At some point in your life, you may feel a sense of aimlessness.
It can come suddenly if you find yourself unexpectedly unemployed or divorced.
It can come slowly as you achieve certain goals or find yourself facing retirement.
Since life tends to pass in phases, there are moments of transition when you may feel that there are too many options from which to choose.
You may not see any options at all.
If you’re feeling stuck in life and you’re not sure what road to take, here are 10 steps you can follow to get yourself unstuck.
I Don’t Know What I Want To Do With My Life (10 Things To Do)
1. Give Your Brain A Boost
Feeling stuck can sometimes be a result of a sluggish brain.
If you’re so stressed out that you’re not sleeping well, then you can suffer from brain fog.
When your brain is foggy, it’s difficult to make advanced decisions like where to take your life.
To help your brain fully understand the different roads to take, you need to give it a boost.
One of the best ways to recharge your brain and focus it is to exercise.
There are several ways in which exercise can boost your brain.
The first is by increasing blood flow and oxygen to your brain.
When you exercise, you’re using up a lot more oxygen.
Since your body is straining, it forces your heart to speed up.
To keep up with the demands of your heart, your lungs need to keep pumping blood throughout your body.
To get more oxygen, you breathe heavier.
The result is that you take in more oxygen.
Your brain needs oxygen to function.
Without it, the brain dies.
The more oxygen your brain receives, in healthy amounts, the better it can function.
Exercising thus boosts your brain.
Exercise can also help release hormones.
Hormones help create the right environment for brain cells to grow and function.
When your brain cells are able to function better, then your mind becomes more focused and sharper.
Finally, exercise can help the production of new neural pathways.
It makes it so your brain can think better.
After exercising, you may find that you have the right focus and energy to start making some real decisions about your life.
2. Meditation
Along with exercise, you can also help your brain make decisions by meditating.
There are a lot of benefits of meditation, especially when it comes to your brain.
One of those ways is that meditation can help thicken the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is a region of your brain where functions like learning and memory primarily happen.
By thickening the region, it becomes easier for your brain to remember things and learn new things.
This is helpful for figuring out what to do with your life because it helps you solve problems easier.
Another way in which meditation can help you decide what to do with your life is through its interaction with your brain’s amygdala.
The amygdala is responsible for giving you certain sensations and feelings like fear, stress, and anxiety.
When you’re extremely anxious or stressed, it can be difficult to make decisions.
All you can focus on is the fear.
Because the brain has a fight or flight response, many brains typically freeze in the face of stress or fear.
Meditation helps because it decreases the number of brain cells in the amygdala region of your brain.
With fewer brain cells operating in that area, there are fewer profound feelings of stress and fear.
That means you can better focus your brain and make decisions.
Instead of feeling stressed over what to do, a few sessions of meditation can train and change your brain to stay calm and think rationally instead.
That can help you decide where you want to take your life.
3. Get More Sleep
You can’t make important decisions when you haven’t gotten enough sleep.
You’ve likely experienced a bad night of sleep and found yourself feeling tired and more aggressive than normal.
There’s a reason for that.
A lack of sleep means the neurons in your brain haven’t had a chance to regenerate.
Instead, you’re overworking them.
It also means your brain hasn’t been able to replenish or process hormones like serotonin.
The result is waking and feeling aggressive, depressed, or even stressed.
A lack of sleep also impacts your ability to make decisions.
It reduces your brain’s flexibility.
Flexibility is important because it helps your brain make quick decisions as circumstances change.
It’s your ability to adapt.
If you suddenly have to face certain life decisions and you’re feeling stuck, then it may be because your brain isn’t as flexible as it needs to be to make a fast decision.
Stress can have a serious impact on your sleep.
It can leave you lying awake at night and unable to focus on anything but the problem at hand.
However, if you can get a good night of sleep, then your brain can regenerate itself.
The flexibility of your brain increases.
When you wake, you feel calmer and a bit sharper.
Before you try to make any important decisions regarding your life, you need to have a good night of sleep first.
4. Eat Brain-Boosting Foods
The next step you should take to help your brain make some big decisions is to eat the right kind of food.
Certain foods have a larger impact on your brain than others.
Blueberries, for example, are famous for their antioxidant properties.
They can remove certain toxins from your body that can impact how well your brain operates.
In particular, they’re great at reducing inflammation in the body and your brain.
This means that there’s less of a risk of a neurodegenerative disease occurring which can decrease your ability to make decisions.
Blueberries can also help your brain cells communicate with one another.
Strawberries are another great fruit that you may want to eat before making a big decision.
They contain a healthy dose of vitamin C.
This vitamin is important for your brain because it prevents brain cell damage.
Some studies even show that it could play a role in helping reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s.
Finally, you should consider eating more leafy greens to help your brain make decisions.
Foods like broccoli, kale, and spinach have tons of different nutrients that nurture your brain.
In particular, they contain folate, vitamin K, and beta carotene.
These nutrients can increase the fat inside of brain cells which helps them function better.
Before making a big decision, it’s a good idea to give your brain the type of food that can help sharpen it up.
5. Revisit Your Hobbies
One of the reasons you may feel stuck is that you no longer remember what you like to do.
It’s easy to get caught up in other people’s lives and start to adopt their hobbies or lifestyles.
Over time, you may find that you’ve lost your own lifestyle by adopting theirs.
When you no longer enjoy their particular lifestyle or hobbies, then you may feel directionless.
The best thing you can do to help yourself become unstuck is to visit your old hobbies.
Take a trip down memory lane and revisit what you used to do when you were a teenager and a young adult.
While not all hobbies may be appropriate anymore, you’ll likely find certain hobbies that carry over to your current age.
Spend some time performing those hobbies.
They can help you reconnect with yourself.
You may even find that the hobby catapults you in a new direction.
Revisiting your hobbies can help you get unstuck because it grounds you.
When you feel entrenched, you can face the uncertain future with more confidence.
That confidence then grants you the ability to make better decisions about where to go next.
6. Talk With Your Peers
It’s also worth speaking with your friends and colleagues about your situation.
Your friends, especially, may be able to offer some advice.
If they’re around the same age as you, then they may even be experiencing the same thing.
This can be helpful for a few different reasons.
The first is that it helps you feel not as alone.
When you feel alone and isolated, it makes your fear even worse.
That makes it even more difficult to make a decision about your future.
The second reason that going to your peers and friends can help you get unstuck is that it gives you a chance to receive some insight.
Your friends may have gone through something similar some time ago, too.
They can offer tips on what they did to help get through it.
One final reason speaking with your peers can help you get unstuck is that they can offer solutions and connections.
If you’re facing a specific problem, then their experience may be able to solve the problem for you.
A problem with attempting to solve problems and make decisions on your own is that you only have your own experience to draw information and lessons from.
Those experiences may not be enough to solve your problem.
The collective experience of your friends or peers might, though.
Some friends or peers may also have a connection to share with you.
They might know a person who can help you move forward.
They might be able to help you find better support for yourself.
They may even have a person in mind who can help you solve your problem and get you unstuck.
Speaking with your friends or peers can be great for support, but it can also help you realize what options you have and which decision to make.
7. Speak With A Therapist
There’s a lot of pushback on attending therapy, but it can be one of the best things that you can do for yourself.
It might also be necessary to help you take the next few steps in your future plan.
One of the reasons you may find yourself stuck and unsure how to proceed in life is that you’re stuck in the past.
Maybe it was a past relationship that didn’t go well.
Maybe you suffered some sort of trauma as a child.
Perhaps you’re undergoing emotional turmoil over unemployment after you worked for the company for years.
Whatever the reason, it’s difficult to move forward when you have a lot of baggage holding you back.
Seeing a therapist can help you unload the baggage and lighten your load.
It can help you learn a lot about yourself.
You may even find that it’s easier to make decisions—both big and small—by learning about how your brain works.
A therapist’s job is to help you better understand yourself.
Your sessions can reveal patterns of behavior that can be both destructive and constructive.
Understanding your brain’s behavioral patterns can help you make decisions about the future a lot more easily.
Seeing a therapist can get you unstuck in the past and help you find a path forward.
8. Narrow Your Options
One of the problems with the human brain is that it struggles when it’s faced with a lot of choices.
When there are too many options available, the brain freezes.
It tries to compute the consequences and benefits of all those decisions, but it doesn’t quite have enough processing power to do so.
Instead, it stalls.
If you find yourself stuck because there are so many different options open to you, then the limitations of the human brain are to blame.
The best way that you can unstick yourself is to narrow your options.
One example is employment.
If you find yourself searching for a new job, then you may feel overwhelmed by the choices.
You can help yourself make a decision by narrowing the choices down to three or four fields.
Once you have the fields narrowed down, then you can start exploring the various jobs within the field.
Your qualifications will automatically remove some of the positions for you.
That allows you to focus on the smaller number of positions that you do qualify for.
From there, you can weigh the benefits and negatives of the position with a lot more ease.
You can use this exercise with practically everything.
Not sure where to move?
Then choose a few areas and narrow your search from there.
Not sure who to date or where to start looking?
Choose a few dating sites or bars and go through your options from there.
By narrowing your options, you can make it easier for your brain to choose which path to take.
9. Consult With A Life Coach
If you feel completely lost and need professional help, then speaking with a life coach is a viable option.
Life coaches take a look at your past accomplishments, your hobbies, your financial status, and then compare them with your desires for the future.
That might be a better job, higher income, a happy marriage, or achieving a certain dream.
Since life coaches aren’t living your life, they’re able to take an objective approach.
They can offer you step-by-step methods to achieve the goals you have in life.
If you’re stuck because you don’t have any goals, then they can help by suggesting a few for you.
By working with a life coach, you can receive professional advice that can help you get unstuck and start moving toward your goals.
10. Try Something New
Our final way that you can get unstuck and find something to do in life is simply to try something new.
When you try something new, it forces your brain to learn.
It wakes it up, enhances its learning capabilities, and may even introduce something to it that it enjoys.
It doesn’t matter what the new thing is.
By going out and doing something you’ve never done before, you can shake up the current stagnant life you’re living and introduce a new experience.
You may find that you have a new hobby or passion.
That can help you move forward and may even launch a new trajectory for yourself in life.
Whenever you start to feel stuck in life and you’re not sure what to do, trying something new can be a great place to start.
Conclusion
Feeling lost or like you’re stuck can happen to anyone at any point in their life.
It can be an isolating experience and fraught with fear or anxiety.
There are steps you can take to help refresh your brain and give it its best chance of figuring out where to go next.
Follow the steps above to find out where the next phase of life is going to take you.
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