Feeling Stuck in Life? Here Is How to Un-Stuck Yourself

The first thing you have to realize is that you can never be stuck.

I’m saying this because the only constant in life is change – everything changes all the time.

You can, for instance, look at a river and say that it doesn’t change – it’s the same river. Nonetheless, the water is always moving. So in some sense, you are never looking at the same water, although it is all water flowing in the river.

Your life experience is like a river. It’s always moving and changing. The only reason you feel stuck is that you look at the water and don’t see its movement.

In other words, in your experience, things change to the same things. Over and over again.

Also, it’s not some evil force that plays a malicious game with you. The one responsible is you. You can’t see what’s really going on because your perception is clouded by concepts, beliefs, and judgments.

I know this might hurt to hear. But only when you take responsibility for your life situation can you start to steer your life in a direction you like.

To help yourself no longer feel stuck, become aware that being stuck in life is an illusion.

More so, getting out of feeling stuck doesn’t require you to go through a complicated maze. Sure, you can start doing all kinds of things to fight this feeling, but all this doing will only give you brief relief.

And creating an action plan to get out of your stuckness often creates more confusion, compulsion, and tension. It’s not about adding more things but about simplifying.

Changing your external environment should not be your main focus. A change of environment is the result of inner work. Things don’t need to change your perception of them does.

All that is necessary is for one variable to change. And that variable is awareness.

Dealing with Your Inner Experience

The only thing you have to “do” is to observe your inner experience, which means being aware.

Observe everything as if you were standing outside of yourself. Through observation, your awareness and understanding will increase. And when you understand something and are aware of it, it will start to change.

Observation of inner experience means observing thoughts and emotions. You can start with your thoughts or your emotions, but eventually, you’ll want to be aware of both so that they lose their power over you.

Examine Your Language

Telling yourself that you are stuck is like saying that life is stuck, which is kind of rude.

So the first step is to stop telling everyone (including yourself) that you are stuck. You are not stuck. But if you keep affirming that you are feeling stuck, you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you run around telling everyone: “I am stuck in life,” you’re creating more of the same.

Sure it can help to hire a coach to solve this issue. Yet at some point, you have to ask yourself why you’re re-affirming your stuckness all the time.

We believe that sharing our problems with everyone ready to listen will somehow solve our problems. Yet the truth is it won’t.

And often, our intention behind expressing our problems is not to find a solution but to attract sympathy.

It’s interesting to observe how people sometimes come to you with a problem that seems to burden them a lot. Yet when you tell them a clear solution, they don’t want to hear it. They rather come up with excuses why your solution is not solving the problem.

I mean, I get it, we want to find our own solutions. That is as long as the intention behind sharing a problem is receiving sympathy instead of receiving a solution.

When someone genuinely wants your help, they’ll openly receive your answer and consider it sincerely. When someone just wants to share their problem, it doesn’t matter what you say.

Now having said all that, how do you use the power of your word? Are you re-affirming that you’re feeling stuck in life or are you solution-oriented?

If you’re feeling stuck in life, start examining your language. Use a positive expression instead of a negative one.

If you need to talk about it, instead of saying: “I feel stuck in life,” you can, for instance, say: “I’m learning how to create more flow in my life.”

This is not denial, it’s a shift in mindset and hence an expansion of your possibilities.

Examine Your Thoughts

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Max Planck

To see why you feel stuck, you have to look inside. You have to ask yourself why you are recreating the same unwanted situation over and over again.

And this can start with your thoughts.

Many people think the same way for their whole lives and are surprised that they feel stuck in life. Your thoughts are one of the major creative forces that create your life experience.

Hence, if you think the same things, you’ll experience the same things. It sounds difficult to change your whole thinking, but this is not necessary.

Sometimes all you need is one different thought. Just one little thought that is so different from your usual thinking that it disrupts everything around you.

For instance, your whole life you might have been thinking that you need the security of a corporate job. Now what you can do is to offer yourself a thought to challenge that assumption.

“Do I really need this unfulfilling job for a sense of security?”

A simple self-reflective question like this can be the piece that collapses your whole repetitive thought pattern.

The logic behind it is straightforward and has been observed by many spiritual, philosophical, and new-age schools:

When you change the way you think, your environment changes as well.

Examine Your Emotions

Another and even more important point to consider are your emotions.

Maybe you have avoided your emotions your whole life. Instead of listening to what your emotional guidance told you about where to go, you have followed the advice of society and other people.

But that’s not all. Because society has been programming you your whole life, you can’t trust your emotions fully. At least not in the beginning.

Most people live according to a program that is hardly self-directed.

We have accepted the reality other people have served us. People have told us what’s important and unimportant, what’s good and bad, and what you should and should not do.

Such a life is more like being puppeteered from external influences. We behave in ways to fulfill standards so that other people like us.

But what we all want on a deep-down level is freedom – the freedom to make your own choices and live your own life.

And to reach this freedom, you need awareness. A whole lot of it.

You don’t have to analyze every emotion you are feeling. All you have to do is feel the emotion. Be with it and observe it. Understanding will follow by itself.

What does feeling stuck in life feel like? What are the sensations in your body?

If you observe the feeling of being stuck for long enough, it will transform. It may still be there, but you’ll no longer be affected by it. I know it sounds paradoxical, but that’s what awareness is like – being happy despite your feelings.

You’ll also see that, like everything else, your experience of feeling stuck changes as well.

Slowly but surely, you will start to unravel all the programming and conditioning. And suddenly, instead of stuckness, you’ll experience flowing movement.

Dealing with Your Outer Experience

In the beginning, I have said that you don’t need to “do” anything to un-stuck yourself.

And chances are that if you have applied awareness to your speech, thoughts, and emotions, your external experience is already shifting.

Doing the inner work is always the most important work. Yet we are also beings that like to do things in the external world.

This implies that you can supplement your inner work with actions in the external world. Also, inner work can take time and is perhaps never done. So assisting it by changing the way you are in the world can be of great help.

Do Things Differently and Do Different Things

A practical approach to assist in shifting out of feeling stuck in life is changing minor things in your daily life.

Do things you’ve been doing (and you want to keep doing) differently. For instance, you can change the sequence of the habits in your routines. Or it can even be as simple as brushing your teeth with the other hand.

This may sound silly and might not change your life, but it has benefits.

For one, studies show that performing tasks with your non-dominant hand improves brain connectivity (1,2). The other benefit is that doing things differently will get you out of autopilot mode and increase your awareness.

Many of our daily tasks are automated so much that we’re not even aware of what we’re doing. And while there is a benefit to that, it can also make you feel like a lifeless android. To counteract this robot mode, switch it up once in a while.

Another thing you can implement is doing different things.

Again this doesn’t need to be something huge right away. You might start to go to an area in town you haven’t been to. Or you can eat at a restaurant you have never tried. Or a personal favorite of mine, start drawing doodles.

It’s not even important what the activity is. The important thing is doing different things.

Doing different things will lead to new ideas, insights, and opportunities. You’ll also find yourself in situations you would’ve not gotten yourself into if you’d never tried that thing.

From experience, I can tell you that minor changes and tweaks like these can be very powerful to overcome feeling stuck in life. Often one small change can be a catalyst that initiates an avalanche of happenings that change the trajectory of your life.

Embrace and honor the minor changes you can do daily. They can be the first domino towards major changes.

Follow Your Highest Excitement

How many of your daily activities truly excite you?

One reason you’re feeling stuck in life might be that you’re unhappy with what you’re doing. Your job is boring and unfulfilling, your hobbies are limited to drinking and gossiping, and you lack a sense of purpose.

Take a good look at your life and ask yourself what excites you.

You may not be ready to throw over your whole way of living in one scoop, but you can start with small things. Wake up and set the intention to follow your highest excitement in each moment as best as possible.

And when I say in each moment, I mean in each moment. What pair of socks excites you the most? Which mug do you want to drink your coffee from?

If your job is not exciting, see which parts of your job are exciting to you. It might be the way to work or talking to your colleagues.

Many people are so stuck with the things they think they need to do to get what they want that they don’t give themselves the freedom to follow what lights them up.

But what if following your highest excitement in every moment will get you what you want and more?

Make a Radical Decision

If you want to speed up things even more you can make a decision that will lead to a lot of change. This decision can come in many forms:

• Quitting your job
• Leaving your unhappy relationship
• Going traveling by yourself
• Moving country
• Starting a business

Granted, making a decision like this takes courage. But it will also lead to a lot of growth and development.

Keep this option in mind when you can no longer take the feeling of being stuck in life. It might not be the most sustainable way, but at least it will get you out of stuckness for the time being.

Yet you don’t need to feel stuck in life to make a big change. Occasionally shaking things up is a good way to keep your life exciting and adventurous.

If you feel like you lack the courage for such decisions, it can help to adopt a sense of being in a game. When you perceive life as a game with all its mini-games, it will lose its seriousness and take on a much more playful character.

The Most Radical Way of Dealing with Feeling Stuck in Life

If you want simplicity and don’t shy away from being with your inner experience, try this approach.

Just sit with the feeling of being stuck in life. That’s it. Not more, not less.

I call this approach radical because that’s usually not how we’ve been taught to get out of an uncomfortable situation. Most of the time, we try to avoid everything that evokes unwanted feelings and emotions.

But this running away from your inner experience is what will keep you running away for the rest of your life.

There is wisdom in everything, and life never wastes anything. So when you feel stuck in life, there is an insight waiting for you. All you have to do is to sit in the uncomfortableness until the insight reveals itself.

You can solve the majority of your problems by giving them space so they can untangle themselves.

This approach is going one step further than observing your inner experience. It’s becoming one with your inner experience. This is another reason why it’s quite radical.

If you’re not used to merging with your experience, you can feel overwhelmed. Yet be aware that what you’re experiencing is just a mix of feelings and sensations which cannot physically hurt you.

The beauty of this approach is that it’s a sustainable and liberating way of dealing with every feeling and emotion.

It’s the final stage in many mystical teachings. You overcome the split between observer and observed to see through all illusions.

If you have experience with this radical way of dealing with your emotions, go for it and let the wisdom of the stuckness speak to you.