Feeling Stuck in Life and Why Thinking Harder Hasn't Gotten You Out
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By the time women find their way to me, they've usually tried everything they can think of. They've talked it over with friends, advisors, and mentors. They've made the pros and cons lists, taken the personality tests, and talked it through so many times they could argue both sides in their sleep. And they're still feeling stuck in life, standing in pretty much the same spot they were a year ago.
If that sounds familiar, you probably don't need one more person telling you to stop overthinking. What helps is having something to work with in your body that your mind can't reach on its own.
In this post I'll walk you through the three-part process I use with women who are stuck in a midlife transition or a career that stopped fitting, and how to get unstuck in life without forcing yourself into a leap you can't sustain.
Why Feeling Stuck in Life Doesn't Budge When You Think Harder
I know this loop well. For years before I left physical therapy, I tried to think my way into being content with my career.
I weighed pros and cons, asked anyone who would listen for advice, ran through every possible scenario, and prayed about it, legitimately and often. I took new trainings hoping something would reignite my love for the work, and I even got my yoga teacher training and pitched my bosses on letting me bring it into the clinic.
After years of looking at it from every angle known to man, I was no better off. What finally got me moving was running out of levers to pull. I had done everything I could to make my situation more tolerable, and it was still completely intolerable.
Thinking can lay out your options. It can't make your body feel safe enough to choose one, and that's the part that keeps you in place.
I've written about this pattern in The Burnout Cycle, where rest and even a brand-new job don't fix what's happening at the root, and in my post on why a midlife career change is so often an identity crisis. So I won't belabor it here.
The more useful question is what to do instead.
What Feeling Stuck in Life Is Protecting You From
The first step in my process is getting curious about the stuckness itself. Most of us want it gone as fast as possible, but stuckness has a purpose and a wisdom to it, and you can't bypass it on the way to clarity.
Set aside ten minutes, get quiet, and ask yourself these questions while paying attention to what happens in your body:
What does the stuckness feel like in my body? Where do I notice it?
If it had a voice, what might it say?
What might it be protecting me from?
What does it want me to do?
The answers often show up as sensation before they show up as words. A heaviness in your legs, a tight jaw, a breath you didn't realize you were holding. Let that count as information.
When women answer the third question honestly, the answers tend to cluster.
Stuckness is usually protecting you from some combination of these:
losing your financial security
the unknown, and the discomfort of not knowing how it all turns out
changes that would ask a lot of you, like ending a career, leaving a relationship, or moving
confronting your own patterns, like self-abandonment, putting yourself last, or getting honest about who you are and what isn't working in your life
In short, it's protecting your current identity, the status quo, and your current relationships. That's a lot to hold up, which is why the stuck part of you is so strong. In a career that no longer fits, the job may be holding up your income, your sense of competence, and the answer you give when someone asks what you do.
That's a big part of why I wrote I Don't Know What I Want Anymore (and My Career No Longer Fits).
In midlife, it might be holding up a marriage, a set of roles, or a version of you that everyone around you depends on, which I explore in my post on what happens when you can't tolerate your old life anymore.
The part of you keeping you in place is trying to keep you safe, a pattern I go deeper into in my post on why self-sabotage is really self-protection.
Once that part feels understood, it usually loosens its grip enough for something else to come through.
Finding What You Want When You're Feeling Stuck in Life
The second step is finding what your desire feels like in your body.
A lot of advice about feeling stuck focuses on fear, and fear is loud, so that makes sense.
Desire is quieter, and in my experience it's what actually gets women moving.
To find it, bring to mind something you've been longing for, even if it seems impractical. Then notice what happens in your body.
Women describe it to me as an opening, a softening, a fluttering of excitement, a pull toward something, or a yearning. It may be faint at first, especially if you've spent years putting yourself last.
Then imagine staying exactly where you are for five more years and notice how your body responds.
You'll probably feel the difference before you can explain it. That difference points you somewhere, and you don't need a full plan yet, only a direction your body is leaning toward.
It's worth learning to tell a genuine pull from an old pattern dressed up as one, since the urge to please someone or prove something can masquerade as desire. I write about that distinction in my post on business decisions and body wisdom, and it applies just as much to life decisions as to business ones.
In midlife, your intuition often gets louder at the same time your tolerance for the old way of living drops, which I wrote about in What Your Midlife Transition Is Really Trying to Tell You.
That combination can feel destabilizing. It also gives you a lot to work with in this step.
How to Get Unstuck in Life With Right-Sized Steps
The third step is taking action toward that desire in a way that feels like a stretch and is still doable. I call these right-sized steps, and in my experience people tend to miss them in one of two ways.
They either push through and try to make a move that's too big, or they wait until they feel 100% comfortable and end up doing nothing.
The first is a step that's too big. Your brain treats anything outside your normal as a threat, even when your normal isn't good for you. A huge leap sets off your threat responses, and you end up white-knuckling it, forcing and pushing your way forward without support. There's almost always a snap back, and that kind of change is almost never sustainable long term.
The second is waiting until you feel completely ready. A lot of women hold off until the discomfort is gone, and it rarely goes away on its own, so they stay exactly where they are. A right-sized step will always carry some discomfort. That's how you know it's a stretch, and stretching is what gives your body new evidence that a different life is survivable.
Here's what this looked like for me. Quitting my full-time PT job with nothing lined up and backpacking around the world solo was a huge leap, and it was what I needed at the time to see and sense other possibilities. It worked for that. Most women won't need to do what I did, plenty can't, and honestly, it was long before I knew anything about right-sized steps.
What came after is the better example. When I came home with a business idea, someone asked if I meant something like life coaching. I received a coaching session myself, and that's how I knew this was my work.
Then I spent two to three years doing part-time and PRN physical therapy while coaching on the side, before leaving PT to coach full time. That slow trickle out of PT was a series of right-sized steps, each one a stretch and each one something my body could actually hold.
Right-sized steps look different for everyone. A few examples:
having one honest conversation you've been avoiding
taking on a single client, project, or class in the direction you're drawn
cutting back hours before cutting ties
spending a weekend living the way you want to live, to see how it feels in your body
What counts as right-sized depends on your capacity, and capacity changes.
If you're navigating life after burnout, your capacity may be lower than you're used to, and your steps may need to be smaller for a while.
Your body usually registers overload long before your mind admits it, which I explore in what your body shutting down from stress is actually telling you.
Perimenopause can shrink your capacity too, through fatigue and anxiety, as I wrote about in my post on when perimenopause starts.
Each right-sized step gives your body new evidence that change is survivable.
That evidence does more to get you unstuck than another month of turning the same question over, and the next step tends to get a little easier.
What to Do When You Are Stuck in Life and Need Support
This process is simple to describe and much harder to do alone. At some point, a lot of women realize they want support, and then comes the question of what kind.
Therapy and coaching are both valuable, they're designed for different things, and the right fit depends on what's going on for you.
Therapy is the best fit if you're dealing with moderate to severe anxiety or depression, if you're working through active trauma, or if you're having a hard time functioning in your daily life.
Licensed therapists are trained to assess and treat those things, and many of them work with the body as well as through conversation. If any of that describes where you are right now, please start with a therapist.
Somatic coaching is a good fit when you're functioning in your day-to-day life and still feel stuck at a deeper, identity level. You know something has to change, you've thought about it endlessly, and you want support learning to trust what your body is telling you and to act on it.
Plenty of people work with both.
My clients can see a therapist while we work together, as long as we're focusing on different things and the two kinds of support aren't pulling in competing directions. If you're unsure which fits, ask either one about their scope before you begin.
A good practitioner will tell you honestly whether they're the right person for what you're carrying.
What a Somatic Coach Does When You're Feeling Stuck in Life
If you've never worked with a somatic coach, it can be hard to picture what that support looks like. Here's what I'm doing alongside the three steps above:
Tracking what's happening in your nervous system. I'm listening to your words, and I'm also paying attention to what's happening below them. The pause before you answer, the shift in your voice when one option comes up, the breath you hold when you talk about staying. Those signals often say more than the story does.
Helping you stabilize and widen your window of tolerance. Your window of tolerance is the range where you can be present and responsive. As it widens, you have more capacity for choice and agency, and steps that once would have flooded you start to feel right-sized.
Helping you learn how your body communicates with you specifically. Every body has its own language. For one woman a clear yes feels like warmth in her chest, and for another it's a settling in her belly. We figure out what yours sounds like so you can keep hearing it long after we're done working together.
Leaving the decisions with you. You set the pace and you make the choices. I'm not going to tell you whether to leave your job or what your next chapter should be.
My background shapes all of this. I'm a Doctor of Physical Therapy who spent 13 years in that career before I became a coach, so the body has always been where I start.
That's the heart of the somatic coaching I offer, and you can read more about how it supports women through a major transition on my Life Transition Coaching page.
If you're curious about the nervous system side of this work, I've also written about what everyone gets wrong about regulating your nervous system.
Getting Unstuck in Life With Support
Here's how Afi Catena described what changed once she stopped living in her head.
"Before I started working with Kim, I felt really stuck in my patterns... One of the most valuable things I gained from our work together was learning how to connect with my emotions through somatics. I realized I had spent most of my life thinking about my emotions rather than actually feeling them. Kim helped me build the capacity to notice sensations in my body and allow emotions to move through me instead of getting stuck... If you're someone who tends to live in your head, feels stuck, or knows you want more but can't quite get out of your own way, I would recommend Kim again and again.” -Afi Catena
If you're feeling stuck in life and tired of thinking about it, a Threshold Mapping Day is where I'd start. It's a focused, asynchronous coaching day on Voxer where we work through all three steps together. By the end of the day, you'll have:
a clearer sense of what your stuckness has been protecting
a felt sense of what you actually want, in your body and in words
one or two right-sized next steps
practices for listening to your body after our day together ends
Threshold Mapping Day is $150, with a 100% money-back guarantee if you don't have clarity by the end of the day. If you continue into ongoing coaching within 7 days, the full $150 is credited toward Crossing the Threshold. I only take one Threshold Mapping Day per week.