236. If I Wanted To Stay Stuck & Hate My Life In 2026, Here's Exactly What I'd Do
236. If I Wanted To Stay Stuck & Hate My Life In 2026, Here's Exactly What I'd Do
There’s a certain kind of stuck that doesn’t look like stuck.
It looks like planning. It looks like self-awareness. It looks like “doing the work.”
It looks like another course, another framework, another 5-step plan you try to follow perfectly… right before you burn out and blame yourself for not being disciplined enough.
In this episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast, I decided to get a little playful and slightly unhinged:
If I truly wanted to stay stuck and hate my life in 2026… here’s exactly what I would do.
And yes, I’ve been doing some version of these for the last 6–8 weeks. Which is why I’m calling it out now, while the spell is still breakable.
Below are the six habits, why they keep high-performing creatives trapped, and what to do instead.
1) Collect strategies while ignoring the energetic root
This is the classic high-achiever move: keep upgrading your strategy, hoping the right plan will finally make you consistent.
But if the real issue is energetic (scarcity, self-worth, nervous system safety, attachment wounds), no strategy will “land.” It’ll feel slippery. You’ll overthink. You’ll stall. You’ll start 12 things and finish none.
Signs you’re in this loop:
decision fatigue
overwhelm because everything “could work”
loss of connection to your inner compass
no energy left for what’s actually happening beneath the surface
Try instead: ask “What energetic state am I operating from?” before you ask “What should I do next?”
2) Follow other people’s 5-step plans like they know you better than you do
This one is spicy because it’s so seductive. Five steps. Thirty days. Guaranteed results.
But here’s the catch: that checklist was built for their personality, their values, their nervous system.
When you force yourself into someone else’s structure, you either:
don’t do it (and feel like you’re the problem), or
do it while miserable (and eventually stop)
Try instead: borrow principles, not protocols. Curate your own rules of engagement.
3) Be wildly promiscuous with your attention
Your attention is sacred. It’s also your most stolen resource.
If you want to hate your life, let every shiny tactic flirt with you. Let every outrage headline move in rent-free. Let every new idea scatter your focus until nothing actually compounds.
This habit dilutes momentum faster than almost anything.
Try instead: treat attention like money. Budget it. Protect it. Invest it where it grows.
4) Use external validation as emotional blood sugar
Praise is fun. Being seen feels good. That’s human.
But if validation becomes your fuel source, you’ll crash every time the room goes quiet.
Creators don’t burn out because they’re weak. They burn out because they tied their worth to applause.
Try instead: let validation be dessert, not breakfast.
5) Treat yourself like a fragile flower who must stay hidden and healing
This one hits high performers hard because you’re perceptive enough to notice your edges.
But self-awareness becomes self-sabotage when it turns into “I can’t build until I’m fully healed.”
Resilience is built through consistent action in manageable doses, not endless hiding and processing.
And yes, there’s nuance: you can be an orchid with your inputs (social media, news, algorithm exposure), while also being a dragon with your outputs (your art, your work, your reps).
Try instead: protect your inputs, commit to your outputs.
6) Confuse growth discomfort with misalignment suffering
This is the big one. The silent life-sucker.
Growth discomfort can look like:
awkwardness
fear of judgment
effort + delayed gratification
ego resistance (your ego hates beginner mode)
boredom during the learning curve
Misalignment suffering feels different:
chronic dread that doesn’t improve after months
depletion that lingers
resentment that compounds
loss of aliveness (you feel less like you)
identity erosion
nervous system threat (you feel rattled long after)
If you want to stay stuck, keep telling yourself “it’s just discomfort” when it’s actually misalignment.
Try instead: choose goals that stretch you in life-giving ways, not soul-sanding ways.
Want the antidote?
Next week’s solo episode is the opposite of this one: fiery, tactical, and designed to help you create more momentum in 2026 than you’ve built in the last five years combined.
And if you’re noticing you’ve been outsourcing your power or confusing misalignment for growth, this is exactly the kind of pattern we unwind inside Food Freedom Fantasy.
Food Freedom Fantasy is for high-performing women who want deep health + consistency that feels like foreplay, without dieting, surveillance, or forcing themselves into someone else’s system.
Links Mentioned
Embodied Activations
Activation 1: The Spell-Break Audit (10 minutes)
Read through the six “worst year” habits and answer:
How many of these am I currently doing? (0–6)
Which one is costing me the most energy right now?
What is the tiny opposite choice I can make this week?
one micro-action
one boundary
one decision that returns power to you
Finish this sentence:
“The version of me who thrives in 2026 chooses ____ instead.”
Activation 2: Write Your Own “Worst Year” List (5–15 minutes)
Title a page:
“If I wanted to stay stuck and hate my life this year, I would…”
Write 5–10 items, as brutally honest as possible. Make it funny if you want. Make it savage. Make it true.
Then star the top 1–2 that you know are your personal “stuck spells.”
Those stars are your power points: the exact places you can course-correct fast.
Bonus Micro-Check: Growth vs Misalignment (60 seconds)
Pick one thing you’re forcing right now and ask:
Does this feel like effort + learning curve (growth)?
Or does this feel like dread + depletion + resentment (misalignment)?
If it’s misalignment, your activation is simple: stop calling it “discipline.” Call it what it is, and adjust.
Transcript
Kayla: Welcome back to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. I think we're gonna have some fun in today's episode. Now, I don't normally lead with such a wildly negative title, but I felt a little playful this week, and I recently listened to a podcast by Leila Hormozi about how to make 2026 your worst year ever.
And it got me thinking if I personally wanted to stay stuck and hate my life this year, here's exactly what I would do. I came up with six key things, and I'll level with you. I have been doing all of them in some way, shape or form over the past six to eight weeks. Until recently, I was like, no more. And while this list is a personal one, I believe these are universal to don't list items for many high performing creatives, growth oriented women, and really anyone listening who's trying to navigate this wild world while staying happy and healthy.
And if you're listening to today's episode and you struggle with four or more of these yourself. You might wanna join us for this upcoming round of Food Freedom Fantasy. This is the program for you if you want deep health and consistency that feels like foreplay, all without dieting or giving your power away to someone else's formula.
This is really for the women who are done outsourcing their power and ready to build this momentum and follow through that actually fits their nervous system. More information will be in the show notes. Alright, let's dive into this list. Now, I have saved the most loaded one for last, so you'll wanna listen to the very end because number six has been wrecking me off and on.
For a decade at this point, I kid you not. Okay. But number one, the first thing I would do if I wanted to hate my life, stay stuck is continue collecting strategies while ignoring the very real fact that most, if not all of my challenges have nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with energetics.
This one is tough to tackle because you can't quantify energetics. You can't condense this into a six step framework, and you certainly can't throw up your hands and get a done for you service to fix it for you. The problem is once you've collected strategies like Pokemon cards for a few years and continue to do so, here's what happens.
First, massive decision fatigue. Two overwhelm because they all seem like they could work and you wanna do them all at the same time. Number three, less connection to your own inner compass. And finally, now you have no energy left to deal with what's actually going on below the surface. Because none of these strategies are going to land.
If the challenge is energetic and we're talking about low self-worth operating from scarcity attachment wounds, or a lack of felt safety, I realized recently that I have been doing the same thing with business that I used to do with weight loss and trying to stop binge eating. I would invest in every new diet, every new plan.
Then, oh, maybe I should do keto. Oh, let's fast instead, wait. That cleanse that lady's doing on Instagram sounds fire. None of it was fire. All of it was distraction from the root causes for why I never followed through with diets. And why I generally ended up eating all the things on day one of every diet.
Fortunately, I stopped doing that years ago because I realized there are more empowering and effective ways to create food freedom and health, which is what I now share inside my offers. But then I started doing the exact same thing with business. So many master classes and mentorships and shiny new courses.
Now, some of these, particularly a few of the recent mentorship decisions I've made have been absolutely worth it and aligned. However, here's the thing about those two more recent investments. One of them is about 70% energetics. 30% strategy, and I received the most significant benefits from the energetic part.
The other investment I've made recently is almost entirely energetics and identity based, because I was finally like, okay, I know what to do. I know how I want to do this. Now let's work on the piece that makes everything better. Which is who I be as. I do the things, and there is vast room for improvement in that department, especially with business.
So that's number one. Collecting strategies instead of doing the deeper work to rebuild the energetic foundation. The second thing I would do if I wanted to hate my life, stay stuck. Follow other people's five step plans, assuming they know me better than I know myself. This is how you stay stuck, even though on the surface it's so enticing, right?
Just do these five things and you'll get X in X days or X weeks. The goal weight, the business success, whatever it might be. But here's how this keeps you stuck and hating your life. That person created that five step protocol for themselves. They put together something that works beautifully for them.
Doesn't mean they're wrong, doesn't mean their list can't have merit or guidance. But where it becomes something that makes you miserable and makes you hate your life is when this list is so far removed from how you want to operate. That A, you either don't do the list, or B, you do the list for a little while and feel so miserable the entire time.
You eventually stop doing it. Both leave you feeling like you are the problem. When you're really not, you are just a unique individual who needs to curate your own list of guiding principles that align with who you are and also the things you'll want to keep doing. And it's funny because I've encountered two separate five list checklists over the past five months, and both echoed the same premise.
Do these exact five things over the next 30 ish days and you will blow the F up both times. Fell for it. I was like, yes. Give me the five things. I love structure, I love checklists. I wanna blow up only to find out one list included DM 30 people a day, two, which I say. Gag me with a spoon respectfully.
Of course, I have to honestly wonder how does someone find time for anything else? If they're filling their inbox with that many messages, when do they get to write or be creative or, I don't know, actually serve the clients they have. And the other list included selling on social media and posting on social media.
Every single day. Now, this was right in a time period where I was navigating my own extremely loaded relationship with the algorithm, which I talk about in episode 230. So even hearing this made me drop into a state of a little bit of dysregulation, and these two experiences made me realize. If I wanna keep hating this process, I will continue to try and wedge my personality and my preferences inside someone else's system.
When personally, I think we're all meant to build our own. And this doesn't mean you never want to try things or build from recommendations you find in other people's framework. But when you force a rigid structure, instead of adapting principles and concepts to make them work for you, that's when you start to suffer.
The third thing I would do if I wanted to stay stuck and hate my life in 2026 would be to be wildly promiscuous. With my attention. So chasing every tactic and idea that flirts with me. You know, kind of like I was with men in my early twenties. I definitely sowed my wild oats back in the day, as my mom likes to say, zero out of 10 would not recommend.
And this relates back to our first point about collecting strategies, but it goes even deeper than that. I think our attention and focus is just as sacred and valuable as money, especially at this point. And I've gone through seasons when I haven't treated it like that. I have lost countless hours to scrolling social media, getting involved in other people's stuff, binge watching television shows that really weren't even that good.
And then getting pulled into every new idea or program or shiny object, and I'd keep doing that if I wanted to hate the rest of this year. When we don't have clarity on our values and what we wanna focus on, we dilute our energy and we spread it all over the place, which only creates diffusion and less effectiveness where it actually matters.
So that's number three. I'd continue being promiscuous with my energy.
And letting every idea, click bait article and latest outrage pollute my own inner environment. Also, if you're like, my goodness, this is a negative episode, and you're like, okay, well I don't wanna do those things and stay stuck. So what's the alternative? You are gonna love next week's solo episode. It's gonna be fiery, it's gonna be tactical.
This week is like what not to do, and next week is like, let's do the rest of this year radically different and create more momentum in one year than we have in the last five years combined. Okay, this next one, number four is massive and you definitely wanna do it if you want to hate your life. And it's this using external validation as emotional blood sugar.
I have wrestled with this one big time in business and in the creativity arena. I have done multiple podcast episodes on this because it's such a massive reason people suffer. I have let reliance on external validation, shake my confidence with my art, with my creativity. With my own worth. It was once.
One of the reasons I took a year long hiatus from this podcast. Even though I love creating these episodes every single week for you, this is a great way to stay stuck as well, because there's going to be seasons where no one is clapping, where your effort isn't rewarded by the external world. And if you let external reasons be the only motivation to keep going, you will stop.
You will stall, and you'll have little to no control over your own pace and momentum. And feeling powerless over your own momentum is going to make anyone start hating their life. It's one thing to get lit up by praise. Or enjoy it when the external validation does happen. It's also human to be disappointed or hurt when you don't receive any outside celebrations for your effort.
When you've worked really hard, that's totally normal, totally human. But the way to stay stuck is when you start worshiping the external praise. Instead of treating it like a nice bonus. Okay, we're on to number five. If I wanted to stay stuck, hate my life, I would treat myself like a fragile flower who must stay hidden and healing instead of building.
This is such a big way to stay stuck, especially for my high performing growth oriented women. Because you are sharp, you're perceptive. You probably have a key awareness of where you could improve and where blocks might be keeping you stuck from consistent action. This self-awareness can be powerful until it becomes an excuse to keep disappearing, to hide and fix yourself.
You do not need to be fixed. You're not broken. You're human. And humans actually create resilience through forward momentum, and they generally heal as they go. I have done number five more times than I can count, especially when it comes to business and visibility. In 2022, I had a massive breakdown with my health, with my happiness.
I was back to binge eating basically every night, feeling confused, feeling too fragile, too sensitive to start a business. It was so bad. I went back to my door building job full-time. Now, I will never regret that decision because that was a season of more healing and inner work, and that was legitimately best done behind the scenes.
I also think there's other reasons why I was meant to stay there longer, and that's the whole nother story. The problem became when I treated myself, like I was that same 20, 22 version of myself. When I went back to launching a business in 2025, I thought that I'd have to do so much processing, so much nervous system work and like.
Lay in yoga nidra after every single social media post I made, or every Zoom call I was on. 'cause it was so much activation, I just couldn't handle it. Nevermind that I had grown so much in a three year time span. Nevermind that I have so many powerful tools now, like dance alchemy and my own food freedom fantasy method.
The problem was. Spending all that time processing was only bringing up more to process because you get what you focus on and that will keep you stuck and then you will start to hate your life because you're so busy trying to avoid life so you don't get triggered and then you get bored and maybe even a little depressed.
So that's number five. I would continue to believe I'm more fragile than I am instead of realizing that resilience is built through external action in consistent doses over time. And if you did listen to the episode about the algorithm and social media, you might be like, Kayla, you literally called yourself an orchid in that episode.
Now you're saying you're not a fragile flower. Explain. You can be an orchid when it comes to the inputs you're bringing into your life. So social media, algorithms, the news, that kind of thing. And you can be the opposite of a fragile flower when it comes to your performance, your outputs, and what you're challenging yourself to do.
Hope that distinction makes sense. Fragile flour when it comes to inputs. But a absolute fire powered dragon when it comes to doing the work and taking the action. Alright, number six. I told you I saved the best for last. If I wanted to stay stuck, hate my life, I would confuse the discomfort of growth with the suffering of misalignment.
This one though, this is the fast track to being completely miserable, and this confusion is the Achilles heel of high achieving growth oriented people everywhere. You have the king of discipline, David Goggins saying stuff like the ticket to victory. Is bringing your very best. When you feel your worst and when your mind is telling you you're done, you're only 40% done.
Now, this is no shade on David Goggins. I am so inspired by him and not gonna lie. Listen to his speeches while I am lifting weights many a morning. He's right. And sometimes this advice can also take us down an unnecessarily thorny, painful path because we start doing the thing that makes us uncomfortable and that bad bitch part of us is like, yes, we're doing it.
Look at us. Go. Meanwhile, every other part of you is like, um, this is awful. Can we stop? Please, but you ignore those parts because your inner bad bitch is noisy and maybe a bit of a bully sometimes. Or is that just me? We keep going because we think it's going to get better. We think we're gonna grow to like this one day, right?
Or we'll at least tolerate it one day, right? What's uncomfortable now becomes comfortable later, and all that jazz. Often, yes, but not always. Sometimes there is a genuine medium mismatch, which I share more about in episode two 30. This confusion is real and it needs to be addressed. So if I wanted to stay stuck and hate my life this year, I would keep pretending I haven't at long last, figured out the difference.
Between growing pains and deep misalignment, and I wanted to share this for you so that you can start to gauge the distinction between the two. So the signs that this is a short term discomfort that you'll eventually grow out of with repetition over time, you might feel awkwardness, especially in the beginning.
You might fear judgment, especially if this thing you're learning to do happens in a public arena. There's gonna be effort involved. It's gonna feel like hard work sometimes there's probably gonna be delayed gratification because there's these learning curves that we have to move through, and then there's probably gonna be some legitimate ego resistance.
Because our ego does not like to be a beginner. It does not like to do things that it feels like it sucks at, and then eventually you might also find some boredom as you go through the learning process. These are all normal signs of discomfort that happens when you are pursuing new goals and learning new things, but genuine misalignment with your personality, your values.
Your natural style of operating feels very different. It feels like chronic dread even after months of doing the thing, and it happens basically every time you even think about doing the thing, it looks like depletion. That doesn't get better, so you're always more fatigued after you do the thing. It looks like this resentment that compounds.
The more you do the thing, the angrier you get, the more you hate it, the more you resent it. It also looks like a loss of aliveness, so whatever you're doing is making you feel more dead, more numb, less inspired by your life. There can also be this identity erosion, so it feels like you're doing something that truly goes against your wiring.
And then finally, it feels more like a nervous system threat versus a challenge because it's one thing when your nervous system lights up from pushing past your discomfort zone. It's quite another to feel so activated by something that hours or days later, you're still feeling rattled by it. So if I kept doing just one thing to ensure that 2026 absolutely sucked, this would be the thing.
I'd keep making space for deep misalignment instead of selecting goals and practices that stretched me in powerful life-giving expansive ways. Even if those things felt initially uncomfortable or frustrating while I was in beginner mode, and there you have it, the exact roadmap to staying stuck, hating the process and making 2026 the most miserable uninspiring year you've ever had.
You are welcome, but actually don't thank me yet, because next week we're talking about the antidote to all of this in our solo episode. And to recap the six things were, number one, keep collecting strategies while pretending the real blocks aren't emotional and energetic. Number two, follow other people's five step plans.
Assuming they know me better than I know myself. Number three, be wildly promiscuous with my attention, chasing every tactic that flirts with me. Number four, using external validation as emotional blood sugar. Number five, treat myself like a fragile flower who must stay hidden and healing instead of building.
And finally, number six, confuse the discomfort of growth with the suffering of misalignment. Your embodied activation for this episode is twofold. First, reflect on those six things and ask yourself, how many of these am I doing and how can I choose differently so that I thrive in this next year? So if you see yourself in this list, good, because that awareness is the place where the spell finally breaks.
And as a bonus activation, I want you to write out your own list of the things you would do if you wanted to stay stuck and hate your life this year. That awareness alone is gonna help you notice when you are doing the things on that list and course correct so much faster. And if you're realizing that you've been confusing, misalignment for growth, or you've been outsourcing your power to external systems, these are the exact patterns we unwind inside.
Food freedom fantasy. This program supports the rebuilding of your inner foundation and strengthening your own inner world instead of collecting more strategies. The exact work we do inside of Food Freedom Fantasy is allowing you to take that power back and build the framework that is fully aligned with you.
Still might expand you, but it's never gonna create that suffering. So you can explore that in the show notes and decide whether or not that feels aligned. Either way, I am wishing you a beautiful rest of your week. Take care.
