I’ve been completely frozen before. Stuck. Staring at everything I needed to do, everything I needed to change, everything that felt broken or impossible or just too much, and having absolutely no clue where to begin.
It’s a specific kind of paralysis. Your brain cycles through options, shoots them all down, and lands nowhere. Every potential starting place feels wrong. Too small to matter. Too big to even try. So you do nothing. And the nothing makes everything worse. And the worse makes breaking out of the nothing even harder.
If that’s where you are right now, I want to give you something simple. Not a list of possibilities. Not some framework. Just one concrete thing you can do when you don’t know where to start.
Here it is: do the next physical thing.
That’s the whole idea. Let me explain why it actually works.
When you’re overwhelmed, your mind tries to tackle everything simultaneously. It surveys the entire landscape of problems and hunts for the perfect path through all of them. But there is no perfect path. Too many variables. Too many unknowns. Too many things tangled up with other things. So your brain just keeps spinning, looking for an answer that isn’t there.
And while that’s happening, the emotional weight keeps stacking up. The anxiety of not moving. The shame of being stuck. The fear that you’ll never figure any of it out. All of that makes clear thinking even harder. You’re trying to solve a complicated problem while your nervous system is screaming that you’re in danger.
This is why “just make a plan” falls apart when you’re truly overwhelmed. Planning needs a calm, working brain. And if you had one of those, you probably wouldn’t be stuck in the first place.
What actually helps is skipping the planning entirely and going straight to action. Physical action, specifically.
Here’s what I mean by the next physical thing.
Don’t think about what you should do. Don’t try to prioritize. Don’t attempt to work out which task is most important or most urgent or most likely to move the needle.
Instead, ask: what is one physical action I can take right now?
Not a decision. Not a plan. An actual bodily movement.
Stand up. Walk to the kitchen. Pick up one piece of trash. Put a single dish in the sink. Open one envelope. Move one thing off the floor.
It almost doesn’t matter what the action is. What matters is that it’s physical, it’s immediate, and it needs zero planning.
I know this sounds too simple to actually work. But there’s something about getting your body moving that interrupts the mental loop. When you’re trapped in your head, spinning through abstract problems, physical action pulls you back into the present. It cuts through the spiral. It shows you that movement is still possible.
And a lot of the time, one physical action leads to another. Not because you planned it. Because you’re in motion now. You stood up, so you might as well walk somewhere. You walked to the kitchen, so you might as well deal with that one dish. You washed the dish, maybe you’ll wash another.
Momentum builds. But it starts with the tiniest possible physical movement.
I stumbled into this during a stretch when I was so overwhelmed I could barely function. I was supposed to be tackling this massive project, dealing with personal stuff that felt unsurvivable, keeping my whole life running. Instead I was just sitting on my couch, doing none of it.
I remember staring at my phone, scrolling but not actually seeing anything, knowing I needed to do something but having no idea what. Every option seemed wrong. The project was too huge. The personal stuff was too heavy. Even basic life tasks felt impossible.
And then, for no particular reason, I stood up.
That was it. No plan. No decision to be productive. I just stood up because sitting there had become unbearable.
Once I was on my feet, I noticed dishes in the sink. I washed one. Just the one. Then I saw the trash was full. Took it out. Then I cracked a window because the apartment felt stale.
None of this was on my mental list of Important Things I Should Be Doing. They were just physical actions that showed up once I started moving. And after maybe twenty minutes of this aimless puttering, something had shifted. My brain felt slightly less locked. The huge problems seemed a little less impossible. I actually sat down and made progress on the project.
I’m not claiming washing dishes fixed my life. But the physical movement broke the freeze. That was enough to get me unstuck.
This isn’t just a mental trick. There’s real science here.
When you’re overwhelmed, your nervous system can slip into a freeze response. It’s a survival mechanism. The same one that makes animals go still when they can’t fight or run. Your system basically shuts down to protect you.
Physical movement is one of the best ways to shift out of freeze. It tells your body you’re not actually trapped. That action is possible. That you can move through space and do things. Even small movements help release that stuck energy.
This is why exercise helps with anxiety. Why shaking and stretching show up in trauma work. Why walking often clears your head. Body and mind aren’t separate systems. Moving one shifts the other.
So when you can’t figure out where to start mentally, start physically. Let your body take the lead. Your mind usually follows.
If you’re reading this while stuck, here’s your instruction.
Stop trying to figure out what you should do. Stop scanning the list. Stop weighing the options.
Instead, do one of these things right now:
Stand up. Take three slow breaths. Walk to a different room. Fill a glass of water. Open a window or a door. Pick up one object and set it somewhere else.
That’s it. That’s your starting place. Don’t plan what comes after. Just do one physical thing and see what follows.
If nothing follows, that’s fine. Do another small physical thing. Then another. You’re not trying to be productive here. You’re trying to break the freeze. Productivity might show up later, but that’s not the point.
The point is movement. Any movement. Just proving to your body and your brain that you’re not actually trapped.
I want to be straight about the limits.
Doing the next physical thing won’t solve your problems. It won’t make the hard stuff disappear. It won’t hand you a plan or light up the path forward.
What it will do is get you unstuck enough to take one step. Maybe then another. And often that’s enough to shift something.
The thing about overwhelm is that it feeds on stillness. The longer you stay frozen, the more frozen everything feels. Breaking that stillness, even with the smallest action imaginable, interrupts the cycle.
You don’t need to see the whole path. You don’t need to know where you’re headed. You just need to move.
If you’ve made it this far and you’re still in that stuck place, I want to gently suggest you stop reading and do something physical.
Not after you finish. Now.
Stand up. Stretch your arms. Walk to the window. Touch something with your hands.
The answer to “where do I start?” is “with your body.”
You can sort out the rest later. For now, just move.
One physical thing. That’s your first step.
You can do this.
