them.

They filter how you see and experience the world.

Instead of seeing the person, event, circumstance or situation as it is, you only see it through the distorted filter of the thoughts, feelings and problems you identify with.

When you can only perceive the world through these thoughts and feelings, you stay in cycles and patterns that align with them. You can never see beyond your level of consciousness or your POV.

You become so trapped in your POV that you can’t see a way out.

Everything exists, reinforces and keeps you trapped in the very cycles or patterns you are trying to break.

The other way this manifests is:

2. Escaping through Maladaptive Action

This is when you avoid the thoughts, feelings and problems through taking action.

Though action is often good, when it’s used as a form of escapism, it works against you.

This could look like you being more reactive and agitated.

Everything triggering and setting you off.

Experiencing feelings you can’t explain.

Struggling to sleep or sleeping more.

Procrastinating on tasks.

Drinking or using substances to numb yourself.

All these behaviours are a poor attempt to soothe the discomfort you’re experiencing.

Avoidance or looking away are hardly the answers.

If you look at it closely, avoidance is the reason you’re still stuck in these patterns and cycles.

You’ll either avoid and fall unconscious to your pattern. Or you’ll escape with maladaptive behaviours.

But with either path, the more you give into avoidance, the more you lose control over your awareness.

It becomes harder and harder for you to break out of these cycles because your awareness is becoming more blunted.

And the longer you avoid and hold these thoughts, feelings and problems in your subconscious, the deeper they are buried and the more volatile they become.

This leads to people suddenly acting erratic and out of character.

It leads to mental breakdowns and mid-life/ existential crises.

Because of the volatility and the mind holding it all within as it falls into chaos, the chaos must be expressed externally.

This is what you want to avoid.

You want to avoid this implosion that leads to you and your life looking like nothing you recognise.

You want to break out and end these cycles.

To meet life where it is and be a worthy contender.

Because in truth, Life/ Universe/ God is not trying to punish you.

Everything is working to evolve you to a higher level of consciousness and being.

To help you grow and rise to your highest potential.

But it can only do so if you let it.

“You can take the donkey to the water, but you can’t force it to swim.”

So what is there to do?

You ask yourself:

What Is the Lesson?

Though the experiences, patterns and lessons you go through will be specific to you, there is a something to grasp that may help.

All these “hard” and “bad” experiences have one thing in common: mental turmoil.

In mental turmoil, your focus narrows because whatever is happening to you at that moment is being perceived with increased importance and attention.

You are being forced psychologically and physically to look at the situation, person, event or circumstance that is causing this stress response and discomfort.

You are being asked to look at it, focus on it and figure out a way to solve it.

Know this:

This is the nature of your psychology: identify a problem and then find solutions to resolve it.

You’ve already seen what happens when you avoid looking at the problem, so why not look at it?

Why not sit in the problem and fully experience it?

Because it’s in the problem that you find the solution.

Nothing exists in isolation.

You know what success is because you know failure.

You know what hot is because you know what cold is.

You know what healing feels like because you’ve been hurt.

You know what happiness is because you’ve known what unhappiness is.

You’ll know what the solution is because you know what the problem is.

Everything has the seed of its opposite.

Like yin and yang.

There’s a little good in the bad and a little bad in the good.

In everything that you want to be positive, there exists a seed of the negative.

And when you begin to accept this, that things won’t be 100% what you want it, you let go.

You let go of expectations and begin to accept reality for what it is.

You see the world more for what it is than what you want it to be.

You understand and appreciate more of what is because you accept all of it.

You see beyond the labels of the mind. Of things being good or bad, and let things be as they are.

And in that acceptance, you move out of mental turmoil into mental harmony.

Out of unconsciousness into awareness.

Out of victimhood and into being an active player of life.

Out of resignation into your power to choose.

You turn the thoughts, feelings, problems and experiences into opportunities of growth and extract the lesson from it.

And with that lesson, you are launched into a new level of life.

A step in a new direction.

You break the cycles and patterns that once kept you stuck and start making progress towards something better.

The Way Out of Repeating Cycles and Patterns

There are two parts to breaking cycles and patterns: Internal work and external work.

You can start with either one and figure out which approach works best.

Part 1: Internal Work

#1: Deeply Observe & Acknowledge

Start by noticing the cycles that keep repeating in your life. Are you always overwhelmed? Do you always sabotage your momentum? Write them down.

You need to stay aware and not get attached to the mind. You can’t break a pattern you aren’t aware of.

To be aware of yourself and what you experience is to observe everything deeply. Your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, reactions and more. Instead of getting involved, attached or moving with the thoughts and feelings you have, you learn to observe them from a distance.

Allow yourself to feel the feeling and observe the thought.

Acknowledge what is happening and that you are aware of it.

Start noticing the cycles that keep repeating in your life.

What triggers them? A certain thought? People? Feelings? Is it something from your past?

Whatever it is, make a note of it and write it down.

#2: Acceptance paves the path forward.

No matter how annoyed or frustrated you are at being in this pattern and feeling stuck, until you accept it, you will stay in it.

You need to accept where you are to get out.

Whatever you resist persists. What you accept, you can change.

Acceptance allows you to see where you are so that you can create the path that leads you to where you want to go.

No event is good or bad, it’s only our mind that makes it so. You are the only one labelling the experience as good or bad, and so it shall be.

So, release the labels and accept what is as it is.

#3: Label your feelings and patterns out loud. Give them your attention.

When you notice a feeling coming up or a pattern being triggered, label it.

Labelling it gives you a model on how to approach it. You know how you feel when you’re happy and sad. You express yourself differently, and you interact with the world differently. The same is true with your feelings and patterns.

You want to label them as a way to give yourself a model on how to approach them.

Then give your feelings and the patterns attention. Like you would a child.

If you don’t acknowledge what’s happening it’s easier for the feeling or pattern to get the better of you and suck you in. But every time you label and acknowledge what’s happening, e.g “I feel stressed, I feel overwhelmed, I feel like scrolling on my phone, I feel like eating this cake”, you create a space where you can be above your impulses and choose how to respond.

#4: Look for the lesson.

Choose to see the rut as an opportunity and look for the lesson in this.

If you’re in this phase of your life where you feel lost and confused, what are you being made aware of?

What is the lesson you are being taught so that you can go into the next phase of your life better?

Sometimes you need these setbacks for major comebacks

Part 2: External Work

#1: Set a goal.

It’s easy for old patterns and cycles to take hold of you when you are without a goal. The simplest, not always easy, thing you can do is to set a new goal.

Set a goal that forces you to grow in new ways and that challenges you.

When you have a goal you are working towards, it pulls you towards something.

This goal can arise from the desire to experience something new or to get away from a problem you have.

You also want to have a compelling reason behind this goal. The WHY acts like an anchor when you start to face your old patterns and work to break them. The WHY reminds you why you should keep going and not fall asleep again.

This leads to the next step.

#2: Explore and Experiment.

Experiment with many different solutions and paths for reaching your goal.

Look for the commonalities between them. Adopt different perspectives and see all these different solutions for what they are. They are guidelines on how to do things. Not the “one-size-fits-all” solution.

This is pattern recognition.

When you explore, test out and experiment with all these solutions, you have more tools for solving problems in your life. You see between the facades of single ideologies and solutions and identify what makes them work.

You can then pick and choose the methods that you enjoy. Doing what you enjoy brings sustainability. Then, you can refine the process until it works for you to perfection.

#3: Mind-Body Relationship

You can’t control the mind with the look of the body.

“You can’t think your way into better action, but you can act your way into better thinking”.

A really helpful lesson I learned from Dr Andrew Huberman:

“Behaviour first, thoughts and emotions later.”

You can’t rationalise your way out of a pattern, but you can act your way out of it. Action is how you get out of it.

#4: Rest and Replenish

As you start to take action and build momentum, you want to prioritise sustainability.

Hustle culture will brainwash you into going from 0 to 100, but this leads to burnout. And burnout is a sneaky way that the old patterns can get a hold of you and hold you back.

So you want to prioritise rest during this period — mental and physical rest. You want to keep the momentum going and building so that you stay on a positive trajectory towards your goals and not accidentally burn out and fall back into the old patterns.

Through this process of working on breaking these cycles and patterns, remember:

1. Give yourself grace.
   
   Know this: You’ve been asleep longer than you’ve been awake. You’ve spent years running on autopilot, so it’s normal that breaking free will take time. Don’t judge yourself—embrace the process.
   
   You just become conscious of these patterns and whether it’s your first or seventh or 12th time trying to break them, give yourself grace. You’ve been in the old patterns longer than you have the new patterns. So give yourself the grace to fall as you make your way into the new.
   

2. Experiment with both internal and external work.
   
   As stated previously, events and situations rarely exist in isolation.
   
   So whether you start with the internal or external work, at some point, do both. The internal work will help you stay grounded when you do the external work, and the external work will get you out of your head when the internal work becomes too overwhelming.
   
   Both complement each other and work to raise you to a new level of consciousness and give you the foundation to stay there.

Bringing It All Together

Breaking cycles isn’t a one-time event—it’s an ongoing process of awareness, experimentation, and growth.

When you treat it like a game, it becomes less of a struggle and more of an exciting evolution.

This process is cyclical.

Growth isn’t linear—it’s a spiral.

Each time you level up, you’ll face a new lesson.

But each time, you’ll be better equipped to see it and learn from it.

You stay lost when you can’t acknowledge or admit that you’re lost.

Just like you can’t receive if you never ask.

It’s in admitting we are lost that we open ourselves to being found.

We become aware of where we are and can figure out where we want to go.

Right now, life is giving you the perfect opportunity to evolve.

Don’t think of yourself as being stuck. Think of it as a time of preparation.

The patterns are here to shape you, to push you to your next level.

When you stop resisting them and start learning from them, that’s when everything changes.

Master your mind. Flow with life. And design your path.

Thank you for reading.

I hope you enjoyed it.

See you in the next one.

— Shana