You’ve got the weirdest sense of déjà vu. It’s not just one thing; it’s everything.

First things first, don’t panic. There’s a good chance you’re the victim of a prank. It’s a more likely scenario than being trapped in a magical phenomenon or temporal anomaly.

Don’t trust newspapers, electronic devices, or casual conversation. Get yourself clear of the immediate environment that your friends or family might have influenced and see if you can get a reputable, impartial stranger to verify the date. Bonus points if you can find a major event that you remember happening and find evidence that it hasn’t yet.

OK. Let’s assume that you’re able to find solid evidence that you’re in the recent past. Kudos. You’ve time traveled. It’s not until it happens a second time that you’re in a loop. But since one-time time traveling isn’t anything you can really prepare for if you weren’t the one to initiate it, let’s go ahead with the version of events where you’ve experienced multiple resets and are now definitely in a time loop.

One of the first things you need to determine is the scope of the loop. How far can you travel? How long is each loop? A five second loop is torture. A fifty-year loop is practically a religion.

Try every mode of transportation at your disposal. Board trains and planes. Get on boats. Rent hot air balloons. See if any improbable circumstances arise that limit your ability to travel out of any theoretical boundaries of the effect.

AVOID DYING. I can’t stress this one enough. In the course of your experimentation, it’s possible that you may be injured or even killed. Don’t ever do so on purpose. Without knowing how the loop works or why it started, it’s possible that your death will end it (not in a good way). If you’ve reached this point in your time loop experience, you’re always aware of previous loops, which means your mind remains intact.

If you must know whether your body resets, start small. Write on yourself in marker. Cut your hair. Nothing permanent, just in case you don’t get another reset.

Another key is to determine the owner of the loop. There isn’t any guarantee that you’re the primary focus of the time loop. Check in with other people. Drop hints. Leave clues. Determine whether anyone else is aware of the loop the way you are. The key to getting out may be related to their life, not yours. Be prepared for a supporting role if you want to escape.

Keep in mind that once you’ve established that intact-memory recurring time loops are occurring, you don’t need to do everything all at once. Information is there, and you can find things out iteratively, learning things in one loop that will reveal secrets when you try again with more info in your brain.

Armed with this information, you’re ready to proceed to the next step.

• Step One: Recognizing a Time Loop
• Step Two: Changing Things [UP NEXT]
• Step Three: Getting to Know the People
• Step Four: Learning New Skills
• Step Five: Avoiding Boredom
• Step Six: Escaping the Time Loop