No one wants to feel like they’re achieving far less than they could, whether in their career, relationships, or personal growth. Realizing our complacency can be uncomfortable, but it’s the first step to a life of greater purpose, passion, and satisfaction. Here are 20 tell-tale signs that your life needs some self-reflection and motivation!
Constantly Daydreaming
Do you have a head full of aspirations but always seem to find yourself stuck in the planning phase? Choosing Therapy says excessive daydreaming, known as maladaptive daydreaming, can take time away from making concrete steps toward progress and doing the hard work required to fulfill your ambitions.
Chronic Discontent
Feeling a lingering unhappiness or lack of fulfillment is a telling sign that something in your life just isn’t right. According to Marriage.com, such dissatisfaction is a particularly potent indicator of an unhappy relationship. Don’t ignore this inner voice! Instead, take action to improve or change what about your life is making you discontent.
Low Self-Esteem
If, subconsciously, you know you could do better or achieve more, you’ll have a sense of worthlessness and failure. Collective World states, “According to psychologists, codependency stems from a lack of self-worth and a deep-rooted need for approval from others.” Basically, the belief that you don’t deserve more makes you settle for less.
Being Untrue to Yourself
If the career path you’ve chosen or the relationship you’re in contradicts your ‘core’ values, this can leave a lingering sense of ‘wrongness’ and unease. Technical writer Charles Amemiya on Medium warns that ‘living for’ money or familial expectations (especially if they’re contrary to your own interests and values) can stop you from nurturing what’s important to you—making you feel disconnected and out of place.
Fear Makes Decisions
Entrepreneur asserts that allowing fear—of change, failure, or the unknown—to consistently guide your choices is a sign you aren’t reaching your potential. Avoiding risk at all costs significantly reduces opportunities for progress, success, and greater happiness, like proposing marriage to your partner or demanding a promotion at work.
No Personal Growth
If you haven’t grown as a person over time, this can be a worrying sign of complacency. Self-improvement requires learning new skills, setting and meeting goals, and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Expert Editor warns that a period without any such challenges or achievements indicates unhealthy stagnation.
Unfulfilling Relationships
Does your relationship feel more like a burden than a source of joy? Then, you might be staying in a failing or toxic relationship because you’re afraid of leaving or uncomfortable being alone. Paired says compromising on core values, constantly justifying your partnership, and ‘waiting’ for change are all red flags that indicate your partner might not be ‘the one.’
Ignoring Passion
We’re not saying you need to be blissfully energized every time you do household chores, but there should be aspects of your life that make you feel alive. Everyone needs something to feel passionate about, whether it’s their partner, family, profession, or hobby. If you feel like the things that excite you the most have been ‘shelved,’ it’s a worrying sign.
Lack of Boundaries
Bonobology warns that ignoring ‘deal-breakers’ for an easy life is a sign of low self-esteem, complacency, and settling, especially in personal relationships. If you fail to set or maintain personal boundaries, others won’t respect you, and you’ll often end up with far less than you’re entitled to, leaving you feeling undervalued and dissatisfied.
Making Comparisons
While it’s natural, and even healthy, to compare yourself to others, constantly doing so can be a subtle indicator that you aren’t happy with your own life. Focusing on other people’s life choices, successes, and accomplishments will prevent you from pursuing your aspirations and passions. So stop following others and blaze your own trail!
Enduring (Not Enjoying) Life
Does life feel like something to get through rather than something to be appreciated and enjoyed? Life isn’t always easy, but it shouldn’t feel like one long slog from start to finish—this can signal that you’re surrounding yourself with people who don’t fulfill you and putting yourself in situations or environments that don’t ‘fit’ with who you are.
Complaining
Unsurprisingly, voicing discontent about your chosen career, relationship, or lifestyle indicates that you aren’t fulfilled in life. While the odd moan is normal, constantly telling others how bad your life is isn’t healthy and will harm your relationships, too. Instead, take action and make changes to improve your situation.
Passiveness
Accepting your life the way it is may seem like the most hassle-free route to an easy existence. But unhappiness is important—it tells us when something is wrong and persists until we do something about it. So don’t accept the negative aspects of your life, especially if they can potentially be changed and improved with some effort.
Aimlessness
Ideapod writes that a life without direction or purpose is bound to leave a person feeling hopeless and unsure of what to do next. If your personal or professional life feels ‘off track,’ you could be missing out on the joy of working toward a goal or achieving a long-term dream.
Prioritizing Comfort
The old adage goes that ‘nothing worth having is easy to get,’ and while that may not hold true 100% of the time, it’s something worth keeping in mind. Choosing the easy or most comfortable option every time will leave you with a stress-free life of missed opportunities and stagnation because hard work, discomfort, and expense are often required to improve ourselves.
Forgotten Dreams
If you once had a head full of vibrant dreams and now can’t remember what they were, you’ve allowed your aspirations to fade into the background. While it’s sometimes necessary to keep personal goals ‘on the back burner,’ they shouldn’t stay there forever to rot! Give yourself permission to pursue them by taking a crucial first step.
Rationalizing Unhappiness
According to Medbound Times, “When we rationalize or falsely minimize our problems, we are essentially telling ourselves that what we’re experiencing isn’t that bad, and we shouldn’t expect anything better.” Such self-deception can stop you from facing difficult truths and paralyze you from taking action to improve your life.
Living Vicariously
There’s no harm in enjoying books and movies, but if you find yourself living your life through fictional characters rather than creating your own happiness, it can be harmful. An unhealthy focus on the lives of seemingly more successful or content individuals, like friends, colleagues, or family members, is also a sign you need to experience your own happiness firsthand.
Waiting
Excessive passivity and a lack of personal motivation to improve your life can leave you waiting for a ‘miracle’ or a catalyst to get you out of the rut. But how long is too long to wait? What if nothing ever changes? Avoid patiently waiting for change and take charge of your destiny by actively pursuing what makes you happy.
Regret
We all have regrets—that’s just life! But feeling like you’re constantly making the wrong choices, letting opportunities pass you by, or failing to achieve anything can leave you pondering ‘what if?’ far too much. No one wants to look back on their life with nothing but regret, so don’t be afraid to take a chance now and then.