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I was looking back at the past few months, trying to figure out why some days felt alive and others felt a bit flat. What were the differences? What was I doing during the good stretches?
The pattern surprised me. My happiest days were NOT the comfortable stretches. They were the hard pushes.
Training for something. Shipping under pressure. Learning something that made me feel stupid for weeks. The times I was grinding toward a goal I wasn’t sure I could hit.
That’s counterintuitive. Shouldn’t ease make you happy? Shouldn’t removing friction be the goal?
This post is my attempt to articulate something I’ve been chewing on for a while. Here’s what I think is actually going on.
The Missing Word
When you’re in the middle of a hard push, you feel something that’s hard to name. You wake up and know what you need to do. You go to bed tired but satisfied. You feel like you matter. Like your effort is going somewhere.
The word for this is agency.
Agency is the sense that you are a cause of effects in the world. That your actions lead to outcomes. That you exist as a force, not just an observer.
When you have it, life feels good. When you don’t, something feels wrong.
What “Feeling Down” Actually Is
Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed in myself. When I’m “feeling down,” I usually don’t know why. It’s vague. I might say I’m tired, or stressed, or just not myself.
But when I dig into it, there’s often a specific thing underneath: I feel powerless about something.
Maybe it’s a project that’s stalled. Maybe it’s a relationship I can’t fix (or not right now, anyway). Maybe it’s something in the world that feels too big to change. The common thread is that I’ve run into a wall where effort doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
We use vague language (“I just feel low and down”) because admitting powerlessness feels exposing. But if you’re honest with yourself, you might find that “down” is often “powerless” in disguise.
The Counterintuitive Fix
So what do you do when you feel stuck? The obvious answer is to attack the problem directly. Fix the project. Have the conversation. Change the thing that’s bothering you.
Sometimes that works. But sometimes the problem isn’t fixable, at least not right now. Or you don’t even know what the problem is. You just feel stuck.
Here’s what I’ve found helps: do something hard.
It doesn’t have to be related to what’s bothering you. It just has to be genuinely difficult. Something that requires real effort and has a real outcome.
Go for a run that’s longer than you think you can handle. Start a side project with a deadline. Learn something that intimidates you. Ship something.
Let’s be specific about the key part: it has to be hard enough that your brain can’t dismiss it. If it’s too easy, it doesn’t count. You know when you’re cheating yourself.
Why This Works
Doing something hard restores the cause-and-effect chain. Effort in, outcome out. You pushed, and something moved.
Let’s dig into why this helps:
It proves you’re not helpless. Even if the thing bothering you is stuck, you’re not globally stuck. You can still make things happen in the world.
It breaks the rumination loop. When you’re grinding on something difficult, there’s no mental space left for spiraling. The hard thing demands your attention.
It’s defiant. There’s something almost rebellious about choosing to do something hard when you feel low. It’s a refusal to stay down.
The hard thing becomes proof to yourself. If you can do this, maybe you can do other things too.
The Reframe
You might be thinking, “Isn’t this just hustle culture dressed up in different clothes?” I don’t think so. Hustle culture says work harder at everything, all the time. What I’m describing is more targeted: when you feel stuck because of a lack of agency, add challenge strategically.
Most advice about feeling stuck focuses on removing obstacles. Simplify. Rest. Give yourself grace. And sometimes that’s right.
But sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re doing too much. It’s that you’re not doing anything that matters to you. You’re coasting, and coasting feels terrible when it goes on too long.
The counterintuitive move is to add challenge, not remove it.
This is what I mean by “the hard way is the easy way.” Adding difficulty feels like it should make things worse. But when your problem is a lack of agency, difficulty is actually the solution. You can’t feel agency without resistance. You need something to push against.
Easy is hard. Hard is easy.
A Note on What “Hard” Means
Note: I want to be clear about what I mean by hard. I don’t mean suffering for its own sake. I don’t mean grinding yourself into dust on something that doesn’t matter.
I mean choosing a goal that you care about and that genuinely challenges you. Something where the outcome is uncertain. Something where you have to show up consistently and push past the point where you want to quit.
The magic is in the uncertainty. If you know you’ll succeed, it doesn’t count. If you’re not sure, and you do it anyway, that’s where agency lives.
Closing Thought
Let’s wrap up. I’m not saying every problem is solved by doing hard things. Sometimes you really do need rest. Sometimes the answer is to ask for help. Sometimes you need to change direction entirely.
But if you’ve been feeling vaguely stuck, and you can’t quite put your finger on why, try this: pick something hard and throw yourself at it. Not to distract yourself, but to remind yourself what you’re capable of.
The hard way might be the easy way out.
That’s it for this one. I hope some of this resonated. Thanks for reading, and see you in the next one :)
