Feeling like your life isn’t moving in the direction you want it to, or even moving anywhere at all, is a scary realisation. I’ve had many of these moments of feeling stuck and wondering what to do when you feel stuck in life.
I’m going to share with you 6 steps to take when you feel stuck in life that have always helped me get out of these moments of helplessness!
What To Do When You Feel Stuck In Life
1. Assess Your Situation
The first thing I recommend is to look at what is, or isn’t, happening in your life right now to make you feel this way. Are you stuck in a job or relationship you don’t want to be in? Have you not reached a goal you thought you’d have reached by now? Or is it just a general lack of motivation and direction that’s getting you down?
Think about what’s missing in your life at the moment. Visualise your ideal life and compare it to your life now. What’s different?
Set aside plenty of time to really think about this. Write or journal about it so that you can keep track of your thoughts and get a general overview at the end. This is a crucial step to creating that life you love so be completely honest with yourself and look at every area of life you can think of. Analyse your mindset, habits, relationships, career, health and fitness, finances, lifestyle and spiritual or religious practices.
2. Set Some Goals
The next step is to take a look at your work so far and use that to help you set some meaningful goals. For example, if you feel like you’ve been neglecting your physical health and fitness, set a goal related to this, such as exercising for 30 minutes a day. If you’re lacking in meaningful relationships, you could set the goal of going to more social events or joining group activities to meet more like-minded people.
Write a long list of every goal you can think of that you believe will move you closer to your ideal life. Then, go through the list and choose 3 that seem the most important to you at this time. You can come back to this list later, but I’ve found it’s best to only focus on a few goals at a time to see the best results.
3. Strategize
Next, you need to strategize and plan the process that will get you to achieve these goals. For example, if your goal is to create a healthier mindset, your process may be to include new habits like practising mindfulness every day for 15 minutes and keeping a gratitude journal that you write in before bed every night.
Do a bit of research if you feel you’re lacking the necessary knowledge to make these plans. You could search on google or youtube to see what other people have done to achieve similar goals, or you can find a book that addresses the topic in more depth.
4. Get Organised
Now that you’ve got your plan, it’s time to get organised. Decide how often and at what times you’re going to carry out the tasks in your plan, add them to your calendar, and schedule them into your day. By doing this, your plan becomes tangible and you’re able to see exactly what you need to do each day in real-time.
This takes a lot of the thinking and decision-making out of the rest of the process which will make sticking to your new routines a lot easier. A way to remove even more resistance from each task is to set up your environment for success. For example, if your plan involves exercising every morning, leave your workout clothes in a neat pile in a place where you’ll see them when you wake up. If your plan involves journalling at night, leave your journal and a pen next to your bed so it reminds you and you don’t have to go and find these when you’ve already settled down for the night.
This is another essential step to include if you want to successfully change your life for the better. It’s unlikely that you will stick to any kind of behaviour change if you don’t put in the time each day to organise.
5. Cultivate self-discipline And Stop Procrastinating
Another crucial step, and probably the hardest one, is to cultivate your self-discipline. The first step to doing this is understanding that, although self-discipline feels so restrictive, it’s what’s going to lead you to true freedom. This mindset shift is important because it will open your eyes to the fact that your own life is completely in your own hands and happiness requires discipline.
Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
Leo Gura sums this up really well in his youtube video on the topic.
On the other hand, procrastination is another huge obstacle for many people when it comes to making changes in their lives. By this, I mean a kind of large-scale procrastination like putting off changing your career or ending a negative relationship.
Procrastination often comes from a feeling of resistance or even fear. It’s common for people to say to themselves ‘I’ll start being healthy in January’ because the anticipation of the discomfort of changing their diet causes an overwhelming sense of resistance. However, it’s important to ask yourself, ‘if I can’t make this change now, what’s really going to make it any easier in the future? If not now, when?’
6. Enjoy the journey
Finally, once you’ve reflected, strategised and put your new plan in place, try to trust the process and enjoy the journey. Real change usually takes time and patience to see in life, so keep this in mind to avoid feeling frustrated and giving up on the possibility of a better life.
Focus on your goals and keep coming back to your why. Re-motivate yourself regularly.
This being said, if after a few months of trying you find that your process isn’t working for you, feel free to re-strategise and try a new approach. However, don’t let this be an excuse to change your plans when they get hard. Make sure you’re sticking to a plan for a good amount of time before deciding to change your approach.
Bonus Step: Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind
Although this isn’t an essential step, it can make your progress a lot quicker and reaching your goals a lot easier. All of our habits and behaviours, whether good or bad, stem from deeply rooted beliefs that exist in our subconscious minds.
Therefore, going straight to the source of our behaviours and reprogramming these beliefs is definitely the most direct and sustainable way of changing our own habits. For an in-depth guide on how to reprogram your subconscious mind, check out this blog post!