How to Get Unstuck Without More Self-Work

You understand yourself better than most people ever will. And yet you’re still stuck. I’m a therapist, and I see this all the time. All that insight from books, personality tests, courses, and even therapy isn’t the solution. That insight may be the very thing that’s keeping you from changing.

In the next few minutes, you’ll discover what’s really keeping you stuck and what to do instead of trying to understand yourself more.

It’s easy to think that the more aware you are about your own dysfunction, the easier it will be to change. The problem is that you make awareness of the problem the destination. Just because you can articulate the problem doesn’t mean you’ll fix it, but it may start to feel like solving the problem. You make progress because you do have to put some effort into it. I mean, you’re doing real cognitive work when you analyze your thoughts, and you’re producing real, documented knowledge about yourself when you journal.

But that very knowledge can actually keep you right where you are. Because the more you do things to understand a pattern or a behavior, the more it feels like you’re actually doing something about it. But you’re not. Not yet anyway.

You’re just telling yourself a more sophisticated story about being stuck. And your brain has a very specific reason for keeping you there.

What’s your brain protecting you from?

There’s a concept called experiential avoidance, and it’s one of the most important things to learn, because it’s the number one thing we all do. Experiential avoidance means avoiding internal experiences. You don’t so much avoid tasks or people or even situations. You avoid the feelings associated with those things.

Take a hard conversation, for example — maybe one you’ve needed to have for a long time. You might find all kinds of ways to back out, or even postpone the conversation until you feel ready. Or you might feel relieved when the time doesn’t even present itself. As tough as that conversation might be, you’re not so much avoiding having that conversation or even avoiding the person. You’re avoiding the anxiety and the fear of whether or not you can handle the conflict that might come with all that. So you kick the can down the road for another day, so you don’t have to deal with those big feelings. And of course, that leaves you stuck right where you are, away from what you want.

Here’s why this works so well.

Your nervous system is designed to protect you from threats. That’s its primary function. Deep inside your brain, there’s a structure called the amygdala. Think of it as your brain’s alarm system. Its job is to scan your environment constantly and decide one thing: am I safe, or am I in danger? When it detects danger, it doesn’t wait for you to think about it. It floods your body with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart rate goes up, your muscles tense up, your breathing gets shallow. This is the fight, flight, or freeze response.

And it’s terrific if you’re being chased by a bear. You don’t want your brain to stop and analyze that situation. You want it to react and get you out of there. So that system works pretty great for physical danger.

The problem is your amygdala can’t tell the difference between a physical threat and an emotional one. To your nervous system, the vulnerability of that hard conversation produces the same chemical response as a genuine threat to your safety. The knot or the butterflies you feel in your stomach before a difficult conversation is cortisol. The tightness in your chest when you think about asking your boss for a raise — that’s your nervous system preparing you to fight or run.

But you’re not actually in danger. Your brain has categorized emotional exposure as something to be protected from, so it doesn’t evaluate whether the threat is real. It just responds. And it responds so fast — faster than your rational brain can catch up anyway.

So before you can even think through the situation, your body has already made the decision for you. Alarm bells have you moving away from the thing that feels dangerous. And the minute you do, the alarm shuts off. Your cortisol drops, your chest loosens, you feel relief. And the moment you step away from the idea of that hard conversation, your discomfort drops right away.

That immediate relief is the engine. Because your brain just learned something.

It learned that avoidance equals safety. And it will use that lesson every single time, because your brain likes to take the path of least resistance. It’s the most efficient way, and your brain will always lean towards what’s most efficient.

But for you, sitting there stuck in your own thoughts, this unfortunately becomes straight up negative reinforcement. You did a thing that removed discomfort, and because it worked, you’re more likely to do it again. So lucky you — you get to be stuck over and over again.

You get caught up in a loop where you avoid a painful experience, even as you know the very thing that will get you unstuck is to take on the painful feelings. You close circuit yourself away from what will actually help you. The same mechanism that keeps you away from danger also keeps you away from what matters to you. Growth is uncomfortable. Vulnerability is uncomfortable. Change is uncomfortable. And your brain treats all of it like a threat to manage.

Now here’s the part that matters for smart people in particular. Your avoidance doesn’t always look like running away. It probably looks more like preparation. It’s research, or taking yet another personality test, or a course, or going to a retreat or seminar, or reading yet another book on how to improve yourself — even one of mine. All of that can produce genuine understanding and insight about who you are and why you behave the way you do.

And all of it could also be functioning as a way to avoid the uncomfortable action that would actually change something. The insight becomes the avoidance strategy. And the smarter you are, the harder this is to see, because your version of avoidance looks productive.

I know, because I almost did this to myself a couple of weeks ago.

I had every reason to feel like a failure, and I almost leaned into that. A couple of weeks ago, I was in the middle of a 30-day video challenge. I had committed to it publicly, I was building some good momentum, doing videos every day. And then I got sick. I had to stop. I lost my voice and I was a congestive mess for about two weeks.

Now, I have a history of unfinished projects. And believe me, I’ve done a lot of work to try to understand how and why I tend to lean this way. So it would have been so easy for me to frame this challenge as yet another failure to complete something that mattered to me. Maybe I don’t want it bad enough. Maybe I’m just the kind of person who starts things and doesn’t finish them. Maybe there’s something fundamentally wrong with how I approach commitments.

I could have spent weeks analyzing that. And I would have learned some things about myself — probably even some accurate and useful things I need to look at. But that analysis would have kept me right where I was, with stuff I already knew about myself. Only now I had one more notch in my belt to prove that I don’t finish video projects.

All that, instead of simply walking right through those feelings and making the next video.

So I made a decision. I reframed it. The illness was part of the challenge. The challenge wasn’t just about making videos — it was also about all the other stuff that comes with being consistent in making videos. Sometimes people get sick. That’s a real thing. And if I’m going to do this for real, I’m going to have to learn how to factor in ways to handle that.

I took what I learned from the challenge. And instead of asking what went wrong with me, I asked: what can I carry forward from this to do something better? This video is the first one I’ve made since.

And I’ll be honest with you. I have all kinds of anxiety about this. I’ve staked my ground on YouTube as the place where I’m going to build a home for my videos, and there are a lot of big feelings there to deal with. It’s tempting to soothe those feelings by watching lots of other videos on how to present myself, or create value — whatever that means — or how to optimize my content before I even make another video. That would be a very sophisticated avoidance strategy. I would absolutely learn some stuff, but I would have one less video right now.

Trust me, I’ve been tempted to lean into that. Instead, I’m using what I already learned from that challenge and trying to be maybe 1% better with this one. That’s it.

If I had spent all my time trying to figure out how the challenge went wrong, and what it is about me that seems to resist progress, I wouldn’t be here. I’d still be back there, bathing in all that understanding. And nothing would have changed.

When I realized I’d actually taken a different path with this, I was pretty proud of myself — because I chose an action that actually takes me closer to what I really want.

The person who has the most clarity isn’t the one who makes the change. It’s the person who moves. You already know enough. You probably knew enough a long time ago. The next step isn’t more understanding. It’s movement.

But there’s still an obstacle between knowing you need to move and actually doing it.

The thing you’ve been poking at with a stick isn’t the task itself. It’s the feeling that comes up when you think about doing it.

Think about one thing you’ve been putting off. You probably already know what it is — it probably came to mind a few minutes ago while you were watching this. Now ask yourself a different question. Don’t ask why you keep avoiding it. You already know why. Ask what feeling comes up when you imagine yourself actually doing it. Name that feeling. Is it the fear of being judged? Is it the vulnerability of putting yourself out there and having it not work? Is it the discomfort of knowing someone might be disappointed in you?

That feeling is the actual barrier, and that’s what you’re retreating from. It’s not the task — the task probably isn’t that hard. The feeling is hard. And the only way past it is through it.

Think of yourself as a buffalo facing a winter storm. Have you seen these buffalo? They’re completely covered in snow and ice. Other animals try to run away from the storm, but that keeps them trapped in the blizzard even longer. The buffalo turns directly into the wind. It charges right through the driving snow and the biting cold. By moving straight through and enduring all that discomfort, the storm passes over more quickly. They also avoid getting stuck in drifts, which means they reach the other side sooner and move on to a calmer situation.

That’s what you have to do with the feeling you’ve been avoiding. Don’t go around it anymore. Go right through it. That’s the only way to get to what you want.

So here’s what I want you to do: the smallest possible version of the thing you’ve been avoiding. Send the resume. Schedule the sales call. Book the session with the trainer. Do it before the discomfort talks you out of it again.

Because every time you act in the direction of what matters to you, even when it’s uncomfortable, you teach your nervous system something new. You teach it that this kind of discomfort is not a threat. It’s information for you to use to move on to the next thing. And this is the most important part — you teach your nervous system that you can handle it. Not that you’ll like it or enjoy it. But that you can handle it.

Because you absolutely can.

If this video helped you see what’s actually been keeping you stuck, I’m building a whole series on the traps smart people fall into and how to get out of them. Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next.