by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
The Funk and How to Get Out of It
There’s a very specific kind of existential misery that a lot of men deal with in this life of ours:
It doesn’t always look like crisis or a failure – in fact, from the outside looking in, things look fine but, underneath it all, there’s a persistent sense that something isn’t quite right because every day feels like a variation of the same day lived over and over again like a personal kind of Groundhog Day.
It might not be terrible or even dramatic, just kinda flat and repetitive with a slight grey hue to the edges as if life has narrowed into a corridor you can walk down with your eyes closed because you’ve done it all so many times before (even though you don’t really want to be doing it anymore).
This is the Funk:
The Funk isn’t just boredom or good ol’ fashioned laziness – it’s not even depression in the clinical sense (though it can certainly eventually slide into that for some people if they stay in the Funk for too long).
No, the Funk is something more subtle and more structural:
It’s what happens when a man is living a life that looks functional on the surface but internally has stopped moving in any meaningful kind of way because he disconnected himself from his own natural drive towards evolution and growth into deeper wholeness.
Over time, the friction of this disconnection creates frustration and – on an even longer timeline – this frustration hardens into misery; if nothing shifts, this misery slowly curdles into a low-level resentment that feels like life is slipping through your fingers while you’re still technically “in it” but fundamentally disconnected from it.
The real question isn’t just “Why do I feel stuck?“, then, but:
How does a man end up in the Funk in the first place and how does he get out of it?
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Stuck in a Funk: What We'll Cover In This Article
- The Funk and How to Get Out of It
- The Funk is Feedback, Not Failure
- What is Realness?
- How the Funk Forms: The Bubble of Forced Stability
- The Identity Problem at the Core
- Life Moves in Seasons (and You Can Get Stuck Between Them)
- Two Core Causes of the Funk
- How to Start Getting Out of the Funk
- The Final Word: The Funk Is Not Your Enemy
The Funk is Feedback, Not Failure
The first thing to understand from the get-go is this:
The Funk is not a sign that something is ‘wrong’ with you – it’s a signal that something in your relationship with yourself and life is out of alignment with reality.
In other words, the Funk is feedback:
Think of it less like a psychological defect or problem with existence itself and see it as being more like a dashboard warning light showing that something in your system is being held too tightly, too rigidly, or too long beyond its natural lifespan.
At the surface level, there are obvious explanations:
- You’ve got responsibilities.
- You’ve got obligations.
- You’ve got limited time, energy, and attention.
These might help explain why you STAY in the Funk but they’re not the root cause of it – just some of its visible conditions.
Underneath them is something more fundamental:
A disconnection from REALNESS.
What is Realness?
Realness isn’t a personality trait or about being radically honest or direct in a superficial sense – it’s about how you show up as a living human being in alignment with reality itself.
The (very) short version is that it’s the difference between:
- Reacting from old conditioning.
vs - Responding from what is actually true now and always.
A real human being doesn’t try to force life into staying the same because that’s impossible and so instead they CHOOSE to move with it, adjust when required, and to keep evolving.
This kind of fluidity in our approach to live is real because one of the most basic laws of reality is this:
The only constant in life is change.
What this means is that everything truly alive is in motion and that every living thing that maintains a sense of stability and equanimity is is actually stable because it is adapting continuously from moment-to-moment.
(Think about the old Taoist idea that a willow tree can survive the wind because its branches move with it but a more rigid tree is more likely to snap in the wind as it resists it).
All of this is to say that when a man starts feeling ‘stuck’ and lost to the Funk, what’s really happening is this:
He is unconsciously trying to maintain a version of himself that life has already moved past.
This is the heart of the Funk and the thing that keeps you in it – it’s not stagnation caused by life (because life is anti-stagnation by nature) – it’s the kind of stagnation caused by resistance to life itself.
This kind of resistance always creates friction, frustration, misery and then resentment.
How the Funk Forms: The Bubble of Forced Stability
At some point, every man – like every human being – builds a self-image or sense of identity that helps him survive in the world.
This identity might be anything but it will usually have some kind of label or role that can be neatly attached to it.
Here are some common examples:
- The Responsible One
- The Provider
- The Easy-going Guy
- The Strong Silent Type
- The One Who Keeps It All Together
- Etc. etc. etc.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with identities like this – we need them to function in the world and so they’re necessary at certain stages of life.
The problem is that the Funk begins to take a hold of us when identity stops being flexible and becomes something that we cling rigidly too because we feel like we can’t cope or survive without it.
Like we have seen, life doesn’t stop moving but the ego tries to stay the same in order to maintain it’s hold over us (and keep us ‘safe’ in a misinformed way).
This leads to a way of being where you start filtering experience through what fits your identity, and rejecting what doesn’t:
- Opportunities that feel unfamiliar get avoided.
- Emotions that don’t ‘fit’ get suppressed.
- Impulses that could lead to meaningful change get ignored.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Over time, this creates a kind of sealed environment which we can see as the kind of psychological bubble which we have been calling The Funk:
Inside the bubble, things feel predictable and safe but they’re also disconnected from the living movement of reality.
The Funk is just over-control disguised as ‘stability’ (even when it’s the kind of stability you’re unsatisfied with).
The Identity Problem at the Core
At its root, the Funk is a problem of identity – not in the “Who am I and what does it all mean?” philosophical sense but in a much more practical way:
The Funk is just feedback showing you that you’re more attached to your current self-image than you are committed to your actual evolution into REALNESS.
This is where it can be important to understand the Shadow Self:
The abridged version is that the Shadow is everything in you that’s been pushed aside and sent into exile because it didn’t match the identity you built to survive whatever you went through in the past (the ego).
It contains:
- Suppressed desires.
- Avoided truths.
- Unexpressed power.
- Emotions you didn’t know how to handle at the time they first came up.
- Instincts you labelled as “not me” (because they conflicted with the ego – not because they really weren’t “You”).
The Shadow doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it – instead, it waits beneath the surface until you’re ready to own it again and start being real with yourself and life.
In many ways, the Funk is often what it feels like when the Shadow starts pressing against the edges of your controlled identity and so you begin to sense that “I’m not fully present in my own life”, “I’m not expressing anything real”, or “There’s more potential in me than I’m currently living up to”.
The problem is that instead of acting on this awareness that’s swimming up from the Shadow Territory, most men tighten the grip on who they already think they are.
The Funk isn’t ignorance but awareness without movement.
You can feel the gap but you don’t cross it because crossing it would require becoming someone slightly different and that’s what the ego resists most.
Life Moves in Seasons (and You Can Get Stuck Between Them)
Another crucial piece of understanding the Funk is this:
Life doesn’t move in a straight line – it moves in cycles and seasons.
The practical implication of this is that there are phases where certain identities, relationships, environments, and goals are appropriate but there are also phases where they naturally come to an end.
Some classic examples from the human experience:
- Boyhood → Manhood
- Single Life → Committed Partnership
- Exploration → Commitment
- Chaos → Structure
- Structure → Reinvention
Each transition requires something uncomfortable (from the point of view of the ego, at the very least):
A kind of death and rebirth of identity – in other words, you have to let go of who you were to fully enter who you’re becoming.
The Funk forms when instead of completing the transition, you try to keep the old season alive by creating an unreal sense of familiarity in the form of the same routines, the same emotional patterns, and the same internal story about yourself.
When you do this even though life has already moved on to a new cycle or season then you end up ‘stuck’ between worlds where you’re physically in a new season but psychologically still living in the old one.
That mismatch between worlds is where the Funk lives – it’s the sensation of being out of sync with your own life.
Two Core Causes of the Funk
We can simplify everything we’ve said so fare about the Funk into two interrelated causes that allow it to show up in our lives:
1. You’ve disconnected from your realness and started living from stasis instead of flow: You’re trying to preserve a version of yourself and life instead of participating in your own evolution.
2. You haven’t completed a cycle or season of life that’ s already ended: You’re still psychologically inhabiting a past structure of identity even though reality has moved forward.
These two reinforce each other because the more you cling to identity, the less you evolve, and the less you evolve, the more stuck you feel.
What’s ironic is that the more stuck you feel, the more you cling to the ‘familiar’ (even if you don’t really want it anymore) and this loop just leads to the Funk.
If you want to get flowing and grow real then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
How to Start Getting Out of the Funk
Getting out of the Funk is not about adding more motivation or forcing productivity but about restoring movement where movement has stopped so that you can step into present day reality.
Here are the real shifts that actually make a difference:
1. Start Treating Life as a Living Process Again
The first shift is simple but uncomfortable because it involves conscious evolution into who you already are in your realness (which means letting of the ‘familiar’ things that no longer serve you because they’ve become unreal).
Stop expecting to cling to a familiar identity and start expecting change in yourself.
Instead of asking “How do I get back to how I was?” start asking “What is life asking me to become next?” – this changes your relationship with experience so you’re no longer trying to preserve an ego that never really existed and can instead start participating in the process of actually living.
Even small actions taken from this mindset begin to break the stagnation so learn to do things slightly differently on purpose – not for productivity alone but to reintroduce movement into your system.
2. Rebuild Trust Through Action, Not Thought
The Funk feeds on overthinking and so the antidote isn’t more insight but taking a stance of movement before certainty.
What this means is that you don’t think your way out of stagnation – you act your way out of it but you don’t have to be fully certain before you act (instead you learn by doing).
Start with something small but nevertheless real:
- Have a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding.
- Change one daily habit that feels automatic.
- Introduce physical challenge or discomfort deliberately.
- Do something imperfect and unfinished.
The point is not achievement but re-entering flow with reality so you can learn to work with it.
3. Identify What Season You’re Actually In
Ask yourself the following brutally honest question:
“What part of my life am I pretending is still the same when it’s already changed or come to an end?“
There’s always an answer because life is always evolving (and our job is just to evolve with it).
Some examples of things that might come up:
- An outdated ambition you no longer feel connected to.
- An identity as a certain type of man.
- A version of a relationship that no longer exists.
- A lifestyle that no longer fits your energy
Name it clearly and see it for what it is because you can’t move into a new season while clinging to the old one.
4. Integrate the Shadow Instead of Controlling It
The Funk often contains suppressed energy in the form of unexpressed life – instead of pushing it down to stay in the ‘familiar’, start noticing it and allowing the light of your awareness to shine on it:
- What do I keep wanting but not acting on?
- What truth about myself am I avoiding?
- What feels “too much” for my current identity?
The goal isn’t to become chaotic but to stop rejecting parts of yourself that are already asking to be lived so you can return to true order – integration restores energy but suppression creates the stagnation of the Funk.
The Final Word: The Funk Is Not Your Enemy
The Funk is just feedback revealing that you’re out-of-sync with yourself and life by showing you where life has moved on and where you haven’t.
It’s essentially just feedback that your current self-image is too small for your current reality and – if you really listen – it becomes the beginning of something more REAL.
Underneath the Funk is always the same invitation:
Stop fighting to maintain who you were and start participating in who you are becoming.
The moment you shift from preservation to evolution, the system begins to move again and the Funk dissolves – not because life changed but because you did.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re stuck in a funk and ready to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get moving again.
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