IF YOU CAN, have breakfast with an off-duty psychologist. It’s a win-win for the two of you. You get to ask them questions about the human condition—preferably at a diner on a gray November morning—as I did with my psychologist/Phish enthusiast friend and the closest thing I have to a spirit guide, Brien Kelley, Ph.D. And they get to talk to someone about their work. People love talking about their work.
A few minutes in, you’ll realize how insufficient your emotional vocabulary is. They push back on terms like grit and wellness. They replace those terms with more-specific phrases. They help you learn to talk about your feelings in a more nuanced—and ultimately more effective—way.
“The language stuff matters a lot,” says Kelley, who’s based in Manhattan, a place that, as I can tell you from experience, is teeming with people who feel emotionally—and literally, with regard to the subway—stuck. “There’s something about the word stuck that allows you to be in an ongoing state. There’s something about it that forecloses further digging. If you replace that with being dissatisfied—that’s a harder word to let stand.”
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And we need that help when it comes to being in a slump. Or being in a rut. Or feeling stuck. Or feeling as though we can’t break a bad habit. When we talk about being in a state of psychological inertia, we resort to sports terminology. I once had an issue with speaking in public—a weird inability to swallow while giving a presentation at work, which is a way bigger problem for speaking than it sounds—that I referred to as the “yips.” I felt like the Chuck Knoblauch of public speaking. No, what I was experiencing wasn’t the yips. It was anxiety. And if I knew to call it that, I would’ve talked to my doctor about it, or at least made sure I had water with me every time I fired up a Google Slides deck.
But speaking in a more precise way has even greater benefits. The larger your vocabulary, the easier it is to experience and tolerate different emotions. In a 2007 paper, UCLA researchers posited that “affect labeling,” or putting feelings into words, diminished the brain’s response to negative visual stimuli. In 2011, the UCLA team found that self-reported distress was decreased during affect labeling. There’s evidence from a 2015 University of North Carolina study that talking about emotions can actually help influence emotional experiences.
We have a rich vocabulary for so many parts of our lives. If we want to get better at pickup basketball, we go to the park and work on our fadeaway or our step-back. We try to fix the mechanics of our jump shot. We “transfer power” from our legs to the ball. We “follow through.” (Also, with sports we just straight-up practice, which is the key to replacing a bad habit with a good one.) But when we’re in a rut? “Eh, I’m just not feeling motivated.”
Often, the catchall is depressed. Which is too broad a word to do much good.
That’s not sufficient, and it’s preventing us from breaking through to new possibilities.
So a smart first move for getting out of a rut is describing the situation you’re in as precisely as possible. And not just to yourself. Communicating the problem—to a psychologist, a friend, your boss, your partner—is a crucial step, and sometimes the most consequential step, toward finding a way out.
How to Think About Feeling Stuck…
Let’s run through a few key “stuck” concepts, as I did with Kelley, who helped me come up with alternative words and phrases—some psychological and some not—that can let us be more specific about our emotions when we’re stuck or feeling like we can’t find our way out of a detrimental situation.
You’re not stuck. You’re dissatisfied.
There’s agency in that. You don’t just happen to be stuck. And you won’t just happen to get unstuck. You were involved in the problem, and you’ll be involved in the solution.
You’re not in a rut. You’re in a habit loop Involving cue, routine, and reward.
When you’re feeling stuck, your brain is trying to help you. It’s trying to save you time. It convinces you the Groundhog Day of your existence is a comfortable, safe thing because routine conserves brainpower. That’s the habit loop. Let’s say you’ve developed a habit of watching hundreds of TikToks for the first 30 minutes of your workday. The app is always there, so you can do this routine every day at the same time. All your bad habits work this way. And they can be disrupted by replacing the cue (sitting down at your desk at home) with a different cue (starting your day on your sofa) and switching up your routine.
You’re not overwhelmed. You’re experiencing increased optionality.
How do you commit when you’re exposed to so many options? For literally thousands of years, the people around us were our main reference group—the community that showed us how life was to be lived—and it felt as though humans had a much tighter set of options for moving through the world.
Now we have access to countless lives online and just as many ways of moving through the world. That can contribute to a feeling of paralysis. The options are almost oppressive. (Of course, the big fantasy is that there’s a best choice. Remember: Your life isn’t something that can be endlessly optimized or perfected. No matter how informed you are, there’s always going to be a measure of winging it.)
You’re not feeling paralyzed. Your brain is trying to protect your sunk costs.
“What am I giving up?” is a powerful anxiety. Humans are generally averse to gambling on an unknown future when they’ve built something. Your anxiety regarding change often comes from the fact that there are many moving pieces, and the longer you move through the world, the more linked everything is. It can feel like a house of cards or a line of dominoes.
And How to Talk About It
You’re not the only one who wants you to get unstuck, which may be part of the problem. While your feelings of obligation to loved ones can contribute to the stability of a household or a relationship, sometimes the routines we’re in exist because we don’t want to disappoint people we care about or disrupt their lives.
The key is framing your situation—and the change you want to make—in a clear-cut way that makes taking action feel laudable and positive, not selfish and burdensome to others.
“There are gonna be some losers in any change you make, and they need a story that they can hold on to, too,” says Kelley. “If I said to my wife, ‘I’m gonna walk to Buffalo next year,’ she’d be like, ‘What are you talking about?!’ But if I said I was going to train for a marathon, which, time-wise, can be akin to starting a second job—well, everybody gets that. It provides a clear way for people to support you and show up and celebrate it.”
The right language allows people to participate. And those are the people who are going to help you stay unstuck.
I know a lot of this doesn’t seem thrilling. We aren’t talking about bold moves here. The big secret is that while the state you’re in may feel extreme, the way forward is almost certainly not. It might require training your vision on a different path. It might require adding a new five-minute-a-day habit to your life.
Whatever the solution is, it’s probably sort of . . . mundane, simple, easy, adoptable. That you can change so much by doing so little? It’s a kind of superpower. And the first step is not even doing very much. It’s replacing certain words with others. It’s talking.
This story appears in the March 2023 issue of Men’s Health.
Writer
Ross McCammon is former special projects editor at Men’s Health and author of Works Well With Others.
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