Why You’re Always Stuck (It’s Not Laziness — It’s Trauma) + How to Break Free

Have you ever known you ought to do something—get to work on time, put away laundry, finish a creative piece, or even brush your teeth before bed—but simply could not force yourself to do it? Everyone procrastinates at times, yet for those who endured abuse or neglect as children, procrastination can take over and dominate life. It doesn’t just slow you down; it can trap you, drag you into a daily rut and cause real depression. It feels like being frozen. What is that freeze? I used to live in it constantly. It was crushingly demoralizing. Then I found a way out, and without that change I wouldn’t have built this YouTube channel, written courses, hosted live events, or grown a team of seven people. None of that would have been possible if I hadn’t discovered how to keep my productivity steady. But when people ask how I changed, many dislike the answer. If you want to hear it, here it is.
First, it helped to rethink what “procrastination” even means, because the term softens the reality. It’s not merely laziness. It can destroy your life like a parasite on your will, undermining your sense of worth and the belief that your time and efforts matter. I prefer to call it paralysis because you find yourself unable to act in your own interest. That paralysis shows up in small ways—surfing the web when you should be working—and in much bigger ways that affect others, like neglecting to pay the electric bill and leaving your household in the dark. In the home where I grew up, that level of avoidance happened all the time. Procrastination can wreck relationships, careers, finances, health, and integrity. That’s not a character flaw; it’s a wound in the soul.
Why do we freeze? Largely because real work is hard: committing, spending energy, and creating out of nothing is difficult. That difficulty mixes with trauma-related exhaustion—depression, conflict, emotional eruptions, overwhelm—so life already feels like too much and adding anything else seems impossible. That survival-focused mindset is understandable, but it doesn’t help you heal the underlying trauma. For instance, one of my greatest joys is putting out videos on YouTube and reading the responses from viewers. Making videos feeds me emotionally and provides for my family. Yet the days I must plan, research, and script feel torturous. The preparation for each video often requires 6–8 hours of concentrated creative work. Even when I share older pieces or read fan mail, that selection process eats hours, and hearing about so much suffering affects me emotionally. The hardest part is beginning. When it comes time to map out the week’s videos and actually make them, I suddenly become obsessed with my plants, or cleaning the aluminum track of a sliding window, or endlessly scrolling Twitter—odd distractions that make no sense because they make me feel worse, while releasing the videos brings real satisfaction. The problem is the preparatory work: hard, time-consuming, and easily avoided.
So I had to be blunt with myself. It brings me real joy to set intentions and keep them—that is integrity. Achievement fulfills me; it’s how I live my mission of helping people with childhood PTSD recover. I’m proud of my work, though I see its limitations. Creating, sharing, and serving others is why I stay engaged and why my life feels meaningful. Procrastination is often an attempted fix for stress. It may feel like postponing tasks will restore energy, as if avoidance recharges a battery or jump-starts your focus. But that’s not true. Rest and self-care are important, but skipping necessary work is not equivalent to healthy recovery; it actually increases stress for people with childhood PTSD because much of their nervous system remains on edge. That creates a vicious loop: stress makes tasks harder, so you avoid them; avoidance increases stress, which leads to more avoidance.
People who didn’t grow up with trauma can’t imagine how exhausting ordinary life can be for some of us. Everything can be hard—leaving the house, keeping a schedule, expressing yourself, facing others’ opinions, earning money. Yet the alternative—never doing these things—is even harder. So when overwhelm hits, telling yourself to avoid all stress isn’t always the answer. Often the calm comes from tackling the mess: clearing out the backlog of unfinished projects, answering forgotten emails, and making space in your life. In other words, avoiding stress isn’t a solution in the long run; the path of least resistance is often to do the work and create order from chaos, which brings relief, inspiration, and happiness.
How to begin? You may know the swing from “I can’t do anything” to “I have to do everything,” which is a classic childhood-PTSD pattern. Sometimes that full-bore energy is useful, but often it’s unrealistic to expect to clear an entire 20-item list in a single day. Many people try to start three things at once and then become overwhelmed and fall back into avoidance. Action at a sustainable pace is like a muscle: you can strengthen it by exercising a little bit at a time. Whether you chip away or have an intense cleaning spree, one thing is not the solution: giving up on yourself. Don’t confuse trauma-driven paralysis or surrender with self-care. Don’t get lost in Instagram posts that romanticize brokenness. Instead, focus on your strengths, your vision, and the commitment not to betray yourself. When you disappoint yourself, maladaptive patterns emerge, and complex PTSD will look for someone or something to blame. If you find yourself ruminating about persecutory thoughts or past hurts, ask whether you’re actually angry at yourself for avoiding something you know you should do.
If you’re unsure whether complex PTSD underlies self-sabotaging behavior, there are tools to assess it—a quiz I developed is linked in the description above and on the free tools page of my website, along with a free course. Most people don’t want to hear this, but the antidote to procrastination is action—action that matches your capacity. Start small. If you’ve been skipping brushing your teeth at night, do it even when you’re tired, as an exercise in keeping a tiny promise to yourself. The next day do a load of laundry. If you feel steady, answer old emails, schedule a haircut, show up at the gym you already pay for, audit your credit card bill for forgotten subscriptions, toss the moldy takeout and the yellow broccoli from your fridge (something I need to do today), or sweep the front steps (also on my list). You know the small, sensible steps you need to take. Push yourself—not to mania, but to steady, daily effort. You’ve probably heard “Don’t be a human doing; be a human being.” It’s a worthy sentiment, but doing and being both matter. Doing is how we make a living and how we become ourselves. The act itself generates momentum: each small action makes the next one easier.
I dragged my idea for Crappy Childhood Fairy around for twenty years before I had the inner strength to act. The turning point came when I paid for a seminar about telling your life story as a teaching tool. I was terrified—what if people judged me, what if my work was bad, what if success meant endless work? All those fears came true in part: the job became a lot of work, sometimes nights and weekends. But once I finally began, I started sharing my gift with the world in a way I had never done before, and the feeling that life was slipping by evaporated. The seminar cost around $2,000 for four days; I had to pay for hotels and food and travel and even got the stomach flu on day three and missed part of it, but I’d taken the step. That moment stopped the sense that I had wasted my opportunities—food, shelter, reasonable health, education—and made me want to give back. I launched the blog in the evenings while still working another job; that “side” project gradually grew. Being the Crappy Childhood Fairy is emotionally demanding and the workload piles up, but it is far less painful than living knowing I could create something but never tried. Time ticks away; the world is waiting for you to show up. Start with one action today. Small, consistent steps are sustainable and accumulate into profound change, with moments to breathe and recover between efforts. If you’ve spent years dimming your light, your spirit will rejoice when you begin to move again. Achievement feels good.
Does taking action guarantee success? No. But it brings vitality—the sense that you’re alive and engaged in your own adventure. You may not reach the original goal or you may decide you don’t want it, but trying opens you to unexpected connections and opportunities. You’re in the game. Action is your strength. Around the world, many people who were abused or neglected feel stuck and think they’re the only ones who freeze or can’t finish tasks. That’s common among those with childhood PTSD. If you treat procrastination as mere laziness or a moral failing, you might worsen it. Recognizing that trauma can alter the nervous system and predispose you to “freeze” is often the first liberating insight.
Today’s letter comes from a man I’ll call Jacob. He writes, “Hi, Anna. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always had the sense that everyone else is better than me.” (I’ll mark things I want to revisit on a second read, but let’s look at Jacob’s story.) He feels others are better at sports, school, and social life; he grew up with an explosive, self-centered parent who expected children to be miniature adults, and a codependent parent just trying to survive. Jacob and his older sister were often set up to fail and accused of laziness when that wasn’t true. The family did most work themselves for the family business—clearing and hauling brush, dragging hardwood by hand—usually accompanied by being yelled at, especially him. The household was a constant state of walking on eggshells, never sure who would be punished or why. They lived rurally without neighborhood kids or activities, so Jacob felt isolated at school where many kids were tightly connected by sports, church, and neighbors. He spent much of his childhood feeling alone or disconnected. The military offered a way out; there he made friends and learned he wasn’t as incapable as he’d believed. Returning home, he worked in the family business and felt his drive snuffed out. There was no useful guidance—just being flung into demanding tasks and compared unfavorably to others. After four years and thousands on coaching and training, he still couldn’t get traction. He moved 1,500 miles away but continued contracting for the old business. Later he started his own business but found it easier to keep earning money from the old company. Over twenty years, more money spent on coaching produced little change. He knows what needs doing—prospecting—and he’s skilled at it when he actually does it, yet most days he sits at his desk staring at the computer, doing nothing to build either enterprise, watching things fall apart until an occasional random deal saves him a few times a year. He’s tried journaling, hypnosis, screaming, pushing himself, but nothing dissolves the block. He’s given up on having a family and on financial security, despite recognizing his talents and opportunities and believing he’s squandered them. He says he cannot see the barrier or how to resolve it.
Here’s a response: Jacob, your childhood—constant verbal abuse from your father while your mother was passive—can create lasting nervous-system harm. That kind of chronic stress in childhood is what often produces complex PTSD. One common manifestation of trauma is getting stuck in freeze mode. Trauma responses typically cluster into four patterns—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Some people become fighters, always in conflict; others flee and avoid; some overfunction and try to control everything; others underfunction—freeze—and that looks exactly like what you described: sitting at a desk, intending to work, but immobilized. The good news is nervous-system states are addressable; with learning and practice you can heal patterns of freeze. If you suspect freeze is your default, read about how sympathetic arousal and parasympathetic calming interact. Another label for living in freeze is underfunctioning, contrasted with overfunctioning where a person keeps busy to avoid feelings. Underfunctioning is common and treatable.
When you said you’d given up on relationships and squandered chances, I want to propose a kinder interpretation: you may not have knowingly wasted opportunities. You might have tried your best, but trauma can cause the nervous system to stall, making it hard to muster focus or initiative. What helps is a practical workaround—methods that restart your nervous system so attention and memory return and you can prospect with confidence. Prospecting—making calls or finding potential customers—is a core part of running a business. Many founders struggle with it. If sales terrify you, consider delegating that role to a partner or salesperson who can work commission-based while you focus on delivering your service. Not everyone is built to be a rainmaker, and that’s fine.
You don’t need more pricey coaching; much practical skill can be learned from free resources like YouTube and books. When I started my second business, I learned most of it from online videos. Study how people communicate with clarity and charisma; learn scripts and techniques that lead to conversations and sales. Half the battle is learning the method and doing it often enough for it to feel familiar. One transformational book for me was The E-Myth by Michael Gerber; it taught me that when a business starts you wear every hat, but growth requires handing off roles to others. You’ve likely absorbed this from coaching already. Now it’s time to get out of freeze.
The single most recommended step for freeze is simple: go outside and move. Ironically, one of your traumatic chores was clearing a long driveway in brutal heat, which was itself a form of trauma. Still, physical movement in fresh air and sunlight can reset the nervous system. Many people benefit from a morning routine—something I cover in my dysregulation boot camp (details in the description). Freeze is one facet of nervous-system dysregulation; we each have a dominant trauma response but can shift among fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Learning to regulate the nervous system helps everyone.
Begin with tiny, no-cost practices: wash your hands in very cold water, step outside for a walk, stomp your feet left-right-left-right, press your tongue to the roof of your mouth—small sensory inputs that ground you. Try five deep breaths or box breathing (inhale-hold-exhale-hold in measured counts). For many, group connection helps: find community through meetings such as Adult Children of Alcoholics or other recovery groups, 12-step rooms, or business meetups where peers face similar challenges. If you’re isolated, seek connection with men or entrepreneurs who understand these struggles—talking about your plans aloud and sharing them with others can open doors.
If selling is the main obstacle, consider hiring someone to do prospecting while you deliver the service. Salespeople can work on commission. And do the learning: there are excellent books and videos about pitching and converting clients. For entrepreneurs, realizing you don’t have to do every role is freeing.
Back to crashes and cycles: trauma recovery is rarely linear. One day you feel strong and energetic, and the next you can fall into a shell. That pattern—highs followed by withdrawals—is typical for survivors. Crashing isn’t always full-blown depression; it often looks like fogginess, hypersensitivity to criticism, or temporary withdrawal. Neurological dysregulation triggers these dips: focus wanes, time blurs, and sensitivity increases. That’s why a regular eight-hour work block can feel impossible; many trauma survivors operate in bursts—sprints of productivity followed by quiet periods. When things hum along, you can sustain intense focus for hours or days, but that usually precedes a crash. The crash functionally aims to keep you “safe,” yet it feels like self-sabotage, pulling you back from risk or growth. You might get a promotion and feel guilty, or you achieve something and then unconsciously undo it.
Crashes vary in intensity. They can be a gentle torpor, physical agitation, or an attack of self-criticism. Often, even if someone apologizes for upsetting you, it won’t stop the crash because the process is already set in motion inside your brain. That’s why it helps to treat the crash as a brain state to be managed rather than a moral failure. Support the brain and the body to return you to functioning.
Here’s what helps: routines. Brains love predictable patterns, especially when trauma previously made life chaotic. Build consistent habits around sleep, meals, and daily rhythms. Irregular sleep, long fasts, emotional reactivity, people-pleasing, and impulsive relationships all drain resilience and invite crashes. You don’t have to live a dull, overly controlled life, but you do need an overall structure that preserves energy. When your reserves are low, small stresses become excuses to withdraw; you may call in sick, slip into resentment, or hide. Avoiding big swings in routine reduces the risk of crashing.
Think of complex PTSD like a chronic medical condition such as diabetes: you have it, but with consistent care and the right lifestyle you can manage it. You might use tools—sleep, healthy food, supportive relationships—to keep yourself balanced when risks and stresses arise. Don’t try to do everything alone; connection and community are critical. Learn to discharge the fear and resentment that blur your thinking during crashes so they have less power over you.
I used to sabotage my creative momentum after successes. When my first film screened and won an award, a friend’s offhand cruel remark—“it was awful because you were awful”—cut deeply even though everyone else loved the film. I called the cast and they reassured me it was great, yet I gave up and retreated into a day job. Later, when my book did well, a supervisor at my workplace told me I couldn’t keep writing or I’d be fired, which silenced me for years. Two years later I discovered the higher-up actually loved my book and never said that; my boss had effectively sabotaged me. Rather than confront him, I stayed and lost many years of creative momentum, not writing again for 18 years. All those pauses were crashes—periods when confidence and forward motion were blocked. Since then, starting the Crappy Childhood Fairy blog renewed my writing practice; at first I struggled and posted infrequently, but over time a daily practice liberated more of my true voice. Little by little, persistence reclaimed what had been suppressed by fear and the pressure to conform to someone else’s expectations.
If your life feels suppressed—by external circumstances, internal fear, or the pattern of crashing—you’ll try and fail to sustain your efforts. The right goal becomes unsustainable. To change that, learn to modulate crashes so they are less severe and less disruptive. Crashes have a pattern: a trigger, distorted perception, physical symptoms, and self-attacks that magnify everything. Recognize a crash as a brain state and act to support your nervous system back to balance. Use routines, keep consistent nourishment and sleep, and seek social support. Don’t let emotional drama or chaotic schedules sap you dry.
You can learn to calm the triggers by becoming aware of the emotions and thoughts that spiral during a crash and finding ways to discharge them. Keep routines, seek help, and build a life that preserves your capacity to handle criticism and effort. With attention and practice, crashes become less overwhelming; you’ll still have setbacks, but they won’t derail you. Build small, steady habits, connect with others, move your body, and be patient with the nervous system’s healing. Over time, these choices let you come back to your projects and your life with more resilience, momentum, and the freedom to do what you were always meant to do.