I sat down with a client yesterday who is feeling absolutely stuck. Their career is feeling like a dead end. “I’m doing the work of three people, hitting impossible targets, and my manager just doesn’t care about me.”
They feel completely jammed between all the hard work they put into climbing the corporate ladder and the deeply uncertain future they face to make work enjoyable again. The pressure only compounded by the age of AI: “I’m supposed to be ‘upskilling’ for an AI-driven world that might not even have a place for me.”
For thousands of years, we’ve built rigid work systems that are simply no longer working — if they ever truly did — to support both our wellbeing and our excellence. We’re relentlessly given impossible targets and an unrealistic pace, with precious little time to recover from the constant hustle. Instead of being asked how we can bring our unique instincts to achieve our objectives, we are usually just told what to do.
Now, we’re all collectively staring down a ‘kaleidoscope of chaos’ as we catch a glimpse of our artificial intelligence futures. AI bots are bouncing our job applications during pre-screening. Employers are demanding we be fully trained in AI when the resources to feel fully equipped simply aren’t there. And the biggest question looms: will there even be any jobs left to apply for?
It feels like we are on the edge of seismic change, again. We find ourselves jammed in the gears of rigid, outdated workplaces that feel as if they are all about to fundamentally change forever. No wonder so many of us feel stuck.
What Keeps Us Stuck
While our nervous system is incredibly complex, let’s look at the simple evolution of its circuits. The neural wiring inside of your body right now evolved in a time when our threats were immediate and local — the next predator, the next 100 kilometres of potential crisis.
Today, we ‘rest’ after a long workday by staring at our phones, effectively porting a world’s worth of chaos, change, and uncertainty straight into our brains and bodies. Then we try to sleep, only to wake up and do it all again.
This bombardment continuously activates the circuits designed to overcome threats and keep us safe: The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS).
Think about small hunter-gatherer communities needing to activate together to survive a clan attack or a tiger infiltrating the campsite. These are the exact same circuits that fuel our outrage on social media or drive performance in a churn-and-burn corporate culture.
The result? Our bodies are constantly activated rather than rested, putting us squarely on the path to burnout, not recovery.
When the SNS is constantly running, we reduce our bandwidth for the parts of our nervous system that help us to regenerate, recover, and connect safely with other humans: The Ventral Vagal Complex.
Imagine those moments in those early human groups when we finally sat down, connected over a fire, and felt safe together. These vital circuits that help us feel connected to each other are the same ones that allow us to recover from a hard day’s work.
When we lose bandwidth for this recovery state, three dramatic things happen:
- Goodbye Logic and Empathy: We lose access to the front two parts of our brain (the prefrontal cortex). This blocks our ability to be logical, curious, and creative—all essential ingredients for facing chaos and change.
- Reduced Trust: Our capacity to genuinely connect and build trust with people in our lives shrinks. As we navigate massive uncertainty, we need each other’s unique perspectives to make sense of the confusion; isolation is a recipe for disaster.
- Failure to Regenerate: We halt recovery and regeneration. Our bodies become more inflamed, stressed, and fundamentally less able to heal and experience true wellbeing.
Getting Unstuck At Work
If you want to feel less stuck at work, the solution is internal: you need to grow your capacity for the parts of your nervous system that help you safely connect and recover.
This first requires a mindset swap. You might currently feel like your stuckness is everyone else’s fault, you might resist feedback, or feel hopeless that things will ever change. This is the Fixed Mindset—a fundamental disbelief that you can learn, grow, and overcome challenges through effort.
The alternative? We need to activate a Growth Mindset. This is the conviction that change takes effort, that we can learn and grow, and that we can create exciting movement by making different choices.
This mindset shift is the first step. Next, we need to scale up the parts of our nervous system that make safe relationships possible.
Guess what? The most consequential relationship we have at work is with our direct manager. 70 per cent of our wellbeing and our capacity to achieve excellence is tied to this one-to-one relationship. If we can, we must start here.
Improving this relationship starts to open up the capacity in our nervous system that ignites curiosity, creativity, and wellbeing. This not only makes you more employable and promotable but also accelerates your ability to feel ready to explore other career options too.
The ‘Work to Live’ Checklist
Too many of us have fallen into the trap of living to work. We spend our days in a grinding cycle — wake up, coffee, computer, gym, eat, sleep… repeat. We dedicate most of our energy to work, leaving just the scraps for the rest of our lives. This cycle must change if we want to feel less stuck.
This checklist helps us redefine the vital relationship with our managers to begin turning the tide:
- Ditch the Guesswork: You and your manager have fully clarified what success looks like, collaborating to define basic expectations and the concrete path to excellence in your role.
- Insist on a Sustainable Pace: Your manager actively respects and enables balance, understanding that sustainable productivity comes from supporting your overall wellbeing, ensuring work enhances your life, rather than dominates it.
- Prioritise Real Growth: Your manager is committed to your development, actively creating an environment where learning, growth, and increased trust in your workplace relationships are built into the fabric of your daily work.
- Create Visibility: Your contributions are consistently and meaningfully recognised and celebrated, establishing a culture of gratitude that ensures your hard work leads to tangible, visible recognition.
This is just as much our responsibility as it is our manager’s. If our leaders aren’t making this checklist possible, we need to invite them to understand what we need to feel less stuck. If that fails, it might be time to explore a new role, job, or company—just make sure you have a plan to cover any financial gaps created by moving.
Given everything we are facing, is it any wonder we feel trapped at work? The power is now in your hands. We need to lead ourselves out of the mess and proactively shift the relationship we have with ourselves and our leaders, and fast.
You can buy Andrew Sloan’s new book Why Things Feel F*cked: Your Practical Guide to Getting Unstuck here.
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The post If You’re Close To Rage Quitting, Read This First: How To Get ‘Unstuck’ At Work appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
