When your life starts falling apart, the video says to reset your body first, stop the bleeding, keep things simple and predictable, and then work through what happened with the help of friends and professionals. The video starts from a blunt place: it hit the fan, maybe your fault, maybe the world’s, and now you need a way out. It promises a solution you can work through together and a reminder that things can get better.
The 15 steps below run from physical basics to emotional ones, ending with the idea of treating this period as the origin story of the person you are becoming. The video gives general life advice, not medical care, and it recommends professional help for anything that feels deeply wrong.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 steps at a glance
- Health, fitness, rest: reset (0:35)
- Get out of the house, put sun on your face and spend time in nature (2:58)
- Stop digging (5:23)
- Don’t start anything new: focus on the essentials (7:06)
- Start a daily routine that jogs your mind and keeps life predictable (8:35)
- Reach out to your friends (11:00)
- Have an honest conversation with yourself about what got you here (12:16)
- Let go of the dead weight (14:24)
- Revisit an old source of creative happiness (16:02)
- Get professional help (17:48)
- Change the difficulty settings on your life (20:03)
- Grieve, feel your feelings, allow them to exit the body (22:22)
- Don’t drown your sorrows in anything that makes it worse (23:55)
- Zoom out (25:36)
- Use this as the origin story for who you are becoming (26:55)
- Bonus: you already have the solution, you just don’t like it
1. Health, fitness, rest: reset
We experience reality through the chemicals in our body, the video says, and it cites large-scale academic studies linking physical health with life satisfaction across age groups. Its advice is to get to a gym, not push hard and just get your blood flowing.
Many people sit from bed to kitchen chair to car seat to office chair to couch, on a diet heavy in fried or buttery food. A mostly dormant body struggles with the chemicals released under stress, and it needs movement to flush stress hormones out. Getting physically tired quiets the mind.
Add a fixed sleep and wake time and your mind begins to defog. The core idea: the mind cannot do its job if the body is not cooperating, so fix fitness and rest first and watch the problems start to make more sense.
2. Get out of the house, put sun on your face and spend time in nature
Many people are not getting enough sun, trees or clean air. The fix is easy and cheap: start walking, the video calls it the vegetable of exercise. Be a tourist in your own city, find its hidden gems and walk through a forest to see how your body signals that it wants more.
Alux also points to a 2018 study in Japan that linked depression and other mental health struggles to iron deficiency. It stresses that this is not true for everyone with depression. For someone who never had mental health issues and now does, it says to see a doctor, get bloodwork done and ask about natural supplements, since not every bout needs heavy pharmaceuticals. It lists fish oil and iron, vitamin D, magnesium, probiotics and vitamin B as examples of what a doctor might discuss.
3. Stop digging
Whatever got you here, doing the same thing will not give you a different outcome. If a deal is unprofitable, take the loss and walk away. Spending more than you earn? Stop spending. Already in debt? Do not borrow more to pay the old debt. If they left you, stop calling and stalking their social media.
This is what getting yourself together looks like: you go from autopilot to decisive. A trap the video sees often is chasing a quick dopamine hit, like a shopping spree meant to prove you still have it, which leaves you feeling worse half an hour later. Its blunt rule: if you cannot pay rent, don’t buy the plane tickets. Stick to the handful of things you know will give a positive return.
4. Don’t start anything new: focus on the essentials
The goal now is to survive and wait it out, because time provides clarity and lets certain actions play through. There is no reason to run around like a headless chicken over things you cannot directly influence.
You will be tempted to solve one problem with an outside fix or risk more to win back what you lost. Someone may also try to take advantage of your situation with a high-return, low-investment offer, and the video says not to fall for it. You cannot spend your way out of this hole. Focus on the few things that measurably work and repeat them. This is the grind phase, and if your actions have a positive return, volume and time solve the problem.
5. Start a daily routine that jogs your mind and keeps life predictable
Winging your schedule every day creates tremendous stress, and unpredictability is part of what got you here. The team proposes three parts: a predictable routine that spares your brain from small decisions, an input of wisdom that gives you context and frameworks, and a disciplined grind that turns that wisdom into measurable progress.
It sums it up as: the day is won before 1 PM. Wake up, wash, make coffee or tea, but first drink a glass of water. Train your brain with a podcast, meditation, journaling or an app built to give actionable steps. Then write a priority list in order of impact and finish the two biggest tasks before 1 PM, so you have made real progress before the day is half over.
The only difference between winners and losers, the video claims, is that winners keep a routine of small daily progress.
6. Reach out to your friends
True friendships matter most in times of struggle. You need people to talk to, even if it is just to vent, and your friends are waiting for you to let them be there. Drop the habit of sharing only the wins, because hard times create depth, and that is how friends become best friends.
Being a lone wolf sounds good until you notice the pack is safer and eats more consistently. If you feel lonely right now, the video says, it may mean you did not make good friendships a priority. It adds that the rich use this too: they make each other richer and keep each other from going broke.
7. Have an honest conversation with yourself about what got you here
Others can give you answers, but only you can work out what happened. The narrator calls it a single-player quest. Step back, watch the replay and look for inflection points, red flags you ignored and bad calls you made.
A life rarely falls apart from one decision, since most single mistakes can be reversed or outworked. It falls apart when bad calls pile up. Alux lists questions to ask yourself:
- Where did I mess up?
- What did I see but ignore, and why?
- Did I double down on the mistake, and why?
- If this happened again, what would a better course of action be?
- What belief did I hold before, and what do I think now?
You cannot change the past, but you can extract value from it. That, according to the video, is the only way to turn bad calls into something worthwhile.
8. Let go of the dead weight
Some consequences of past decisions are still around. Hired too many people? Make the tough call. If you went back to an abusive ex, choose yourself and let them go. Poured too much money into a hobby? Stop. If someone steered you into a bad deal, they are out of your life now.
It is cheaper in money and time to take the loss now than to keep people around trying to recoup what you lost through them. Without the weight, your overhead is low and you move lightly. Everyone is responsible for their own life, and you are a sinking ship trying to save everyone else. Put on your own oxygen mask first, accept that it hurts both sides, then don’t look back.
9. Revisit an old source of creative happiness
The team says two mistakes got you here: tying happiness to a certain outcome, and letting that outcome depend on other people or barely be in your control. Its claim is that happiness is not found but created, the way you make yourself go to the gym despite the voice telling you to hit the couch.
The happiness muscle weakens when unused. Society pushed a culture of productivity where work, thinking and everything became hard, and the things that made you happy got traded for hard things. So go back to what used to bring joy: old songs, favorite films or a book that sparked something. Chances are it will again.
10. Get professional help
If something still feels deeply wrong after the steps above, the video names four kinds of professionals who can help: psychiatrists, nutritionists and doctors; therapists; priests (a note on screen says to maybe leave this one for last); and professional coaches.
Each has seen hundreds or thousands of people go through similar things and knows the patterns that help. You pay them for expertise, not work, and it usually takes a few tries to find the one who clicks. Your life did not fall apart overnight, so the fix will not be overnight either. The video’s point is that what worked for others will statistically work for you if you do it.
11. Change the difficulty settings on your life
Your life has different difficulty settings depending on what you want to achieve. Becoming a billionaire requires expert-level play in the money game, and getting under 6 percent body fat requires expert-level play in fitness. Being happy and at peace is not an expert-level objective, and you have met poor people who were content.
Social media, the video says, convinced people everyone should have the penthouse, the supercar, the private jet and the designer jewelry, which sets an almost unattainable bar and makes you feel worthless. It points to easy-mode wins instead: love your partner, hug your parents, sleep well, go to the cinema, take your kid for ice cream. Ask what winning at life means to you and how you will measure it.
12. Grieve, feel your feelings, allow them to exit the body
Many people bottle everything up, lock it in a box and never talk about it, until the room cannot hold any more. The narrator encourages you to give yourself permission to grieve and to process, and reminds you that what happened to you was not your fault.
Creative types can put it into writing, painting, journaling, music or code. The reasoning: emotions are meant to be processed, not bottled, and time does not heal anything if you do not use it to work through the feeling.
13. Don’t drown your sorrows in anything that makes it worse
TV glamorizes alcohol, drugs and other escapes, and the video says to stay away from them. The peace they bring is an illusion: reality does not stop, and the consequences of earlier choices keep festering.
It uses the image of a dragon that was not killed in infancy and grows stronger every day, while the addiction comes to collect as well. The cost of buying a moment of quiet, it argues, is trading most of your future. Stay clear of that and you have a real shot at turning things around.
14. Zoom out
The video’s line: a zoomed-in life is a tragedy and a zoomed-out life is a comedy. You have been through hard times before and pulled through, so expect to do it again. In ten years this will be one more chapter in your book.
Think back to a middle school test that felt like the end of the world. You probably laugh about it now. This is what hard feels like, and you are supposed to go through it so you can laugh later. Remember too that 12 bad months do not erase a decade of progress, so give yourself more credit.
15. Use this as the origin story for who you are becoming
The final step is to treat this as your hero’s story. Every hero starts with excitement, meets early challenges, then things go dark and the hero is captured. You have seen enough films to know that this is not where the story ends. The hero pulls themselves together, understands the mentor’s words and wins.
Use the wisdom, tools and teachings of your mentors to do the same. One day this struggle will make your TED talk more interesting. The video’s closing message is that it is all figureoutable, that you already hold the puzzle pieces or at least know which are missing, and that this is not the end of your story.
Bonus: you already have the solution, you just don’t like it
Some problems can be solved with outside help, meaning money, connections, a tool or someone’s knowledge. Others come down to brute-force effort: the problem needs a certain number of hours, and you are the one who has to put them in.
Alux calls that a blessing, because it means nobody else can keep you from solving it. Its closing reminder: you are not the voice in your head. You are the person making things happen, and that voice is only a spectator.
Start with one step today
You do not need to do all 15 at once. The team suggests starting with the body and the money leaks, then adding routine, people and honest reflection as your head clears.
Return to this list whenever you need it, and come back once you have beaten your dragon.
FAQ
What should you do first when your life is falling apart?
The narrator says to start with your body: get moving, sleep at regular times and get outdoors. A rested, active body lets the mind think clearly about everything else.
What does stop digging mean?
It means stopping the actions that caused the damage, such as unprofitable deals, overspending, borrowing to repay debt or chasing a former partner. Keep only the few things you know give a positive return.
How does a daily routine help when life falls apart?
A predictable routine removes small decisions and stress. Alux recommends getting the two biggest tasks on your priority list done before 1 PM.
Who can help you if you feel stuck?
The team lists doctors, psychiatrists and nutritionists, therapists, priests and professional coaches. It says it often takes a few tries to find the right person.
Why does the video say to zoom out?
Because a zoomed-in life feels like tragedy and a zoomed-out life looks more like comedy. It points out that 12 bad months do not erase a decade of progress.
Keep reading
- Life Unlocks After These 15 Changes
- 15 Things You Should Know About Yourself (if You Want to Win at Life)
- 15 Things You Should Know When Starting a Business
