GETTING UNSTUCK

By Victor Midgley:

Feeling stuck is a common part of the healing process, often representing a plateau or a deep-seated resistance rather than a permanent state. Understanding why this happens requires looking beyond traditional mental wellness processes. One reason you get and feel stuck is to understand your issues intellectually but fail to translate that into new daily habits. You may know why you have anxiety, but taking actionable steps to change your behavior is a separate, more difficult challenge. Without consistent practice of new skills, therapy becomes repetitive "intellectualizing" that leads to no lasting change. Change is scary, even positive change. Your current behavioral patterns, despite being dysfunctional or painful, are often deeply ingrained survival mechanisms that helped you in the past. Letting go of these patterns can feel like losing your protection, leading to subconscious resistance, which keeps you in a familiar, albeit frustrating, "stuck" state. If you are struggling with intense pressures, your nervous system will be in constant crisis mode. Your brain will naturally prioritize immediate survival over long-term emotional processing. In this case, it is not a lack of effort but an overwhelming, unforgiving environment. Jim Rohn said, "The most important question you can ask yourself is, whose plan are you buying, whose got you talked into doing what you're doing?" Sometimes, the method or the messenger is not the right fit for your current needs. If you are working with someone who is not right for you, you could just be spinning your wheels. Napoleon Hill notably stated that most challenges and problems people deal with are psychological in nature, asserting that they stem from ungoverned thoughts, fear-based mindsets, and the failure to take control of one’s own mind. He maintained that limitations are largely self-imposed and that "failure is a man-made circumstance," rather than a permanent reality. What got you in a distressed state will require effort and application of the same energy to get you out. In other words, what caused your difficulties took a long time of consistent programming and conditioning of certain thoughts and emotions to create the belief of strife. That is the same pattern that will get you unstuck, although you will replace old thoughts and emotions with empowering ones. Understanding cause and effect in psychology is the foundational framework for identifying why people think, feel, and behave as they do. The human experience isn't random; it's a complex chain of reactions where our environment, biology, and habits are constantly sparking one another. By looking at psychology through the lens of cause and effect, we can see exactly how specific inputs shape who we are and how we function. At the most basic level, our actions are shaped by their consequences. This is the foundation of habit formation. Consistent reinforcement will either produce pain or pleasure. If you receive praise every time you speak up in meetings, you are likely to become more vocal - (pleasure). Conversely, if a behavior is met with a negative outcome, the "pain" is that the brain flags that action as something to avoid, eventually carving out a long-term habit. Our cognitive performance is heavily dependent on our physical environment and how we treat our basic needs. Sleep is one of the most powerful "causes" in the psychological toolkit. When you skip sleep, your brain’s ability to process information slows down. This directly results in poor decision-making and a "foggy" lack of concentration. You aren't just tired; your environment has caused a temporary shift in your ability to think logically. Understanding links between cause and effect gives you a "map" for change. If you want to change the effect (like poor health or bad habits), you have to identify and adjust the cause (like chronic stress or our reinforcement patterns). This is my point, focus on positive behaviors and create a list of 3 to 5 positive questions to ask yourself every morning and repeat throughout the day, for example: 1. What can I do today to ensure I have a productive and fulfilling day? 2. Who can I meet today that can help me achieve my goals? 3. What am I willing to do (or not do) that will lead me to my goals? Do not include “why” questions. At this stage, they will just produce a negative answer. Be confident in your plan and understand it will take time for your change to manifest and become automatically programed in your psychology and biology. Do not give up on your journey for change when the going gets tough. Fear, self-doubt, and negative thinking are internal, psychological barriers that cause more failure than external circumstances. Remember, healing is rarely a straight line. It is an upward spiral that often requires ebbs and flows. Plateaus are often just the preparation phase before a major breakthrough.