When You Don’t Know What to Do Next—Do This
How to get unstuck when you’re overwhelmed, burned out, or stuck in your own head
There are times where everything clicks—when the path feels clear, the work feels exciting, and the next step feels obvious. You’re in the flow. A master in action.
And then there are the other times.
Times where you’re stuck in your own head. Overthinking. Overcomplicating. Paralyzed by all the options—or none at all.
This happens to me way more often than people would guess.
Sometimes it’s right after a summit moment: crossing a big goal off the list, finishing a major project, hitting a milestone you’ve chased for months. Instead of feeling unstoppable, you feel... adrift. Aimless. Like you fought to the top of the mountain only to realize you don’t know what comes next.
Other times, it sneaks up. After too many days where the grind feels heavy. After realizing you’ve dropped the ball on something important. After stacking one little stress on top of another until the whole thing feels overwhelming. Not a dramatic crash. Just a slow fade into low gear until you’re stuck.
In these moments, though, the worst part isn’t the lack of movement—It’s how quickly your mind turns the stuckness into a story: "You’re falling behind. You’re wasting time. You’re screwing this up. You’re never going to figure this out."
But that pressure on yourself doesn’t create clarity to help you move forward. It just digs the hole deeper.
It locks you inside your own head, spinning in frustration, shame, and doubt instead of moving toward anything real.
That’s why getting unstuck is never about thinking your way forward. It’s about moving your way through.
"If you're going through hell, keep going." — Winston Churchill
Why We Get Stuck in the First Place
Stuckness gets a bad reputation. It’s easy to label it laziness. Lack of willpower. Weakness.
But most of the time, it’s none of those things.
Stuckness is fear. Fear of picking the wrong thing. Fear of wasting time, energy, and effort. Fear of stepping forward without a guarantee it’ll work out.
Sometimes it shows up as anxiety—too many options, too much pressure to pick the right one. Sometimes it shows up as sadness—not enough fire, not enough direction, not enough reason to move at all.
But underneath both, it’s the same root: fear of moving without certainty.
I know that feeling well. For years, my job trained me to see every wrong move as a failure.
As a systems and technical designer, my work was about predicting problems—how departments would interact, how millions of players might try to push or break the system. One mistake could ripple through everything. And the expectation was clear: figure it out ahead of time.
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?” became my default mindset.
It made me sharp. But it also made me stuck. Because when you condition yourself to believe mistakes are disasters, you stop trusting yourself to move without certainty. You start thinking so far ahead—and so deep into every possibility—that it feels safer to hesitate than to risk being wrong.
Over time, that fear turned into burnout.
After I finished my last Half Ironman, I expected to feel strong, proud, ready to tackle whatever was next. Instead, I felt... directionless. With the structure gone and no obvious next race on the calendar, momentum started to fade. Training felt heavier. Focus scattered. Even small decisions felt bigger than they should have.
Different causes. Same effect. Stuck.
Whether you’re drowning in demands—or drifting without a clear next move—the fear creeps in. It tells you to wait. To hesitate. To hold back until you “figure it out.”
But the longer you sit in that fear, the louder it gets.
Stuckness isn’t laziness. It’s the mind freezing itself in search of a guarantee that doesn’t exist.
The Hidden Cost of Waiting for Clarity
When you’re stuck, it feels safe to wait until you have a good plan to fix it.
You tell yourself you just need more time. More thinking. More planning. A little more certainty before you act.
But the longer you wait, the heavier it gets.
Because stuckness isn’t neutral. It doesn’t sit quietly in the background while you figure things out. It grows. It compounds.
The longer you stay frozen, the more doubt creeps in. You start second-guessing your own instincts and doubting your abilities. You wonder if you even know what you want anymore. You invent more problems to solve before you can even start.
Eventually, it does more than just slow you down—it erodes your confidence in yourself to move at all.
I’ve felt it firsthand. I’d stare at a blank page, a training calendar, a to-do list—and instead of picking something and leaning in, I’d spiral. What if it’s wrong? What if it’s wasted? What if I’m not ready?
And after big races or major projects, it was a different kind of stuck—feeling that without a clear goal to chase, even the basic rhythms of life felt off. I wasn’t just doubting the next step. I was doubting what direction I even wanted to go next.
The stuckness wasn’t about the task anymore. It was about trust.
Every day I waited for perfect clarity, I was doing more than standing still—I was slowly training myself to doubt my ability to choose.
And that's the real cost.
It’s not just that you lose time or momentum. You lose the muscle of action. You lose the self-trust that only gets built through movement.
You start to believe that you’re the kind of person who has to wait. Who can’t act until everything is perfect. Who can’t trust themselves to build the next chapter without a script. Who can’t trust themselves to figure it out along the way.
And that belief? It’s way harder to unwind than any missed opportunity.
That’s why waiting for clarity rarely brings the breakthrough you’re hoping for.
Because clarity isn’t something you wait for—it’s something you move toward.
How to Build Momentum (Even When You’re Uncertain)
The only way out of stuckness is through action. But not reckless action. Not "fix everything overnight" action.
Intentional action. Small action. Real action.
When you’re stuck—whether it’s from burnout, overwhelm, or drift—the goal isn’t to “get it right.”
The goal is to get moving again. To rebuild trust with yourself, one step at a time. Here’s how you do it:
1. Shrink the next step until it feels almost too small to matter
When you’re stuck, everything feels bigger than it is. That’s why you need to make the next move so simple and doable that your brain can’t argue with it.
Not “write the whole plan.” Just “open the doc.”
Not “build a full training schedule.” Just “go for a 10-minute walk.”
Not “figure out your next life chapter.” Just “brainstorm three things that sound interesting.”
Small moves break the paralysis. And every small move builds momentum.
2. Focus on movement, not mastery
You’re not trying to solve everything at once. You’re just trying to prove to yourself that you can move again.
Let it be messy. Let it be uncertain. Let it be imperfect.
Clarity comes once you’re in motion and see what matters—not before it.
3. Choose progress you can feel, not just progress you can track
When you’re rebuilding, it’s easy to obsess over metrics. But early momentum isn’t about numbers—it’s about emotion.
Did today’s action make you feel a little stronger? A little clearer? A little more awake to your own life?
That’s the real win. Chase that feeling—not just the finish line.
Because here’s the truth: you don’t think your way back to momentum. You move your way there—one small, honest step at a time.
When I’m stuck, it’s never because I don’t know something I could do. It’s because I stop trusting that one small move is enough to matter.
Every time I’ve found my way forward, it hasn’t been by thinking harder. It’s been by moving—one small, honest step at a time.
Not because I was ready. Not because I had a perfect plan. But because action builds clarity—and waiting just builds doubt.
If you’re stuck, you don’t need the whole map. You just need one move.
What’s one small thing you can do today to remind yourself you’re still moving?
Start there. Then keep going.