Recurring life questions have a way of showing up at the worst possible times.
You’re trying to fall asleep, and suddenly you’re wondering if this is really the life you want. Or you’re driving to work, and the same nagging doubt about your relationship surfaces again. Maybe you’re scrolling through social media and that familiar restlessness creeps back in.
If you’ve been stuck in the same loop of questions, you know how it feels. And here’s the real problem: if you don’t do something to change things, these questions will still be right there, waiting for you years from now.
But the good news? There is a way forward.
Why Your Brain Won’t Let These Recurring Life Questions Go
Are questions like these circling around in your head?
- Should I stay in this relationship?
- Why do things feel so off?
- Why am I restless?
- What do I actually want?
If so, it’s not just you being indecisive.
It’s your brain refusing to let something unresolved slip into the background.
Psychologists have actually shown that unfinished tasks or concerns don’t fade away from our brains on their own. Our brains hate unfinished business and will keep circling back to try to finish it. This creates what psychologists call cognitive tension, which just means that your brain is struggling to figure this thing out.
It keeps dragging you back to these same questions because it can sense that there’s a problem here. And the brain, if anything, is a problem-solving machine. If you have questions like this that are circling in your mind, especially that keep you awake at night or that just keep coming back week after week, month after month, even year after year, that means you haven’t solved this issue.
There’s this issue in your life that remains unresolved and the brain hates that, so it’s going to keep bugging you about it.
Hoping that life will just kind of sort itself out rarely works because this loop in our brains is hardwired into us. Until we face the problem differently, the brain will keep circling around the same ground.
The Wrong Way We Handle Recurring Life Questions
Here’s where we usually get it wrong. These questions, we try to dismiss them. We tell ourselves that we’re just tired or stressed out or that we’ve had a lot of things going on. And often that’s probably true. We probably are busy. We probably are stressed out. There probably is a lot going on. So it makes sense to us.
But then, we just kind of shove it under the rug . . . or we try to.
And sometimes we even shame ourselves for asking these questions, like this life doesn’t feel quite right yet and I would like something else, but then we feel bad about asking for that or wanting that.
The truth is that these questions keep surfacing because they’re coming from your inner self. This isn’t something that we need to feel bad about or that we should feel guilty or shamed about. It’s something that is true to us and it’s saying, you know, this isn’t quite right and we need to fix it.
You can ignore these questions and push them down and try to just keep going. But they’re still shaping how you feel. They’re popping up and making you feel uncertain and restless and like you just can’t relax.
This is why trying to brush them off doesn’t work, at least not for long. If you have something like this that’s coming back day after day, month after month, year after year, that’s not just stress and that’s not just you having some character flaw. That is information. That is data that you can use to improve your life.
How to Know If Your Recurring Life Questions Are Serious
So how do you know if this question is just a passing worry or the result of stress, or if it’s the kind of signal that your future self is begging you to notice?
Here are some signs.
These Recurring Life Questions Keep Coming Back in Different Seasons
Some questions are tied to a specific moment. You can have a bad day at work and wonder if you’re still cut out for this job, but then the next day things can get better and off you go again. We’re not talking about that kind of question.
We’re talking about the ones that keep circling back no matter what the situation might be.
Maybe you’ve asked yourself, “Do I really want to keep going in this job?” Or maybe you’ve said, “I feel unfulfilled in this job, and I know I need to do something that challenges me more.”
Or maybe you’ve asked yourself, “I don’t know if this relationship is right anymore.” Or, “I would really like to start my own business, but I don’t know if I should. I probably don’t have the expertise for it.”
These are the kinds of questions that can keep coming back in your life.
You might look down the road and say, I don’t know if I want to be here 5 years or 10 years from now. When you imagine the kind of future that you want to have for yourself, if where you are right now isn’t it, and your brain keeps going, we need to make a change, and that question keeps circling back, that’s a sign that this is an important piece of data that you need to listen to.
Your Recurring Life Questions Show Up in More Than One Place
Maybe your questions show up when you can’t go to sleep. The same thought pops up while you’re taking a road trip and it pops up again when you’re talking with a friend.
Let’s say for an example that you’re questioning a relationship that you’re in. It could be any type of relationship—a business relationship, a romantic relationship, or a friend relationship. You might be asking, “Is this a relationship I want to continue?”
You might think the question surfaces only after you’ve had an argument or a conflict. But then if you catch the question coming up again during a holiday or while you’re scrolling social media or when you’re taking a quiet walk, that kind of spread across different parts of your life tells you that this is important data that you need to pay attention to—that it’s not just tied to an emotion of the moment.
These Questions Carry an Emotional Charge
You know how some thoughts just skim across your mind and you don’t really have a reaction to them? They just kind of come and go. No big deal.
But the ones that matter land a little differently inside you.
They might make your stomach drop, rev up your pulse, or make you feel nervous in the moment. Maybe your chest tightens or you feel kind of a heaviness settle on you. That response is a clue.
Maybe you’ve asked yourself something like, “Why do I feel like I’m not really living?” And every time this question comes up, you feel maybe a mix of fear or a sense of longing. Fear because you know this question would require you to change something about your life. And change is always frightening. And longing because part of you wants more.
Maybe you’re looking out at a sunset one night and this thought comes up and then it comes up again when you see beautiful tree or an animal that strikes you. And always when this thought comes up, there’s an emotional charge attached to it. It doesn’t just come and go. It creates an emotion inside of you.
That means that this question matters.
What to Do With Your Recurring Life Questions
If you notice that these three things are true about the recurring questions that are going on in your head right now, understand that these questions are probably signals.
If you treat these recurring questions as signals and start catching them and tracking them, you can gain information from your own life that helps you get clear about the next step that you need to take.
Because often the problem that we face when we have questions like this is we don’t really know what to do next. Or perhaps we’re afraid that we’ll make the wrong choice about what to do next.
Start Listening to Your Recurring Life Questions
Instead of brushing off these questions or the emotions that they create, the first thing you can do is just allow them to be. Listen to what they’re saying to you and to treat them like they matter because they do.
They’re important or they wouldn’t keep coming back.
And you don’t have to solve anything. You don’t have to take any action right away. You just have to be willing to listen and to acknowledge that yes, this is important.
Shifting from dismissal to recognition is the first step toward clarity.
For example, you might have the thought, “Do I want to keep living here?” come up again and again. Maybe it’s surfaced many many times over the past year and you’re noticing that it keeps coming back. Simply naming it as a pattern or a recurring signal from your life helps you to respect it rather than ignore it.
Create a Space to Catch These Signals
What I mean by catch is that you record it somehow. So that might mean having a journal that you use to start keeping track of these questions that show up and when they show up and how you feel when they show up. Or it might mean having a document on your computer where you record these things or just a notes app on your phone.
You need something that helps you record what happens so you can treat it as data. It’s amazing how much this can help.
When we’re facing a potential change in our future, that can always be a little bit nerve-wracking. You can take two to five minutes just to jot down these quick observations. Then go about your life.
The Bottom Line on Recurring Life Questions
Those questions that won’t leave you alone? Most of the time, they’re here to guide you. So the sooner that you start acknowledging them, catching them, and tracking them, the sooner you can stop circling around this uncomfortable place in your life and start moving forward again.
If you’d like help getting started, check out the free Signals Journal.
Featured image by Grant Durr on Unsplash.