You're not stuck, you're just afraid to change
A companion to: You are what you choose
I’ve been telling myself for months that I’m stuck. Stuck in my work, stuck in certain patterns, stuck in ways of thinking that stopped serving me years ago but have become so familiar they feel like part of my personality. The word “stuck” is useful because it sounds passive, like something that happened to me rather than something I’m actively maintaining, like the universe glued my feet to the floor and I’m just standing here waiting for someone to bring the solvent.
But I’m starting to suspect that’s bullshit. In fact, I think most people aren’t stuck at all. I think they’re stationary by choice, waiting for certainty before they move, or waiting for permission from some external authority, or for motivation to arrive like a package they ordered, or for a sign that somehow guarantees no regret. But that sign never comes, which is convenient because it means you never have to actually do anything. You can stay exactly where you are and tell yourself it’s not your fault. You’re just being “responsible”, or “careful”, or waiting for the “right moment.”
Being stuck is really just our own fears playing tricks on our nervous system, deceiving us into staying small.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why we cling to this idea of being stuck—why it feels safer to identify as someone trapped by circumstances than as someone who’s afraid to move—and I think it comes down to the fact that the brain prefers familiar pain to unfamiliar risk. This isn’t a moral failing or a character flaw but simply how our nervous systems work.
Known dissatisfaction is less threatening than unknown possibility because at least you understand the contours of the dissatisfaction you’re already living with. You know what tomorrow will feel like because it will feel like today, which felt like yesterday, which means you can predict and manage and regulate yourself around that known quantity.
Predictability regulates the nervous system even when the thing you’re predicting is miserable. This is why people stay in jobs that drain them of any will to live, because at least the paycheck is predictable. Or why they stay in relationships that feel like slow suffocation, because loneliness feels worse and at least this kind of pain is familiar. Or why they stay locked into identities they outgrew years ago, because starting over feels humiliating and what if you fail and prove that you never should have tried in the first place?!
There’s research backing this up. Kahneman and Tversky documented what they called loss aversion, this tendency for humans to fear losses more intensely than they value equivalent gains. We’re wired to protect what we have even when what we have is making us miserable. There’s also status quo bias, which is the brain’s preference for keeping things as they are. Doing nothing feels rational even when it’s actively harmful because at least it’s not a decision you have to take responsibility for. You can just let inertia carry you forward and tell yourself you never really had a choice to begin with.
What I’ve noticed in myself and in the people around me is that most people aren’t actually waiting to change, they’re waiting to change cleanly. They want clarity before action, confidence before movement, motivation before effort, certainty before risk. They want to know exactly how it’s going to turn out before they commit to trying. They want the transformation to happen internally first so the external change is just a smooth execution of something they’ve already resolved. But that’s not how change works. Clarity is a reward for movement, not a prerequisite for it.
You don’t think your way into a new life. You live your way into new thinking.
I wrote a few weeks ago about identity being built through choice, and I meant it. But believing that doesn't automatically make you capable of choosing. You can know you're constructing yourself brick by brick and still be standing there with the brick in your hand, unable to set it down or place it anywhere.
And yet we’ve built an entire culture around the idea that if you just analyze something long enough, research it thoroughly enough, consider every angle carefully enough, you’ll eventually arrive at perfect certainty and then action will be easy. Thinking has become a socially acceptable form of avoidance, and you can spend years “working on yourself” without actually changing anything about how you live.
I’m no exception… I admit I do this constantly. I’ll spend hours turning a decision over in my mind, examining it from every conceivable angle, building elaborate scenarios about how each option might play out. I tell myself I’m being thoughtful, or responsible, making sure I don’t do something rash. But what I’m actually doing is avoiding the discomfort of committing to something before I know how it ends. I’m rehearsing the decision endlessly instead of just making it and dealing with whatever happens next.
This is part of why I started tracking my own patterns—not goals or habits, but the stories I tell myself and where fear shows up wearing “reasonable” clothes. I built Conscious Creation around that practice: 12 weeks of guided behavior tracking designed to make your own patterns visible so you can interrupt feedback loops and effect real change in your life.
Fear doesn’t sound like fear anymore, and that’s part of what makes it so effective. Fear no longer says “I’m scared” because that would be too honest, too vulnerable, too easy to identify and challenge. Instead it says “I just need more time.” Or “Now’s not the right moment.” It says “I’m being practical” and “I’m waiting until things calm down” and “I don’t want to make the wrong choice.” Fear has learned to speak in reasonable sentences and has borrowed the language of wisdom and caution and careful planning. It sounds like the voice of maturity when really it’s just mental paralysis.
Since I’ve started paying more attention to this, I’ve noticed I do this almost daily. Framing my avoidance as prudence, calling my paralysis patience, pretending that not deciding is somehow different from deciding to stay exactly where I am. But staying put isn’t neutral, and that’s the part people want to ignore because it would mean accepting responsibility for the life they’re living. There’s a cost to not changing, and you’re paying it whether you acknowledge it or not!
The cost shows up as erosion of self-trust, because every time you promise yourself you’re going to do something and then don’t, you’re training yourself not to believe your own commitments. The cost shows up as quiet resentment, this background hum of bitterness about your life that you can’t quite articulate because you’d have to admit you chose it. The cost shows up as cynicism, as this protective shell you build to explain why trying is pointless and people who do try are naive or privileged or just haven’t been beaten down enough yet to understand how the world “really works.”
The cost shows up as dullness, as the slow decay of ambition until you can barely remember what it felt like to want something badly enough to risk failing at it. Or as contempt for people who did move, who did change, who did take the risk you were too afraid to take. You tell yourself they got lucky or had advantages you didn’t have or don’t understand the real constraints you’re operating under. You build an entire worldview around why staying put was the only rational choice, and that worldview calcifies into something that looks like wisdom but functions as a prison.
Inaction is not free, and you’re paying for it with your future—with the person you could have become, with the relationships you could have built, with the work you could have done, with the life you could have lived if you’d been willing to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing how it would turn out! (Yes, I am yelling! I wish I could scream this paragraph from a rooftop!)
Something I’m trying to remember when I catch myself spiraling into that paralysis is that change is less dramatic than I think it is. I have this tendency to imagine change as burning everything down, or making some grand public announcement, or literally uprooting my entire life and becoming someone unrecognizable. I catastrophize the stakes until the only options seem to be staying exactly where I am or destroying everything I’ve built. And then (of course!) staying put seems like the obviously sane choice.
Real change usually looks much quieter than that. It looks like one uncomfortable conversation where you tell the truth instead of managing someone else’s feelings, or one honest admission that something isn’t working instead of continuing to pretend it’s fine. One boundary you finally enforce after years of letting it be crossed, one new routine that disrupts the pattern you’ve been running on autopilot, one decision you stop revisiting, one choice you make and then commit to living with instead of endlessly second-guessing, and so on.
Most lives don’t change through grand reinvention but through quiet refusal, through deciding there’s one thing you’re no longer willing to tolerate and then actually following through on that decision instead of just thinking about it. Change happens when we choose the discomfort that moves us forward over the discomfort that keeps us frozen.
If you start to actively pay attention, you’ll begin to notice when you’re choosing fear. You’ll notice in the moment how nobody is actually holding you there and no external force is stopping you. The cage door is wide open (!) and you’re just standing inside it because the cage is familiar and outside the cage is unknown and your entire nervous system is screaming at you to stay where it’s safe even though safe is killing you incrementally.
This realization isn’t meant to shame anyone, and I’m not interested in the bootstrap mythology that pretends external constraints don’t exist or that everyone has equal access to choice or that willpower alone can overcome structural disadvantage. But within whatever constraints you’re actually operating under, there’s usually more room to move than you’re using. There’s usually some small thing you could change that you’re not changing because changing it would require admitting you’ve been choosing not to change it all along.
Fear only works when you pretend it’s wisdom, when you let it borrow the language of caution and responsibility and careful planning, when you mistake its voice for the voice of your better judgment. But once you see it for what it is, once you strip away the reasonable-sounding justifications and acknowledge that you’re just afraid, it loses some of its power. Not all of it, because fear doesn’t just evaporate once you name it, but it becomes something you can work with instead of something that’s working you. And sometimes (not always but sometimes!) that’s enough to create a little space between the fear and the choice, enough space for you to finally move.
I can't tell you how to move. I can only tell you that 'stuck' is a story, and you're the one telling it.
PS: if you enjoyed this essay, I recommend “If no one’s told you, you’re allowed to be many things” or “Great work is a side effect of a disciplined inner life” next.
Thanks for reading with me. If you enjoyed this post, please consider hitting the like button and/or sharing it to help boost its visibility. I appreciate you so much. xo
so true & also leads to thoughts about cognitive dissonance. how many of us have tricked ourselves into thinking we’ve tried so hard, when really we haven’t taken as many tangible steps as our emotional exhaustion would have us believe?
“Clarity is a reward for movement, not a prerequisite for it” 👏🏼🙏🏼👏🏼