Stop Living on Autopilot and Reconnect With What You Really Want

Have you ever looked at your life and wondered, How did I end up here? Not because your life has fallen apart. Quite the opposite. Your calendar is full. People rely on you. You are working hard, showing up and doing many of the things you thought you were supposed to do. From the outside, everything looks fine. And still, something feels missing.

One of the things that fascinates me most is that we are always creating our lives. Not only through the big decisions, but through the small choices we repeat every day. The habits we never question. The roles we learn to play. The stories we believe about ourselves.

Sometimes we become so busy living our lives that we never stop to ask whether we are creating them intentionally.

That is what I explored with author and facilitator Jasmine Bailey. Her story is not about a dramatic collapse. It is about something quieter and perhaps more recognisable: doing plenty of good things, being there for everyone and slowly losing contact with yourself.

What living on autopilot can look like

Jasmine was studying, working, building a business, serving in her church and showing up for friends and family. She wanted to be the best aunt and the dependable person everyone could count on.

She was not simply doing fine. She was making sure everyone else was fine too.

But inside, she felt empty.

She compared it to eating an entire cake when you are hungry. It may fill you for a moment and even taste good, but it does not truly nourish you. The more she did for other people, the more she needed another hit of feeling useful, connected or needed.

The problem was not generosity itself. It was that doing things for others had become tied to her sense of worth.

“I learned that doing for other people equated my worth as a person.” - Jasmine Bailey

That distinction matters. Giving can be an expression of who you are, but it can also become a way of proving that you deserve to be valued. From the outside, those two things may look exactly the same. Internally, they feel very different.

One comes from choice. The other comes from need.

When people-pleasing becomes a role you play

Jasmine described herself as a chameleon. She could become what each person needed her to be. If you were happy, she had done her job.

But when you continually change yourself to maintain connection, people may be connected to the role you play rather than the person you are.

You can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely because nobody is actually seeing you.

It also becomes difficult to receive. If you are always the capable one, the helper or the giver, other people may not even know that you need anything. You keep pouring outward while running on fumes.

I realised during our conversation that giving and receiving are not opposites. They are part of the same relationship. When I listen to what you have to say, allow your question to affect me or let you support me, I receive perspectives and possibilities that I could not create alone.

Real connection needs that movement in both directions.

Why slowing down can feel so uncomfortable

If constant doing is familiar, stopping can feel surprisingly threatening.

You may worry that people will judge you. You may feel lazy, selfish or unproductive. If your identity has been built around being useful, a pause can even raise a more unsettling question: Who am I when I am not doing something for someone else?

For Jasmine, the turning point began around 2016, when the exhaustion became harder to ignore. A book about emotional health helped her see how patterns from her family of origin had shaped the way she related to people. Giving was familiar. Receiving was not.

She began asking questions she had never realised she was allowed to ask:

Is there another way to have relationships?
What kind of relationships do I actually want?
What would mutual support look like?
How do I want to show up?

Even asking those questions required a shift. She had been given paths that looked ideal without often being invited to ask whether they fit her.

This is one reason a pause matters. It creates enough distance to notice whether the life you know how to live is also the life you want to live.

You do not need to fix yourself before you can move forward

Both Jasmine and I recognised another pattern: reading one self-help book after another in search of an answer.

Reading feels like progress. Sometimes it is. But it can also become another form of doing, especially when every new book is secretly based on the belief that something is wrong with you.

Jasmine still reads self-help books, but she no longer reads them to fix Jasmine.

That line stayed with me.

I have experienced the same loop. I would feel stuck, search for answers, read more and become even more aware of everything I had not figured out. The pursuit of clarity started reinforcing the idea that I was inadequate without it.

Information can show you a possibility, but eventually it has to meet real life. You have to apply something, ask a difficult question, enter a conversation without knowing the outcome or try a different choice.

“Once you do the work for you, not to fix you, but to be you, the possibilities are endless.” - Jasmine Bailey

You do not have to know everything before you begin. You may first need to admit that you do not know, and that not knowing does not make you broken.

How a pause can interrupt an old pattern

There was an unexpected example of this in the conversation itself.

Jasmine and I had recorded before, but at one point we both sensed that the conversation lacked clarity. Continuing would have been easier than acknowledging it. As a perfectionist, stopping felt uncomfortable to me because not getting it right can quickly feel like failure.

But we paused, talked honestly and recorded again.

That interruption created a better conversation. It also gave us evidence that stopping does not automatically mean failing. Sometimes it is the choice that allows something more truthful to emerge.

The same happened when I once stepped away from my usual routine and travelled with a friend I did not know particularly well. I stopped forcing myself to find an answer. In that new space, I became more open-minded and creative. The idea for my book appeared there, not while I was desperately trying to produce it.

When you keep repeating the same pattern, you tend to keep creating the same result. A pause does not guarantee an immediate answer. It creates the space in which a different answer can become possible.

The STOP practice for more intentional living

Jasmine turned what she had learned into a simple practice called STOP. It is not about withdrawing from life. It is a way to interrupt automatic movement before deciding what deserves your energy.

S: Silence and stillness

T: Thankfulness

O: Openness to curiosity

P: Prioritise

Only after silence, thankfulness and openness does Jasmine return to action.

The question is no longer simply, What can I get done? It becomes, What do I genuinely want or need to do now?

That changes the meaning behind the action. You are not doing something merely to look capable, feel valuable or satisfy somebody else's expectation. You are choosing a direction based on what you have noticed.

What changes when you create space for yourself

Jasmine does not pretend that one course or one practice transformed everything overnight. She had to unlearn patterns, tolerate the messiness of not being okay and discover new ways of relating to people.

But creating space gave her something she had not experienced before: the sense that she gets to create her life.

That did not always mean making a grand move. It helped her recognise healthier relationships, consider an unexpected partnership and choose a work environment based on fit rather than simply accepting something because it sounded good or paid well.

An intentional life is not necessarily a dramatic life.

It may mean keeping Fridays free. Starting a business you care about. Letting someone support you. Having a deeper conversation with a friend. Or looking in the mirror and feeling more at home with the person you see.

The point is not to stop doing. It is to stop long enough to notice what is driving the doing.

You are more than the value you provide, the role you play or the number of people who depend on you. And you are worth the time, space, energy and resources it takes to discover what feels true for you.

If you want more conversations about becoming who you know you can be, follow The Luca Savazzi Podcast on YouTube.

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