5 Tricks to Get Mentally Unstuck FAST

I am a self-admitted nerd. Learning about human physiology during my MS was a fantastic experience that spilled into my daily life at work and home. When talking with people about how to be more creative and deliver inspiring innovations, I speak with them about becoming mentally unstuck. This is where my nerdy side gets to kick into full gear.

1. Eating a lot of Chocolate, FAST.

Beyond being delicious for most people, chocolate has many different benefits. It is a natural antioxidant. It can reduce internal inflammation, bring energy and protect your skin from dehydration. When you consume a lot of it fast, it also releases endorphins into your system, but also two little chemicals called oxytocin (the love hormone) and dopamine (the feel-good hormone). When these hit our brain, it naturally causes a shift in our mood. When we are in a different mood, we perceive the world through different eyes, which allows us to get unstuck in our thinking process.

2. Do 15 jumping jacks, sit ups, more jumping jacks, and 30 seconds of in-place running.

Beyond getting some exercise, this activity gets us unstuck by flooding our system with the endorphins I mentioned above. The constant moving of different body parts above and below the heart also gets our adrenaline and noradrenaline (catecholamines) pumping because our heart needs to catch up with the sudden blood demand. Our brain pulls the most significant amount of blood, which means it is getting flooded by these stimulates too. By the time we get done doing this highly intense workout, we focus on catching our breath. Often that minor little shift in focus can get us unstuck in our thinking.

3. Count backward by sevens from 201 to zero.

The simplicity of this tool is conceptually simple but harder to do in practice. However, that is the point; it pulls your mind in a new direction. It takes a good bit of focus for most people to be able to count by sevens, let alone to do it backward. This exercise deliberately shifts where the blood in our brain is circulating the most. By doing that, we are stimulating other areas that can get us unstuck.

4. Play the alphabet game.

Incorporating the alphabet, which is the baseline of formal learning, taps into a different neuroplasticity aspect of our brain that is very deep. That is the first shift. The second shift is that we have to be creative in thinking about using the following letter to identify a city, animal, person, or whatever we are applying the game toward. This can be easier for the more common letters but challenging for the less common letters. This brings in the third shift of our eyes, looking around for inspiration. We send blood from the front to the back of the brain, causing more shifting. Once we have seen something to help inspire us, we may need to get a little creative to spin it to fit the category and letter we are on. It essentially gets our brains stuck on something else, followed by breaking it quickly. That allows us to find new thinking paths when returning to our problem.

5. Laughing out loud.

The fastest and best way to break out of being stuck in our thinking is through laughter. The louder, the better. Actually, if you start laughing so hard you aren’t making a sound, that is as good as it gets, but you might make some people worried that you are having a stroke. Laughing taps into different chemicals in our systems, like chocolate and exercise. It also taps into other brain waves. When we are mentally stuck, we are usually in what we term Basic Beta. This is where we function 80 to 90% of the day. Laughing allows us to get into Aspiring Alpha. For many people, this is where they have their best ideas. Some prevalent places for Aspiring Alpha are the shower, running (for obvious reasons as above), driving, or even cutting the grass. A place that is exceptionally uncommon to have our best ideas is work. Work, however, is where we do get mentally stuck the most.