On Feeling Stuck
When nothing seems to change
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with feeling stuck.
Not the tiredness that follows a busy week, but the quieter kind. The heaviness of feeling as though nothing you do really makes a difference. Days blur together. Decisions feel harder than they should. Underneath it all sits a quiet belief that's often difficult to put into words:
"Nothing is going to change anyway."
If you've ever felt like this, it's easy to assume something has gone wrong within you. That you've lost your resilience, your motivation, or your ability to cope. I wonder whether something else might be true.
You have already survived
Whatever has brought you here has already happened. The relationship ended. The diagnosis came. The loss occurred. Or perhaps there wasn't a single defining moment at all, but years of pressure that slowly accumulated. Whatever brought you here now belongs to the past, even if its effects still shape the present. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, you found ways to keep going.
Perhaps you kept working when every day felt heavy. Perhaps you carried on caring for other people while quietly falling apart yourself. Perhaps you simply got through one day at a time without ever calling it resilience.
Thriving and surviving aren't the same thing. But surviving still tells us something important: somewhere along the way, you adapted. And those adaptations deserve a closer look.
The adaptations we don't always notice
One of the things I find most fascinating about human beings is how quickly we adapt to protect ourselves. We rarely choose our coping strategies consciously. They develop because, at the time, they make life more bearable.
Keeping busy can become a way of avoiding painful thoughts. Withdrawing can feel safer than risking another disappointment. Expecting very little from life can seem easier than hoping and being hurt again. The difficulty is that our minds don't always recognise when the danger has passed. What once protected us can quietly become the thing that keeps us stuck.
One of the quieter consequences of trauma is a sense of powerlessness. If painful things have happened despite your best efforts to prevent them, it's understandable that effort itself can begin to feel meaningless.
Why make plans if life changes them anyway?
Why hope if disappointment feels inevitable?
Why risk trying if failure feels more familiar than success?
From the outside, this can sometimes look like giving up. From the inside, it often feels more like self-protection. As trauma researcher Dr Bessel van der Kolk writes, part of recovery is about reclaiming a sense of ownership over ourselves again—feeling that this body, this life and these choices belong to us. When we're stuck, that sense of ownership can become obscured by fear, old patterns, or the belief that our actions no longer make a difference.
The difference between resting and disappearing
Not every coping strategy is a problem.
Sometimes we genuinely need to withdraw. Sometimes we need routine, familiarity or comfort before we have enough capacity to do anything else. The question isn't whether we cope, it's whether our coping is helping us recover or helping us disappear. A quiet weekend after a difficult week is very different from months spent avoiding everyone who cares about you. Watching a favourite programme to unwind isn't the same as losing yourself in endless scrolling because being alone with your thoughts feels unbearable. The behaviour itself isn't always the problem, more often, it's what the behaviour is trying to protect us from that deserves our attention.
Moving doesn't always begin with a big decision
When people feel stuck, they're often encouraged to make dramatic changes.
Find a new job. Join a gym. Think positively. Start again, as though stuckness were a switch that simply needed flicking. In reality, change is usually much quieter than that. It might begin with a conversation you've been putting off. A walk with nowhere particular to be. A proper meal instead of whatever's quickest. A slightly better night's sleep. Replying to a message. Or simply learning why your mind and body respond the way they do, not to fix yourself, but to understand yourself a little better.
None of these things solve everything. But each one gently interrupts the story that nothing can change. Agency isn't something we either have or don't have. More often, it's something we begin to experience again through small choices that slowly accumulate.
A different question
Instead of asking,
"Why can't I move forward?"
We could look at asking something else…
What did it take for me to survive what I've already lived through?
Whatever the answer is, it's evidence of strengths you may have stopped recognising. Perhaps being stuck isn't the opposite of resilience. Perhaps it's what resilience looks like when it's been surviving for too long.
