[jdeaton]

I've been in ruts before. Something helpful which has gotten me to the other side of the most recent one is telling myself repeatedly "I'm just in a bad time". The last word (i.e. "time") is really key here. It's imposing a temporal structure of transience on the situation. In this way, I can conceptualize the "end" of the "bad time" as sone (unknown) future point in time which is inevitably approaching, even though I'm not sure when it will be.

The notion of a "rut", by contrast, imposes a physical structure on the concept (think is a person who is literally stuck in a ditch in the ground) which doesn't lend itself to your thinking of it as "inevitable" for you to ever get out of it.