When Trying Hard Is Not Enough: How to Break Through Feeling Stuck

You are not lazy, your nervous system is maxed out—and other reasons trying harder is not working.

Westend61/Getty Images

Molly Hahn was doing everything wrong, but she didn’t know it. She attacked her postpartum body like a project, ready to whip it back into shape with harder workouts and self-criticism.

Her efforts only compounded the exhaustion, frustration, and hormone roller coaster all common in a new mom’s first year.

By her third pregnancy, however, Hahn learned something that changed how she approaches every goal for herself and her coaching clients. Often, the most effective way to move forward is to stop striving so hard.

Hahn’s experience illustrates what most of us learn the hard way: We can get stuck because of unrealistic expectations. Sometimes circumstances are outside our control—such as dealing with a close family member’s illness or having an accident. We’re prone to giving up on goals after one slip-up, rather than pausing to reassess. Everyone faces moments of being stuck, but experts say adjusting our approach accordingly can help us move forward even when we miss the mark.

Resist Maxing Out Your Nervous System

It is probably not you that is keeping you stuck, but your nervous system. Trying harder—whether focusing on building willpower, adopting more rules, or increasing your commitment—does not work for most people, according to Jessica Maguire, a trauma-certified physiotherapist who trains clinicians on the nervous system.

Trying harder can shift your nervous system into a sympathetic state—a fight-or-flight response that amps up your heart rate and breathing—or into a shutdown state that makes you feel numb or dissociated from your body. In both cases, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, too, taking your planning, decision-making, and follow-through with it, Maguire said.

“When you’re already maxed out, adding another ‘should’ to your plate does not create change. It creates more dysregulation,” she told The Epoch Times in an email.

Working with stroke and traumatic brain injury patients in physiotherapy taught her that no matter how motivated they were, rehabilitation wasn’t working because their nervous systems were going haywire during therapy.

What Research Says: Allostatic load—chronic stress responsible for nervous system dysregulation—is also an indicator of cognitive function, and too much of it can create a vicious cycle that makes it hard to lose weight, as one study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology illustrated. Overweight subjects with higher allostatic load had lower executive function and less cognitive flexibility, factors that can negatively affect eating behavior and food choices, according to the study authors.

“Traditional goal-setting approaches rooted in perfectionism often push people into zones of intolerable stress,” Maguire said. “The turning point comes when people stop asking ‘Why can’t I stick to this?’ and start asking ‘What state is my nervous system in right now?’”

Expert Tip: The solution is not discipline. Learn to recognize racing thoughts, rapid breathing, anxiety, and other signs of dysregulation, and respond with regulation techniques such as longer exhales, gentle movement, or mindfulness to relax the mind and body, Maguire said.

Get Curious Instead of Critical

When you do not reach your goal, do not beat yourself up, Maguire said. Investigate the reason. Was the goal too big, too fast, misaligned with your circumstances?

Giving up is often your body’s attempt to protect you, she said. Instead of forcing your body to meet your goal, you might consider adapting the goal to what your body can tolerate.

What Research Says: Curiosity is linked to increases in creativity, innovation, life satisfaction, academic performance, job satisfaction, and life meaning. On the other hand, a 2009 study of high-level athletes and musicians published in Personality and Individual Differences found that self-criticism impaired motivation, harmed emotional well-being, and affected goal progress. There’s a psychological explanation: Self-critics scan their minds for failures and look for the next negative self-evaluation, which creates an emotional reaction to setbacks and undermines progress.

“When we recognize hopelessness, avoidance, flatness, and apathy as a protective response rather than a character flaw, we are more likely to stay consistent,” Maguire said.

Expert Tip: Learn to recognize shame spiraling and ask what about the goal feels too daunting or unsafe, and whether you can modify your goal so that it is reachable, Maguire suggested.

Stack Small Wins

If our goal is too big, and we do not hit it, our brain can convince us to put a negative spin on it—the day is ruined, the goal should be postponed, we aren’t capable—life and fitness coach Tyler Todt told The Epoch Times.

“I’ve found that for myself and for a lot of clients I’ve worked with, if you just have three or four or five real easy wins, the brain will start looking for new ways to win,” he said.

Todt attempts to build automated habits, such as brushing your teeth, based on the physics principle that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. You can create momentum, he said, by getting up from a sedentary position—or better yet, start your day by moving—and tackling small, achievable goals.

What Research Says: Dividing a task up into many small goals can fuel motivation and improve the likelihood of goal success. Additionally, habit-forming interventions were shown to motivate participants to develop physical activity habits in a meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

Expert Tip: Start each day with a list of four or five things that are really easy to accomplish, Todt said. Some ideas: Drink water, make a short gratitude list, say a prayer, take a 10-minute walk without your phone, text your spouse a kind note, clean your desk, and put away your laundry.

Bet on Yourself

When you want to reach a goal quickly, tying it to a financial incentive might be helpful. An example would be a weight loss program in which you pay up front and can earn your money back—or “win” other participants’ money—if you reach your goal.

However, financial incentives come with a caveat: They may not build the kind of motivation that lasts.

What Research Says: Social rewards increase motivation and make it more likely that people will change their behavior, according to the meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. However, researchers also found that social rewards decrease intrinsic motivation and create a dependency on external validation.

Expert Tip: Use extrinsic motivation sparingly and possibly only when you already have intrinsic motivation. While working as a bank manager, Todt wanted to stop eating junk food. He offered his 14 employees $100 each if they caught him with a donut or junk food at the office.

“Do you ever think a donut’s worth $1,400? No, so this little social pressure made it real easy for me to not eat the bad food,” he said.

Address Self-Loathing

For Hahn, co-owner of Instinct Fitness and Wellness, physical strategies work only when paired with mental shifts.

“I find it’s a lot harder to reach goals related to fitness and wellness when you’re hating yourself and hating your body,” she said.

She has noted the vicious cycle in some people who use fitness and food restriction as a punishment for how their bodies look. When neither resolves the root issue of self-loathing, they’re more likely to binge eat, give up, and fail to reach their goal, which brings them back to punishing themselves.

What Research Says: Self-criticism was significantly associated with higher body mass index, greater loss of control over eating, and decreased flexible control over eating, in a study of 724 overweight and obese women published in Psychology and Psychotherapy. The study examined shame, body image, eating-related difficulties, and symptoms of anxiety and depression—all issues that Hahn said inhibit women from reaching their goals.

“All we see is the love handles, the back rolls, the acne on our face, and we don’t step back and see this macro view, which is how other people see us,” she said.

Expert Tip: Do not look away from the mirror, but step back for a macro view, Hahn said.

“Look at yourself as a whole person from head to toe, look at yourself as how someone else would see you, and let your personality shine through,” she said. “Because we’re not just a body, and people don’t really just see us as just our bodies.”

Be Clear on What You Want

It is possible you feel stuck because you are unsure of what you want. Realizing they were prone to unconsciously moving through their days without intention, Todt and his wife began writing out what a perfect day would look like each morning.

“Society programs us to want more and bigger and shinier, and then we stay stuck in that race forever,” he said, adding that intentionality is a vital part of goal setting and assessing.

Knowing what you truly desire is a form of more potent intrinsic motivation.

What Research Says: College students with goal clarity were more motivated and believed they could succeed in self-directed learning, according to a study published in Education and Information Technologies.

Expert Tip: Resist the urge to live like everyone else by making your own daily list of goals. Todt’s “perfect day” list prioritizes reading the Bible, journaling while drinking coffee, taking his kids to school, going to the gym, walking daily with his wife, and weekly date nights.

“I realized none of it has to make sense to anybody else,” he said.

Do Not Fear Failure

The best coaches Todt has had were those who were real about the problems they’ve muddled through.

“I struggle, and I struggle sometimes with people who pretend they’re perfect constantly,” he said. “I can’t learn anything from somebody who never makes a mistake.”

Hahn has given herself grace for not knowing with her firstborn what she learned through experience: It is not realistic to bounce back quickly after a pregnancy.

She’s not ashamed of past mistakes. Life’s failures are opportunities to learn and grow, she said.

Hahn noted that many times she felt like she needed to exercise more, strive harder, or be in different physical shape—but she wasn’t motivated, inspired, or ready. Timing can be vital. 

“I try anyway, and it’s very hard, and I keep struggling,” Hahn said. “Sometimes it takes getting to that place where you feel like you’re so ready for things to change—then it’s a whole lot easier to reach your goals, implement changes, and keep going.”