How Do I Stop Feeling Lazy When I’m Actually Struggling?
If you’re asking that question, reading this post, then you’re demonstrating motivation and perserverance. You’re still pushing on this issue. “Struggling” means you haven’t quit and want more. To be more.
Neat! Keep it up.
Laziness is probably not the real problem holding you back.
You’re able to hold down a job and relationships but when it comes to WHO you are and the life you’re leading, you want things to be different. You’re frustrated because you know there must be more to life and you know you’re capable of living that fuller life. Right?
That frustration is the pressure you feel from two forces pushing against each other: the way your life is working now and your desire for it to be different. Great! You’re still in the fight.
You may think you’re lazy or undisciplined, but I see it way more honestly…
You’ve got the desire to keep fighting with the problem. That’s perseverance. What you do not have yet is a way of moving forward that works with your mind, body, emotions, circumstances, and reasons for doing the work.
🔸You are not lazy. You just have not found the way yet.
🔸And the way may be more than one thing.
Let’s look at three foundational things probably holding you back:
🔸Physical
🔸Emotional
🔸Belief in a path forward that you want
(If you’re on the spectrum there could be other issues at play but these three need to happen first.)
Tell me I’m wrong.
Start with your physical capacity
The first place I look is the physical and then work our way up to the emotional. Crappy feeling body then crappy feeling emotions. And vice versa. If you don’t have the physical energy to manage yourself then well it’s hard to get anything done…
How have you been sleeping? Are you eating enough decent food? Are you moving your body? Have you been resting when you need a break, or have you spent the last three months running on stress while expecting yourself to perform as though nothing has changed?
People who are busy, unfulfilled, overwhelmed, chronically stressed, or lack a deeper purpose in life often become disconnected from their bodies. I think that makes sense. It’s a slow shift of fatigue that has been going on for months, so you have nothing you remember accurately to compare it to. You lose track of how poorly you’ve slept, how irregularly you’ve eaten, or maybe what you ate, or maybe you’re not excerising like you once did? Your output is greater than your input. No gas in the tank. No emotional fulfillment. Etc.
Then they judge themselves entirely by the unfinished task in front of them. I did this. I put myself in the hospital more than once from chronic stress and people pleasing.
Think of your body like the base level of your capabilities. It’s a foundation upon which you build upwards. Ever notice how highly successful people focus on sleep, food, and exercise? Not only does it help with general energy it affects your mood greatly. It’s a two for one deal. Now it’s the first thing I look at if I feel crappy.
While physical health doesn’t explain every struggle with motivation. It’s still worth investigating because it affects your available energy, concentration, and ability to manage frustration.
🔸If you don’t get enough sleep it’s hard to think straight.
🔸If you are stressed it’s hard to think straight.
You can’t accurately judge your capability without considering your ability to phyically do it. Including the thought and emotional management. Something people don’t often consider when thinking of physical health. You live in a machine. It needs fuel and maintenance.
Client Example:
This is the “vice versa” version I mentioned above where the emotions pulled the physical care down. One of my clients used to arrive at our sessions already regretting the previous week. The conversation would begin with some version of:
“I wish I had done better.”
“I should have gotten more done.”
“I wish the week had gone differently.”
That created an emotionally based cycle of depressive thinking that would couple with fear of the future, because they didn’t feel like they were doing enough.
And BAM! Now we have stress creating a habit of poor sleep which makes the next day even harder to tackle. And it’s a slippery slope from there into a lack of exercise and eating poorly because the food “treats” temporarily reduced the stress and sadness.
🔸If you don’t take care of your body, where are you going to live?🔸
How do you get out of a cycle of poor physical health?
🔸One FUCKING thing at a time! I cannot stress this more.
You went downhill over time with a seriess of small, probably unintentional, and maybe subconcious, steps. You go back up the same way but this time with CONSCIOUS INTENTION.
The intention is the key piece. Intentional forward action requires you to be present with your thoughts and feelings when you do the thing. “I’m going to make and eat this salad instead of the burger so I can keep my energy up and feel better…” and you can keep going, “so I have energy for my partner/family/work, and sleep better and can get more done and feel confident and responsible and my anxiety goes down because I have more energy and see things are getting done.” - See where I’m going with this?
You’re conciously layering in what you are doing and importantly why. And notice it’s not a “to do” list format which tends to feel heavy vs my version which layers in what you want over and over. You don’t have to do the long sentence, but you do need to say this to yourself INTENTFULLY.
This works because the other option will go back to your brains pre-programmed script it runs which takes up less cognitive resources. Our brain doesn’t really work things out unless it’s new and different, or particularly stressful. Think of this like choosing to act vs acting out a routine without a choice.
Back to “Do One Thing at a Time.” Eat lighter and healthier one meal at a time.
Take a walk and get some sunshine, conciously shifting your thoughts away from the stress and onto the present moment. The trees, the air, the sounds, etc. It’s a break from feeling stressed not just work.
Talk to a partner or friend about how you’re feeling. Connection builds intimacy, calms nerves, creates safety. Do this often.
Get on a treadmill, lift some weights - or just do some random pushups whenever you think of it. There’s a vast difference between working out twice a week for 20min and not working out at all. And it’s not about the weight or the distance. It’s about pushing yourself into that temporary discomfort, enough that you’re growing past your limits. That’s it. Step by step.
Each time you do one of these things you get a small boost of energy, confidence, and belief, to tackle the next thing. One healthy meal creates the energy to manage your stress better, perhaps breathing and letting it go for a few minutes. One walk outside creates the emotional shift to lift some weights. One conversation with a close ally creates emotional safety and the energy to rest better that night.
It all adds up.
🔸ACTUALIZATION isn’t a point to achieve but a constant climb to improve over yesterday.🔸
AND… if you did any one of these things, each day, slowly building back new and inspiring habits, wouldn’t you be striving, with that perserverance you clearly have, by reading this article, to keep going and be an ACTUALIZED person day by day? Becoming the best version of yourself?
It is that simple. Not easy. But simple. And if you can’t do it ask for help. Success isn’t always a solo adventure.
Next: The impact of your emotional state
Client Example:
A client struggling with stress once told me, “I don’t feel like I’m living my life.”
We had been working together long enough to see the issue they could not - My response was,
“Of course you don’t. You’re in the future worrying about what could happen or in the past thinking about what you should have done differently. The only time you’re in the present, you’re beating yourself up. So being present, where the change you want to happen occurs, isn’t a place you even want to be.”
The answer was not another productivity system. It was learning to calm down, sleep, become more emotionally aware, and return to the part of life that was actually happening. The key lesson was understanding they were trying to do too much. And letting go of some of these things, to find out nothing terrible would happen. That required sitting with the fear, being in it, to see they were still safe. That processing allows the calm to come back. The fear took up all the emotional space available. Fuck that!
As that changed, the client began showing up differently. There was more eye contact. Their thoughts were clearer. They spoke more directly. Instead of returning to the same fears, they started bringing in new ideas, wants, and possibilities.
Their capability had not suddenly appeared. It had been buried under fear.
You may need a perspective outside your own
One of the most useful things a mentor ever told me was:
🔸You cannot read the label from inside the jar.🔸
Your brain constructs an understanding of reality using your past experiences, expectations, beliefs, and learned rules. In that sense, the brain is a predictive machine. It uses what has happened before to anticipate what is happening now and what is likely to happen next.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains this predictive process in her TED Talk, “You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions: Your Brain Creates Them.”
That predictive ability is incredibly useful. It can also keep you trapped inside conclusions you learned years ago.
If some part of you already believes, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” you may interpret confusion as proof of incapability. If you expect judgment, you may experience ordinary uncertainty as danger. If you believe every unfinished task exposes a flaw in you, another planning system will not necessarily change the belief controlling how you use it.
This is why outside perspectives matter to help you see your own inaccuracies. Like “I’m a lazy person despite all this struggling and effort.” - That’s some bullshit right there.
My guess, after years of coaching, is you are doing two things:
🔸Being responsible for too much - both warranted and unwarranted.
🔸Over-focusing on the tasks and not the health of the person who completes them. You. 💖Ya dumb dumb 💖
Look at those two things for a moment. Trying to do more than you need to and not taking care of yourself. Do you think it’s going to be hard to feel like you’re progressing in life with this math?
Stuck = I am unable to see the way out - Ask for another perspective outside your own.
Our society has perpetuated this “go it alone” narrative. It’s bullshit. Greatness, to stand out from the crowd, isn’t something one does alone. If greatness was achievable on your own then everyone would be great. Is this proof enough to rely on others for different perspectives so you can grow out of your limited one?
Quick Personal Example: I pulled myself out of my own hole, when my life was falling apart, by learning how people do this whole “peopling thing.”
🔸People have figured out how to lead a successful and meaningful life. What don’t I know?🔸
Determined to understand how this is done I traded in all my sci-fi and fantasy books for ones on philosophy, religion, and psychology. Now armed with new knowledge I set out to deeply understand the path of human psychological development by mapping it myself without using someone else’s system. My goal was a deeper understanding so I could come at it from any perspective my clients might bring to me.
For fun, I had organized it around words beginning with the letter ‘A’, as a core progression to “deal with” life:
🔸Awareness - You have to see it and understand it to deal with it.
🔸Acceptance - You can’t effectively deal with life if you don’t accept reality as it is.
🔸Action - Now you can actually do something about it.
🔸Awesomeness - Self-worth - Feeling great about facing what life threw at you.
I had about 20 pages written up and was talking about it with that same mentor.
“There’s another A, and you don’t see it because you’re not in it.”
I paused to compute that and said, “Fuck.”
They were right. I could not see what was absent from my model because it was also absent from my current understanding. That simple perspective shift allowed me to create my own framework of psychological development, which I still work on. The better I know it the better I can see where people are stuck.
Here’s the WIP model written out on an 8’x6’ whiteboard in my office:
I can’t tell you how deeply fun and meaningful this was to put together. And there’s more to go! Neat.
When you remain stuck after repeated attempts, asking for help is not giving up responsibility. It is a way to stop banging your head against a wall built out of assumptions you can’t see.
You can keep trying alone. You may eventually find the answer.
A good outside perspective can help you find it faster.
You are not lazy. You just haven’t found the way. YET.
I’m going to end this post here because the next post gets much more into the weeds on this question by looking at what pulls people from accomplishing tasks. I also hit some notes on specifics people on the spectrum (ADHD/AuDHD/2e) struggle with more often. If you believe you’ve got the physical and emotional shifts figured out, yet still struggle to “do stuff,” then check out this link next:
Can Coaching Help Me Finish Projects I Keep Starting? - Yup. But it’s about finding the real problem…
You want your life to be different badly enough that the gap between where you are and where you want to be hurts. It’s stressful, sad, and painful. I’ve been there.
You have continued searching, trying, thinking, and fighting with the problem. That is goddamn motivation. It’s motivation because you don’t really want to keep pushing against that yet you do anyway. Still! That is perseverance. That pressure is evidence that you have not given up creating a more meaningful life for yourself.
You may need to care for your body differently. You may need to understand what you are avoiding. You may need to release someone else’s judgment, reconnect the work to meaning, or stop treating every difficult day as a verdict on your capability.
And you may need someone outside the jar who can see the label.
🔸Jump into a free call to map the patterns you’re stuck in and find what moves you forward.🔸