Writer’s block. A slump. Whiffing the ball. The yips. Quiet quitting. Failure to launch. In a rut.
We all get stuck at some time or another in life and work. Sometimes the stuckness lasts a day or two and sometimes it plagues us for years.
I listened to several podcasts with Dr. Adam Alter (NYU psychology professor) as a guest, and I gained some insights about stuckness that I’d like to share with you.
The Plateau Effect
The easiest example of the plateau effect is physical exercise. The activities that work spectacularly well for a body at first will fade in their efficacy over time. The body gets accustomed to a type of exercise and does not derive the same benefits.
The plateau effect reminds me of Dr. Laurie Santos’ (Yale psychology professor) research on happiness, specifically hedonic adaptation. Our brains habituate to the good things in our lives, and they stop bringing us happiness, sometimes very quickly.
So, one cause of stuckness is that the things that used to work stop working.
Lifequakes
Bruce Feiler coined the term lifequake to describe major transitions that are disorienting and destabilizing. You know what I’m talking about here: marriage, divorce, kids, death, career change, and so on. In Feiler’s research with hundreds of adults, he found that his interviewees experienced a lifequake roughly every 8 to 12 years.
Feiler also differentiates lifequakes (whose aftershocks can last years) from “disruptors” which are challenges we experience, roughly every 12 to 18 months, that may cause mild tremors but can help you develop resilience.
Disruptors may cause transient stuckness. Lifequakes, however, can lead to persistent experiences of stuckness.
The Middle
Dr. Alter asserts that we are most likely to get stuck when we are mid-way through a project, task, or goal. There’s something about being in the middle of something that demotivates us. We’ve lost the initial excitement of the thing, and the endpoint seems so far away.
So, we feel stuck.
Getting Unstuck
Now that we are all depressed and think humanity is doomed, let’s flip the pancake.
In the movie, Moonstruck, Cher had to slap Nic Cage (hard!) and tell him to “Snap out of it!” In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Short Round burned Indy’s abdomen with a torch to free him from an evil spirit.
How can we pull ourselves out of the pit and move forward? Preferably without physical pain…
Embrace Satisficing
Satisficing is the opposite of maximizing. It is the slack-jawed banjo player nicknamed “Good ‘Nuf” winning a Grammy over the virtuoso violinist named Anton.
Satisficing is understanding that you are not going to write, compose, imagine, or envision something that the world has never ever seen before. Creativity is combining existing things in a novel way. Gather ideas into notebooks, curate things electronically, and be okay with something that is a combo meal of disparate concepts.
Satisficing is accepting lower standards <<gasp>>. Perfectionism is associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and other things that (I assume) you don’t want. Get unstuck by redefining what “excellence” means to you at this time.
Stop striving for world peace; just do the dishes. Instead of dwelling on your inadequacy to address huge, potentially insurmountable obstacles, do small things that make positive impacts in your small circle of the world. The world peace thing won’t happen while you’re stuck, anyway.
Take the “Opposite Action”
“Opposite Action” is a dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) strategy. It involves being aware of our emotions and the typical behaviors we display when feeling that emotion.
For example, my daughter felt an overwhelming amount of stage fright in her youth. She loved singing and performing, but her knee-jerk behaviors were to blend in, be small, and hide behind other performers. Opposite Action in this circumstance would be to sing a solo in front of an audience. NOTE: She eventually sang a few solos, but it took a minute.
Even if you cannot identify the offending emotion and your default behavior, you can still practice Opposite Action. Do something totally different. Random actions are better than perfect ones.
Expose yourself to strange, new experiences. Go to your local library when they offer a course on cultivating bee-friendly gardens. Go to an art show at a gallery. Go to a concert to hear experimental music. Embrace variety!
And perhaps the hardest recommendation is to surround yourself with different people. The people you hang with most often are probably eerily similar to you in values, world view, and preferred actions. You may end up in an “echo chamber” that reinforces your stuckness and keeps you there longer.
Go on a date with someone who you think is not your “type.” Seek advice and feedback from people with whom you have little in common. Go to an exercise class geared toward seniors. Diversity of thought, experience, and action is beneficial to individuals, teams, and entire organizations.
The Sacred Pause
I’m as action oriented as the next crazy productive person, so my default behavior in the face of stuckness would be to DO SOMETHING…ANYTHING. The sacred pause is taking time to reflect on your stuckness, how you got there, and the emotional implications. For me, this would be opposite action as well as a sacred pause.
The sacred pause, conceptualized by Buddhist philosopher Tara Brach, can save you from moving in the wrong direction just to be moving somewhere…anywhere. Knowledge is power. Knowing that my anxiety-riddled brain tends to tell me detailed stories of horrors that never happened lets me pause and recognize, “Oh, it’s just my brain doing its thing again. I do not need to act on these hypothetical melodramas.”
Embrace Community
My new job title on LinkedIn is “Headmistress of the Crazy Productive Academy.” And you know that my role models are Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall. I chose a tool for the academy because it came with a ready-to-launch community embedded within. I’ve tried several online course management tools, and although they can help you assemble a beautiful course, there were no “safe spaces” for participants to interact with each other.
Getting unstuck, particularly in the face of lifequakes and other lesser traumas, is not a solo sport. We need people that can provide new perspectives on common issues. We need advice from folks we would never have an opportunity to spend time with. We need people.
The Crazy Productive Academy is equipped with this community. Wanna take a five-minute tour? Click or tap the video below.
I’d love for you to join the Academy. It may not be Hogwarts, but there is magic within!
This is a FABULOUS post, my friend! The first bit, about hedonic adaptation, is something I talk about with clients and on my blog so often that I think everyone knows about it, but they don’t. I recently read Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, and it really looks at the myriad ways we can cut hedonic adaptation off at the pass!
Perfectionist procrastination is the boarder who always neglects to pay the rent, so I know I have to get better at satisficing. And OMG, yes, the more off-the-wall, out-of-your-wheelhouse things you do, the more ideas you will generate based on the fact that variety truly is the spice of life!
And I know your Crazy Productive Academy is going to help SO MANY people!
Ooh. The title of that book you just read is so yummy that I want to pipe it out in frosting on a cake!