9 min read
When you're in between one chapter of your life and the next, there can be a period of real uncertainty.
Maybe you've changed jobs, been through a breakup or lost someone close to you. Perhaps the change is less visible from the outside: a new diagnosis, something that's shifted through therapy, or a change in your beliefs about yourself and the world.
The circumstances might be very different, but the underlying experience is often the same. Life doesn't look the way it did before. You don't have the same routines or supports, and you might not feel like the same person, either.
And that uncertainty can be really difficult to cope with.
When we're going through a major life change, there's often a lot of pressure to work out what comes next. But I think there's something important we need to do before that: get ourselves steady enough to actually engage with the work of transition.
In my framework for navigating life transitions, I call this Steadying the In-Between. It's about finding some stability during a period that can feel emotionally, mentally and sometimes even physically destabilising.
In this article, I want to explore why life transitions can feel so uncertain, and share four ways you can start to feel a little more grounded as you move through one.
Why do life changes feel so destabilising?
There are a few reasons, and some are more obvious than others.
The routines and structures you relied on have changed
If you've lost your job, suddenly you're not getting up and going into the office every day. If you've been through a breakup, you no longer have that person you could message whenever you wanted.
These might seem like relatively small things alongside the bigger change, but our routines, relationships and everyday structures give life a sense of predictability. When they're no longer there, we can feel quite uncontained.
The future you imagined might no longer exist
I think this is one of the really difficult parts of transition.
Often we have some sense of what the next few years are going to look like. We might not have everything mapped out, but there's a direction we're moving in, and that gives us a sense of security.
Then something happens and the future you've been working towards is completely changed. Perhaps you've spent years imagining it, planning for it, building your life around it. And suddenly it's no longer there.
The difficult thing is that a new future doesn't immediately take its place. It takes time to understand what you want now and what your life might look like.
In that gap, there's the unknown. And when we don't know what's coming, it can be really scary.
Your sense of identity has shifted
This is something I focus on quite a lot in my coaching work.
Maybe you were a director, a partner, a son or daughter in a particular family relationship, or someone who held a set of beliefs that no longer fit. When those roles or beliefs change, you might find yourself asking: Who am I now?
Our sense of identity is partly shaped by the roles we play and the people and groups we belong to. Losing one of those connections can feel threatening, even if the change was something we chose.
So if you're feeling anxious, overwhelmed, scared or even a little hopeless after a big change, it makes sense that you might be feeling that way.
It doesn't necessarily mean you've made the wrong decision or that you've failed in life. It may mean you're navigating a genuinely difficult human experience.
1. Normalise what you're going through
One of the first things that can help is simply recognising that what you're experiencing is a normal part of going through a major life transition.
I don't think we talk about these periods enough. We often see people celebrating the new job, the new relationship, the exciting new chapter. But we hear less about what it actually feels like to be between chapters, when the old life has gone and the new one hasn't quite taken shape.
As a result, people can end up feeling that there's something uniquely wrong with them. That they should be coping better, or that everyone else has life figured out.
There can be a lot of relief in recognising that this is hard, and that it's understandable for it to be hard.
It can also help to be honest with other people about what you're navigating. Someone whose life is relatively stable might not immediately understand why you're struggling. Giving them a little insight into what this period is like for you can make it easier to feel supported, rather than keeping everything bottled up.
Above all, try to bring some compassion and patience to yourself. You don't have to have everything sorted out immediately.
2. Build some routines and structure into your days
One of the most practical things you can do is start putting a little bit of structure back into your day.
This is especially helpful if your life change has disrupted the routines you used to rely on.
It might involve:
Going to bed and getting up at roughly the same time.
Planning regular meals, rather than eating at random times.
Making space for exercise a few times a week.
Having a simple end-of-day check-in, where you look at what's coming up tomorrow and make a bit of a plan.
None of these things needs to be particularly complicated.
The point isn't to create the perfect routine or become incredibly productive. It's to give yourself some degree of stability and predictability when other parts of your life feel uncertain.
When everything feels chaotic and uncontained, having a few things you can rely on each day can help make the whole experience a little more manageable.
3. Get the chaos out of your head and onto paper
Another thing I find really helpful is visualising and organising what's going on.
When you're overwhelmed, you can end up holding an enormous amount in your head: things you need to do, decisions you need to make, worries about the future, and all sorts of half-formed ideas about what might come next.
One option is to get some of that out of your head and put it somewhere you can actually see it.
You could use a notebook, a physical whiteboard, Post-it notes or an online tool. I personally use Miro, which is a digital whiteboard.
With clients, I sometimes use exercises such as mapping out an ideal day or week, or creating a simple roadmap of the different projects and areas of life they're working on.
It can help you see whether you're trying to do too much, what needs your attention, and whether what you're doing is actually aligned with the person you want to become.
You might also find it useful to mark your life change on a calendar. If it only happened a few weeks or months ago, seeing that in front of you can give you a bit of perspective. Perhaps it isn't surprising that you're still finding things difficult.
And even something as simple as writing down your tasks can relieve the pressure of trying to remember everything yourself.
Sometimes we don't need to solve the whole problem. We just need to make it a little easier to see what we're dealing with.
4. Find ways to regulate and process difficult emotions
Emotions can be all over the place during a transition.
You might feel sad one day, anxious the next, and occasionally excited about the possibilities ahead. You might also find yourself overthinking, trying to force an answer to questions that you just aren't ready to answer yet.
I think this is something worth paying attention to, because we can get caught in a cycle of trying to think our way out of uncertainty.
We keep turning things over in our heads, imagining the worst, looking for certainty. But we're not really getting anywhere. We're just spinning our wheels.
Sometimes what we need isn't more thinking. It's a way of being with, and processing, what we're feeling.
Different things can help here. Exercise, getting outside and spending time with people you like can make a difference. You might also find it useful to explore your thoughts through CBT-style exercises, noticing when you're catastrophising or thinking in very black-and-white terms.
Meditation or mindfulness can be helpful too. Rather than trying to get rid of sadness, anger, fear or shame, you practise allowing those feelings to be there without immediately needing to change them.
That can be difficult, especially when the emotions feel very big.
And it's understandable that we might try to avoid them. For some people that looks like drinking too much or overeating. For others it might be endless scrolling, gaming or binge-watching something just to avoid sitting with what's going on.
The problem is that some of these ways of coping can create difficulties of their own.
As you become more able to sit with difficult emotions, you may find that you don't need to rely on those distractions quite as much.
A word of caution, though: if what you're experiencing feels overwhelming, go slowly. Don't push yourself to sit with more than you can comfortably manage. Sometimes having support from a therapist or another appropriately trained professional can be an important part of navigating this safely.
You don't have to figure out the next chapter just yet
A lot of Steadying the In-Between comes down to compassion, patience and trying to minimise the damage during a difficult period.
It's not about making all the uncertainty disappear. And it's not about getting your whole life figured out before you can move forward.
It's about getting yourself steady enough that you can begin to do some of the other work of transition: letting go of what has ended, making sense of who you are now, and gradually exploring what comes next.
And at some point, that involves taking action in the real world, rather than staying stuck in your head with all the ideas, worries and what-ifs. It's often through trying things out that a new direction starts to take shape.
I spent around a year to a year and a half struggling through a major transition of my own, and I wish I'd had someone explain some of these things to me at the time. It could have saved a lot of pain and struggle.
So if you're in the middle of a big life change right now, I hope some of these ideas help make things feel a little steadier.
You don't have to rush yourself into the next chapter. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is take care of yourself while you're in between.
Prefer to watch or listen?
If you’d rather explore these ideas in another format, you can watch the full video on YouTube or listen to the episode on the Between Chapters podcast.
Going through a transition yourself?
Between Chapters is my 8-week coaching programme for people trying to make sense of life after a major change, helping you understand what has changed, reconnect with who you are now, and find a grounded way forward.