If you are feeling stressed or experiencing a great amount of negative thoughts specifically related to a life situation it’s probably because you are stuck in between making a choice about what to do. Misery lives in between choices.  So if you are thinking about a life situation over and over again the best thing you can do is take an action. Action will give you power. It will give you control again over the situation.

Research suggests that happiness involves being in a state of movement towards the things you’d like to accomplish in your life. If you are considering what to do about a specific set of circumstances and you are stuck thinking about it you are not getting anywhere.

Action leads to results. This is as true a fact as gravity keeps your feet on the ground.  Taking an action will always produce a result. Sometimes those results aren’t what you want. Though, knowing what you don’t want will often lead you to knowing what you do want.

If you don’t know what to do, take an action. Stop thinking about taking action. Take an action that you think will make you better and move you forward to what you want.

For example:

If you don’t know what course to take in school the best advice is to sign up for a course anyway. Do something you like and find out if it’s a fit or not.  If you decide you want to be a lawyer and then choose it, start school for it and find out it’s not for you, you can choose something else.  But taking action – ie. enrolling in a course – will get you out of the agony of trying to decide what to do.

You always have choice.  Life happens but it’s up to you to CHOOSE what you want to do about it. And choosing a path involves starting by taking small actions.

Try this:

Step 1: Identify the situation that’s been bothering you, that’s causing you stress, where you feel stuck.

Step 2: Decide what the ultimate goal would be if you could have it.

Step 3: Make a list of all the possible actions that would move you in that direction.

Step 4: Choose one simple action

Step 5: Once you’ve taken action, when you produce a result, evaluate it.  Then follow the same process (the same 5 steps listed here) to decide what new action to take.

Taking action puts the power of life back into your hand. It will give you power. It will make you feel good and move your life in a forward direction. Start small.