REDRUM Your Routine: How to Escape the Psychological Overlook Hotel You Accidentally Live In

Colour / Reading Time 6 mins Approx

Ever feel like your house is slowly turning into the Overlook Hotel — but with worse lighting and significantly fewer amenities? This guide helps you diagnose the cabin-fever curse, break out of the psychological maze of stale routines, and get your inner Jack Torrance back under control… before you start talking to phantom bartenders about your life choices.

Have you ever woken up, stared at your ceiling, and thought: If I have to walk from my bed to my kitchen in this same dull loop one more time, I’m going to lose it and start writing ominous sentences on the wall?

Congratulations. You might be living inside your own personal Overlook Hotel.

And no — this doesn’t mean your home has a hedge maze (though if you’ve let the laundry pile up, who knows). It means your daily routine, unchecked and un-upgraded, has slipped into that special breed of psychological horror where every hallway feels the same, every day feels identical, and you’re pretty sure your décor is starting to judge you.

But don’t panic. Don’t grab the axe just yet. Don’t start typing the same sentence 500 times in a Google Doc.

We’re going to talk about:

• Why your home can turn into a psychological trap

• How your routines quietly become a haunted house

• What to do when you start resembling Jack Torrance pacing the overlook corridors

• And how to break out of the mind-maze before your walls start whispering “Stay with us… forever…”

If you’ve been feeling haunted, stuck, restless, numb, half-feral, burnout-y, mysteriously irritated by the sound of your own fridge… you’re in the right place.

Let’s exorcise your routine.

Let’s REDRUM it — in the best way.

PART I: WELCOME TO THE OVERLOOK (YOU LIVE HERE NOW)

There’s a moment in The Shining when Jack stares out over the empty ballroom, wearing the expression of a man who has officially lost the plot. And while most of us aren’t writing novels in cursed hotels, many of us are slowly unraveling inside our own four walls.

Why?

Because the human brain hates sameness. It rots in it.

We were designed to hunt, explore, dodge predators, chase new experiences, and reinvent ourselves constantly. But modern life? It often demands the opposite.

Wake up.

Slog through tasks.

Sit in the same spots.

Think the same thoughts.

Repeat until you’re spiritually dehydrated.

Eventually, your home stops feeling like a sanctuary and starts feeling like… well… a haunted hotel where you’re the only employee and the ghosts are terrible tippers.

Suddenly:

• Your bedroom feels like a tomb

• Your kitchen feels like punishment

• Your living room feels like purgatory

• And your bathroom mirror is showing you things you never asked to see

You’re not broken. You’re bored. And boredom, unchecked, becomes dread.

This is how the descent begins.

PART II: HOW YOUR HOME BECOMES A PSYCHOLOGICAL HAUNTING

You didn’t choose this descent. It sneaks up on you. Here’s how your house becomes a brain-trap — Overlook-style.

1. The Spatial Loop (aka: Every Corridor Is the Same)

In The Shining, the Overlook is a labyrinth disguised as a building. Corridors blur. Hallways repeat. Jack gets lost long before he knows he’s lost. When your routine is too familiar, your home becomes a spatial loop. Move. Task. Sit. Scroll. Repeat.

This sameness convinces your brain that nothing new is possible — which is how dread settles in: quietly, gently, like a ghost pulling up a chair.

2. The Time Loop (aka: Every Day Is Tuesday)

When you don’t have novelty, your brain stops registering difference. You lose track of time. You lose track of days. You lose track of yourself.

You become the caretaker and the ghost.

3. The Identity Loop (aka: “This Is Just Who I Am Now.”)

This one’s the killer.

When your habits calcify, your identity shrinks to fit them. Wake up → drag yourself → survive → sleep. Repeat until you forget you once had ambition, curiosity, joy, or hobbies that didn’t involve doomscrolling.

This is how you become psychologically trapped.

PART III: BEFORE THE AXE COMES OUT — HERE’S YOUR EXIT PLAN

Good news: the way out doesn’t require destroying the bathroom door with hardware tools. It simply requires breaking the loops.

To do that, here are the “lessons,” your personal survival guide — the ones Jack desperately needed but didn’t get.

Lesson 1: Change One Room, Change Your Brain

One of the fastest ways to un-haunt your home? Alter the environment.

• Shift the lighting

• Rearrange the furniture

• Switch where you sit

• Move your workspace for the day

• Change your morning route through the house

The Overlook’s power came from repetition — same hallways, same carpets, same spaces. Break the loop and the haunting loses its grip.

Micro-renovations = macro-resurrection.

Lesson 2: Add a “Plot Twist” to Your Schedule

Routine is how your brain falls asleep while awake. But plot twists? Those wake it up instantly.

A plot twist can be microscopic:

• Make breakfast a different way

• Work at a café once a week

• Take a walk at a random hour

• Try a new playlist

• Wear something that changes your energy

• Light candles before noon (witch privilege)

Anything that disrupts the automatic gets your mind back online. The goal: make your days slightly unpredictable. The safe kind of unpredictable — not “blood-elevator” unpredictable.

Lesson 3: Do Something Badly on Purpose

Perfectionism is a ghost that loves to keep you trapped. If you don’t try anything, you never fail. If you never fail, you stay in stasis. And stasis is the Overlook’s preferred meal.

So try something you’re delightfully terrible at:

• A sloppy drawing

• A ridiculous dance

• A hobby you have no talent for

• Cooking something chaotic

• Crocheting a creature that should not exist

You don’t need to succeed. You need to move. Movement is life. Stasis is possession.

Lesson 4: Exorcise Through Noise

There’s that scene — you know the one — Jack marching through the hotel with that deranged, brittle silence. Silence is where fear festers.

Make noise. Break the spell.

This could be:

• Music

• Singing badly

• Vacuuming

• Calling a friend

• Reading out loud

• Playing something loud enough to shake your serotonin awake

Your home needs to hear that you are alive.

Lesson 5: Build Rituals That Actually Feel Magical

Rituals aren’t routines. Routines numb you. Rituals ignite you.

Ritual = meaning + intention + repetition.

Try:

• Lighting a candle every time you start work

• Setting out a morning altar (coffee counts)

• Journaling in the witching hours

• Doing one self-kindness before noon

• A “closing the day” ritual so your brain doesn’t blend work-life into sludge

Magic ruins the monotony — in the best way.

Lesson 6: Let a Little Madness Out Before It Builds Pressure

Jack is a cautionary tale for what happens when you suppress too much. He didn’t snap overnight. He simmered.

Let your inner chaos seep out intentionally instead of waiting for the explosion.

• Scream in your car

• Write an angry letter and delete it

• Punch a pillow

• Cry

• Dance it out

• Journal like you’re summoning demons (responsibly)

Letting it out ≠ losing control. Letting it out is keeping control.

Lesson 7: Reintroduce Yourself to Yourself

The longer you sit inside the same routine, the more you forget what you’re capable of. So reintroduce yourself.

• Take yourself somewhere you haven’t been

• Read something new

• Try a different hobby

• Wear something bolder

• Order a drink you wouldn’t normally choose

Small identity expansions create big psychological shifts.

Jack lost himself in the Overlook. You don’t have to.

Lesson 8: If the Walls Could Talk… Listen

Sometimes the dread is trying to tell you something.

Your fatigue isn’t laziness.

Your boredom isn’t failure.

Your restlessness isn’t drama.

Your irritability isn’t personality.

It’s information. It’s feedback. It’s your psyche saying: “This isn’t working anymore. We need newness. We need meaning. We need out.”

Listen before you end up typing REDRUM in metaphorical lipstick on the walls of your life.

PART IV: YOUR ESCAPE FROM THE MAZE

Let’s talk about the hedge maze — the symbol of being trapped while panicked. How do you escape a maze?

Not by sprinting.

Not by panicking.

Not by circling faster.

You escape by pausing long enough to see the pattern.

Ask yourself:

• What’s the real cause of my dread?

• Where am I looping?

• What tiny action can break the cycle?

• What room feels dead? How can I revive it?

• What thought is keeping me stuck?

• What new direction can I test today?

One small choice becomes a new pathway. One new pathway becomes an exit route. One exit route becomes your new life.

You’re not meant to haunt your own home. You’re meant to live in it.

FINAL EXIT: YOU ARE NOT JACK TORRANCE

You are not doomed to psychological cabin fever.

You are not destined to lose yourself in repetition.

You are not trapped in your routines.

You are not the monster in your own story.

You’re simply someone who’s been stuck in a maze for a while — and now you’ve found the map out. And that map? It’s yours to rewrite.

So open a window. Move a chair. Change the lighting. Add a spark. Break a loop. Reclaim the space.

You’re not here to become the caretaker of a haunted mental hotel. You’re here to become the one who walks out — alive, awake, self-rescued.

Here’s your key. Here’s your door. Here’s your way out. REDRUM your routine. Resurrect yourself.

And leave the ghosts behind.

IN ODD WE TRUST Presents
A FIELD NOTES FROM THE DARK Production
Starring YOU, the protagonist in your own psychological thriller
Produced by A LIFETIME OF QUESTIONABLE DECISIONS
Directed by EXISTENTIAL DREAD Story by THAT VOICE IN YOUR HEAD AT 3AM
Costume Design WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE TEE Music by DISSONANT SYNTH and REGRET
Feeling seen? You Belong with us, Join THE CULT OF ODD Your backstage pass to PSYCHOLOGICAL
SURVIVAL GUIDES, HORROR COPING RITUALS and EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE T-SHIRTS