Getting in a rut is easy to do. You find yourself sitting on the lounge watching rubbish on TV or at the dining table eating boring food or worse still, catch yourself talking rubbish. It’s easy enough to do. Here are a few things you might want to consider doing to help jolt yourself out of that rut.

Listen to ‘Common at the Whitehouse’. Just type that into YouTube. This extraordinary performer will give you an insight into his world in a gentle explorative music genre. Just four songs performed at the Whitehouse in the last few weeks of the Obama’s term in the House. NPR recorded this.

NPR also do an amazing series of music samplers called Tiny Desk. I hope you have heard some of these. Depending where you up to in your music journey, you could try The Crossrhodes or go old school with The Blueman or Randy Newman (sublime four songs) or if western swing is more your thing try Lyle Lovett. Perhaps something pretty and intimate like the extraordinary  Laura Mvula will work for you. (The only person I have seen play a Rhodes electric piano and sing, standing up.)

The story behind this show is to take musicians and ask them to play in an office with very little technology. They just roll back a desk, throw a couple of microphones into the mix. Some artists cope wonderfully, others really struggle. Think about it for a moment. Imagine standing up at your workplace and belting out a couple of tunes. If you can’t find something on NPR Tiny Desk that speaks to you and lifts you out of the rut, you are not trying. The diversity is staggering. The depth and richness of the musical offering is unequalled.

If the visual is more your thing, you could try Omeletto a YouTube station that presents short films. There is some very disturbing stuff, it will jolt you out of your rut. I have deliberately stayed away from book here, I could list a hundred for you. But if you are a reader already, you are probably not in a rut.