Being stuck can get uncomfortable but maybe the real question isn’t how to get unstuck—it’s why we’re choosing to stay stuck.

What if being stuck isn’t a trap we fall into—it’s a small room we rent?

When we’re stuck, we get something valuable out of it: permission not to risk. Permission not to change. The job we hate becomes our excuse for not starting our own business. The toxic relationship proves we’re not ready for real intimacy. The canceled flight becomes our reason for missing that difficult meeting. The uncertainty becomes our shield against having to bet on ourselves and take responsibility for our actions.

There’s a psychological phenomenon called ‘learned helplessness’—when repeated negative experiences teach us that our actions don’t matter, we stop trying. But what I’m pointing at goes deeper: chosen helplessness. When we’ve convinced ourselves that the pain of staying is somehow less terrifying than the unknown of leaving.

Being stuck is familiar. We know its contours, its rhythms, its exact flavor of suffering. We’ve become experts at it. There’s weird comfort in that mastery, even when it’s destroying us.

Change demands we become beginners again—stumbling, uncertain, possibly failing spectacularly in front of everyone. The stuck person at least knows how this story goes. The person who breaks free? They’re writing new pages with no guarantee of a happy ending.

Here’s what we need to face: Every day we choose to stay stuck, we’re not just avoiding risk—we’re spending our most non-renewable resource: time. The question isn’t whether you can afford to take the risk of changing. It’s whether you can afford not to.

Here’s what separates stuckness as pathology from stuckness as pause: Intention. Purpose. Sometimes we need a “brain break”—a fallow season before the next harvest. That’s not being stuck; that’s being strategic.

Ask yourself:

Am I resting, or am I hiding?

Am I preparing, or am I pretending?

The vital question is whether you’re using your stuckness as a cocoon for transformation or as prison cell to lock yourself away from your dreams and success.

Freedom of choice means we can choose wrong. The gift isn’t that all choices work out—it’s that we get to choose again and again and again.

Thanks – Michael (he, him)

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This also matters – Stuck for a Good Reason.

#2203