How to Stop Feeling Anxious When You Don’t Know What to Do Next
Standing lost on a busy street in Yangon years ago, watching the last bus disappear into the distance, I
Standing lost on a busy street in Yangon years ago, watching the last bus disappear into the distance, I felt something I couldn’t quite name at the time. It wasn’t just panic about missing my ride home. It was something deeper, more unsettling. Years later, watching a conversation between Theo Von and Jordan Peterson, I finally understood what I’d experienced that day.
“The reason they’re anxious isn’t because they don’t know which way to go,” Peterson explained, “it’s because there are way too many places to go.”
That moment of clarity hit like a lightning bolt. My anxiety that day wasn’t about having no options but about having too many. Every street corner beckoned, every direction seemed equally valid and equally terrifying. I was drowning in possibility.
The Neuroscience of Going Nowhere
Peterson’s insight reveals something profound about how our brains work. When we feel aimless, our minds don’t simply shut down or go blank. Instead, they go into overdrive, frantically scanning an infinite horizon of potential paths.
“Anxiety computes aimlessness,” Peterson notes. Drop someone in the middle of a desert, and their distress isn’t about lacking options but about facing an overwhelming abundance of them. Every direction beckons, creating a paralysing complexity that our brains signal through anxiety.
This isn’t just philosophical musing. There’s hard science behind it. Our brains are literally wired to produce positive emotions when we make progress towards goals. The positive emotion system computes the decrease in distance between where we are and where we’re headed. Move closer to your target, and your brain rewards you with a dopamine hit that both makes you feel brilliant and strengthens the neural pathways that got you there.
But here’s the catch: if you don’t have a goal, you get none of that positive emotion. Zero. Zilch. Overcoming aimlessness isn’t just about reducing anxiety; it’s about unlocking your brain’s natural reward system.
The Tyranny of No Direction
Peterson shared a chilling observation that cuts to the heart of why so many people remain stuck: “If you don’t provide yourself with direction, you will take direction from a tyrant.”
This reminded me of something I heard growing up: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” But Peterson’s version carries an edge that makes it impossible to ignore. He’s not talking about moral flexibility or weak principles. He’s talking about something far more fundamental: the human need for structure and direction.
Consider the Israelites in Exodus. They escaped Pharaoh’s tyranny, expecting freedom to feel like paradise. Instead, they found themselves wandering aimlessly in the desert, longing for the very slavery they’d fled. At least under tyranny, they knew what was expected of them. At least they had direction, even if it wasn’t their own.
This pattern repeats throughout history. After the Soviet Union collapsed, much of the population felt nostalgic for Stalin’s brutal regime. Not because they enjoyed oppression, but because aimlessness felt worse than tyranny. The human brain craves organisation and direction so desperately that it will accept almost any source, even a destructive one.
The Fantasy Solution
So how do we escape this desert of aimlessness? Peterson’s approach is surprisingly practical and refreshingly honest. He suggests starting with what he calls a “fantasy” but treats it with the seriousness of a life-or-death mission.
“Maybe this isn’t true, but maybe it is,” he proposes. “You can have what you want in five years. But there are two conditions: you have to know what it is, and you have to aim at it.”
This isn’t positive thinking nonsense or manifestation magic. It’s finding purpose through the deliberate construction of compelling visions. Peterson encourages people to imagine their ideal life across every domain that matters:
Relationships: What does it look like when your partner greets you after work? How do you treat each other? What does intimacy mean to you?
Career: Where do you want to be professionally? What kind of work would energise rather than drain you?
Health: How do you want to feel in your body? What habits would serve you?
Personal Growth: What skills do you want to develop? What kind of person do you want to become?
The key is specificity. Vague wishes like “I want to be happy” provide no direction. But detailed visions create what Peterson calls “just on the edge of conceivability” goals that your brain can actually work with.
The Moving Towards Principle
Here’s where Peterson’s advice becomes genuinely life-changing. You don’t need to achieve your grand vision to benefit from it. The neuroscience is clear: “Almost all the pleasure is in the moving toward.”
Every tiny step in the right direction triggers that dopamine reward system. Write one page of the novel you’ve been dreaming about, and your brain celebrates. Have one difficult conversation that moves your relationship forward, and you get that psychological pat on the back. Save fifty pounds towards that emergency fund, and your neural circuits strengthen around financial responsibility.
The goal isn’t perfection or even completion. It’s progress. It’s overcoming aimlessness by giving your brain something concrete to navigate toward.
The Choice Nobody Talks About
Peterson frames our fundamental life choice with stark clarity: “You’re either going to be responsible to yourself, or you’re going to be responsible to a tyrant, or you’re going to be absolutely lost. That’s your option set. Pick one: tyranny, slavery, or something approximating visionary self-determination.”
This isn’t motivational speaking. It’s a cold assessment of reality. Abdicate responsibility for your own direction, and someone else will happily provide it for you. Companies will tell you how to spend your time. Governments will tell you how to think. Social media algorithms will tell you what to want.
The alternative is taking on the burden of finding purpose for yourself. It’s harder in the short term but liberating in the long run.
From Anxiety to Action
Looking back at that panicked moment in Yangon, I realise I was experiencing something universal. That anxiety wasn’t a sign of weakness or mental illness. It was my brain’s way of telling me I needed direction.
The solution wasn’t to eliminate options but to choose one and start walking. Not because it was perfect, but because movement in any coherent direction beats paralysis in the face of infinite possibility.
Overcoming aimlessness doesn’t require a grand revelation or life-changing moment. It requires the simple act of imagining what you want and taking one step toward it. Then another. Then another.
Your brain will reward each step with that hit of positive emotion, strengthening your ability to keep going. Before long, you’ll find yourself somewhere entirely different from where you started, not because you had a perfect plan, but because you refused to stay lost in the desert of aimlessness.
The choice is always there: tyranny, slavery, or visionary self-determination.
What’s it going to be?
