One of the trickiest forms of procrastination I have seen in people is a propensity to understand everything at all cost; oftentimes that is applied to totally unimportant things.
Don't get me wrong, trying to understand reality is a very good idea in general; It's going to sharpen your thinking, help you to gain clarity, and give you a better sense of what's going on overall -but it becomes a problem if it's preventing you from taking action and making progress.
Understanding should be used as a way to navigate your environment or whatever it is that you are transitioning and moving forward, not as an end in mind.
To avoid taking action, we hold ourselves to impossible standards trying to solve impossible problems; And when we don't we feel justified to postpone action indefinitely. That's the very definition of being stuck.
If you ever feel that's the case here are two things you can do.
Lean into action
Oftentimes the problem is that we are trying to understand things that otherwise need to be experienced. Thinking is a great way to plan and strategize your next actions, but it cannot be a substitute for real-life experience.Take a break.
You could just step away, sleep on it and come back at a later point to see how you feel about it. Here is why this sometimes works; Understanding is about forming new connections so that your mind can organize itself, update its model of reality in a way that accommodates new insights. It might happen by taking a break or during sleep or simply by abandoning your current mode of thinking and trying to view things from a different perspective.
Understanding is not a boolean, it's a gradient people have this misconception that they either understand something or they don't - It's a yes or no situation. But in reality, because consciousness is infinite, full understanding is just an illusion;
Understanding is gradual and never complete; And here lies the problem, you can get stuck in this mode forever. It's a reality where you think a lot more than you do, creating a huge imbalance between the two.
Understanding is more tricky because some things you can never know for sure, while the action is more precise and straightforward -you do it or you don't.
Thinking and doing complement each and they need to be in balance to make real progress. Thinking a lot but doing little is unrealized potential, doing without thinking is chaos.
The only way to know if you are trapping yourself is by evaluating your progress.
Ask yourself this question:
Am I using thinking as a way to plan my next actions or as a way to avoid them?
You have to go out there and test your beliefs in reality and then observe what the result of your action is telling you and incorporate that in future actions. This is how you make true progress.