What we talk about when we talk about feeling ‘stuck’
To free yourself from a mental rut, first you need to decipher what’s truly holding you back. We have your escape plan.
If you can, have breakfast with an off-duty psychologist. It’s a win-win for the two of you. You get to ask them questions about the human condition—preferably at a diner on a grey November morning—as I did with my psychologist friend, who’s the closest thing I have to a spirit guide, Brien Kelley. And they get to talk to someone about work. People love talking about their work.
A few minutes in, you’ll realise how insufficient your emotional vocabulary is. They push back on terms such as ‘grit’ and ‘wellness’, replacing them with more specific phrases. They teach you how to talk about your feelings in a nuanced—and ultimately more effective—way.
‘The language stuff matters a lot,’ says Dr Kelley, who’s based in Manhattan, a place that, as I can tell you from experience, is teeming with people who feel emotionally—and literally, with regard to the subway—stuck. "There’s something about the word stuck that allows you to be in an ongoing state. It forecloses further digging. If you replace that with being dissatisfied—that’s a harder word to let stand."
And we need that help when it comes to being in a slump. Or being in a rut. Or feeling stuck. Or feeling as though we can’t break a bad habit. When we talk about being in a state of psychological inertia, we resort to sports terminology. I once had an issue with speaking in public—an inability to swallow while giving a presentation at work, which is a way bigger problem than it sounds—that I referred to as the ‘yips’. I felt like the Chuck Knoblauch of public speaking. No, what I was experiencing wasn’t the yips. It was anxiety. And if I knew to call it that, I would’ve talked to my doctor about it, or at least made sure I had water with me every time I fired up a Google Slides deck.
But speaking in a more precise way has even greater benefits. The larger your vocabulary, the easier it is to experience and tolerate different emotions. In a 2007 paper, UCLA researchers posited that ‘affect labelling’, or putting feelings into words, diminished the brain’s response to negative visual stimuli. In 2011, the UCLA team found that self-reported distress was decreased during affect labelling. There’s evidence from a 2015 University of North Carolina study that talking about emotions can actually help influence emotional experiences.
We have a rich vocabulary for so many parts of our lives. If we want to get better at five-a-side football, we go to the park and work on our agility and close ball control. We try to fix the mechanics of our shooting. We transfer power from our legs to the ball. We ‘follow through’. (Also, with sports, we just straight-up practise, which is the key to replacing a bad habit with a good one.) But when we’re in a rut? ‘I’m just not feeling motivated.’ Often, the catch-all term is ‘depressed’, which is too broad to do much good. It’s not sufficient, and it’s preventing us from breaking through to new possibilities. So a smart first move for getting out of a rut is describing the situation you’re in as precisely as possible. And not just to yourself. Communicating the problem—to a psychologist, a friend, your boss, your partner—is crucial, and sometimes the most consequential step, towards finding a way out.
How to think about feeling stuck…
Let’s run through a few key ‘stuck’ concepts, as I did with Dr Kelley, who helped me come up with alternative words and phrases—some psychological and some not—that let us be more specific about our emotions when we’re stuck or feeling like we can’t find our way out of a detrimental situation.
You’re not stuck. You’re dissatisfied.
There’s agency in that. You don’t just happen to be stuck. And you won’t just happen to get unstuck. You were involved in the problem, and you’ll be involved in the solution.
You’re not in a rut. You’re in a habit loop involving cue routine and reward.
When you’re feeling stuck, your brain is trying to help you. It’s trying to save you time. It convinces you the Groundhog Day of your existence is a comfortable, safe thing because routine conserves brainpower. That’s the habit loop. Let’s say you’ve developed a habit of watching hundreds of TikToks for the first 30 minutes of your work day. The app is always there, so you can do this every day at the same time. All your bad habits work this way. And they can be disrupted by replacing the cue (sitting down at your desk at home) with a different cue (starting your day on your sofa) and switching up your routine.
You’re not overwhelmed. You’re experiencing increased optionality
How do you commit when you’re exposed to so many options? For literally thousands of years, the people around us were our main reference group—the community that showed us how life was to be lived—and it felt as though humans had a much tighter set of options for moving through the world.
Now we have access to countless lives online and just as many ways of moving through the world. That can contribute to a feeling of paralysis. The options are almost oppressive. Of course, the big fantasy is that there’s a best choice. Your life isn’t something that can be endlessly optimised or perfected. No matter how informed you are, there’s always going to be a measure of winging it.
You’re not feeling paralysed. Your brain is trying to protect your sunk costs.
'What am I giving up?' is a powerful anxiety. Humans are generally averse to gambling on an unknown future when they’ve built something. Your anxiety regarding change often comes from the fact that there are many moving pieces, and the longer you move through the world, the more linked everything is. It can feel like a house of cards or a long line of dominoes.
And how to talk about it
While feelings of obligation to loved ones can contribute to the stability of a household or a relationship, sometimes the routines we’re in exist because we don’t want to disappoint or disrupt those we care about.
The key is framing your situation—and the change you want to make—in a way that makes taking action feel positive, not selfish and burdensome to others. "There are going to be some losers in any change you make and they need a story they can hold on to," says Dr Kelley. "If I said to my wife, 'I’m going to walk to the other side of the state next year,' she’d wonder what I was talking about. But if I said I was going to train for a marathon, which, time-wise, can be akin to a second job—everyone gets it. It provides a way for people to support you, show up and celebrate it."
The right language allows people to participate, which will help you stay unstuck. We aren’t talking about big, bold moves. The secret is that while your state may feel extreme, the way out is almost certainly not. It might require training your vision on a new path or adding a five-minute-a-day habit to your life.
Whatever the solution, it’s probably mundane and easy. That you can change so much by doing so little? It’s a kind of a superpower. And the first step is just replacing certain words with others. It’s talking.
