What to Do When Self-Help Feels Impossible
When you have no motivation, traditional self-help advice often feels like an impossible task. This post explores a different approach: lowering the bar to the smallest possible action, focusing on observation over effort, and how speaking your thoughts can be the first step towards momentum.
Self-help advice often makes a dangerous assumption. It assumes you have a certain amount of energy to start with. It presumes you can get out of bed, read a book, make a plan, and execute it. But what happens when you have none of that? What happens when the simple act of existing feels heavy?
The standard advice then feels like a personal failure. You are told to climb a mountain when you can barely stand. The gap between where you are and what you are told to do is so vast it just creates more guilt. It becomes another reason to believe you are broken.
The Problem with Action-Oriented Advice
Most self-help is about doing things. It tells you to build new habits, go to the gym, meditate for thirty minutes, or wake up at 5 AM. This is advice that is oriented around action.
This kind of advice is not necessarily bad. It is simply for a different person at a different stage. When you have no energy, a command to take action feels like an unclimbable wall, not a helpful doorway. It is an impossible first step.
The inevitable failure to take that step reinforces the inertia. You think