Why Do I Feel Stuck in Life? What Neuroscience Actually Says About Change

There is a particular kind of tired from feeling like you have tried. You have had the conversations, read the books, heard the podcasts, even talked about it with your psychotherapist again and again. The quiet, heavy suspicion: is this simply who I am?

This is a question that I have thought about a lot. But do you know what I find genuinely hopeful? Not the thought that “everything is figureoutable” or that change is easy. But the fact that science is on our side, giving us something real to bet on.

You are not stuck

Period. That is the whole point of neuroplasticity. 

So, why do you feel stuck in life?

You might feel like nothing is changing, that you're repeating the same patterns, or that you're struggling to move forward. But feeling stuck doesn't mean you are stuck. Your brain has the capacity to change, adapt, and build new pathways. 

That is the whole point of neuroplasticity. Every time you do a hard thing, practice something, or even think differently, your brain is physically changing. You are literally, biologically, becoming a new version of yourself. Meaning those feelings of anxiety or negative thinking are only the well-worn pathways that you have grown comfortable taking. Roads can be rerouted, new ones built. This is neuroplasticity at its core. Not a self-help slogan, but an observable and measurable property of living neural tissue.

As said by freestyle skier and Olympic gold medallist Eileen Gu, “You can control how you think, and therefore you can control who you are…with neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be. How cool is that? Like, how empowering is that, right?”. Although a little optimistic, the underlying science is not wrong. Neuroplasticity is not luck, it is biology, and therefore, always been true.

Why change feels hard, and why that is not necessarily a bad thing

         So, we have established that your brain can change, then why does it feel so impossible sometimes? This is because the nervous system is a survival system. It is wired to keep doing what has kept us safe and alive, even if the strategies used are no longer necessarily serving you or even getting in your way.

         For example, the patterns we formed in childhood, like shutting down, over-explaining, or disappearing when uncomfortable, once made sense. They were adaptations to situations with the mental capacity and skills we had at that time. Yet, the brain does not acknowledge that you have since grown, all it knows is that this worked before, so it should work again.

         Our nervous system is continuously scanning for danger, a process the psychologist Stephen Porges calls neuroception. And when it detects it, a threat puts us into a protective state of flight, fight, or freeze. Meaning that the reflective, rational parts of the brain momentarily go offline to direct all its energy to it. Which is why it is hard to think our way out of a trauma response, or will ourselves to feel different.

Change at this level is not primarily cognitive. It is deeper, more physical and relational than that. So the real question isn’t about how do we think differently, but rather what conditions make different feelings, and as such different wiring, possible. 

Creating conditions for change

         I want to be clear and honest with you, because I think that a lot of what gets written about neuroplasticity skips over the hard part. Rewiring does not happen through insight alone, it is through repetition, over time. And, most crucially, it happens in the context of felt safety. Research continuously tells us that learning and memory formation is most effective when our nervous system is regulated, not shut down.

         This is in part why relationship is so central to healing. It acts as a mechanism. There is a real science behind what happens when another person truly sees you. That experience is not just meaningful, it is neurologically formative. Researchers like Daniel Siegel have written extensively about this: co-regulation before self-regulation, where we learn to soothe ourselves in part by first being soothed by someone else. Therapy is one of the few spaces specifically designed for exactly that, a consistent, safe relationship where that kind of seeing can happen, repeatedly, over time.  

         Yet, this does not have to mean therapy, though therapy can be one context where it happens. It can also look like a friendship where you finally said the true thing and were not abandoned. Time moving your body or being outside to teach your nervous system to settle. Small things, repeated. That is the mechanism.

You do not need to believe me right now that you can change. The research supports the notion that through action and experience, understanding will follow. But, if there is a part of you that suspects that the current version of you is not the whole story, that part of you might be onto something.

Written by Sabrina Ferreiro, RP(Q), MACP student

Interested in working with Sabrina? View her Psychology Today profile here.

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