On being stuck

This advice isn’t generalizable, so make of it what you will.

We all go through phases where we feel stuck for a variety of reasons—personal, professional, or sometimes even external. Sometimes we feel stuck because we are overwhelmed by life and the world in general; it’s not like the state of the world is so fantastic that some of us aren’t paralyzed just by looking at it. And sometimes it’s pure inertia and avoidance—we are running from something.

Whatever the reason for this stuckness, it is not a good place to be. You feel like shit, and everything sucks. And the way to solve this problem is that one has to get unstuck. Duh.

I was thinking about this as I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. More often than not—and I want to be absolutely clear: more often than not, not always—there are two obvious paths one can take to feel unstuck.

One: Take a break. You just stop whatever you’re doing, sit your ass down, and stare at the passing clouds, the morning sunrise, the gentle breeze, the sweet rustling of the leaves, and the blooming of the flowers. Just go outside, touch the grass, and smell the sweet fragrance of urban air pollution.

Two: Do small things. In my own case, this has been nothing short of a lifesaver. Small acts of work—little things. I think they’re underrated.

Doing small things creates a sense of momentum. As you get feedback from doing those small acts, be it good or bad, your brain slowly starts to change and gets into a groove of action. Those small things add up, it becomes an avalanche of sorts, and before you know it, you’re cruising at top speed.

Why does this work? It works through multiple channels. For one, small wins trigger your brain’s reward system. Whether they are big wins or small wins, we are humans and we always want to feel nice—and small wins make you feel good. In writing this, I discovered an idea from Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile, who calls it the progress principle. She says that of all the things that boost our mood and motivation, one of the biggest factors is small progress on things that matter to you and are meaningful to you.

On top of that, we’re also very ambitious creatures. Once we’re confident because we were able to pull off the small things, our ambition slowly starts increasing, and we start doing slightly bigger things.

What’s happening here? Well, psychologist Albert Bandura calls this self-efficacy. You feel stuck for a variety of reasons, but in that moment, we often feel like we can’t do anything. When we start doing things and are able to pull off even small things, our brain rewires itself a little, and then you start feeling, Oh, I can actually pull off things. You become self-efficacious. Things steadily escalate, and before you know it, you’re back. You’ve recovered your mojo, and you’re back in the groove.

And the small things can be anything. In my own case, it was something as simple as writing a small blog post, reading a book and writing about it, finishing a part of a project that was long pending, going and talking to someone new, or dealing with whatever I was avoiding. More often than not, these things have worked like magic.

Again, I want to be very clear about the caveats here: this is not clean, generalizable self-help advice, which I abhor and hate with the wrath of a thousand suns. There are phases where you genuinely are in a bad position due to external or internal factors. But for the garden variety of stuckness, I think these things work.

So if you’re feeling stuck, try these two things. If they don’t work, then you need to be committed to an asylum—but I hope it doesn’t come to that.