March 30, 2026 9 min read By Gwendolin Kirchhoff

What to Do in an Existential Crisis — Five Steps No Self-Help Book Knows

In an existential crisis, neither optimization nor diagnosis helps — what helps is the conversation that touches the thought where it sits in the body and gives space to what has not yet been understood.

The search term is still in your browser. What to do in an existential crisis. You typed it because what you are going through does not fit any of the familiar categories. No illness, no clearly nameable problem, no goal that has slipped away. Something more diffuse: the feeling that the answers that used to hold have stopped holding — and that you do not know what could take their place.

This text will not give you a checklist. What you will find here are five steps that emerged from working with people in exactly this situation — from philosophical practice, not from a self-help book. Every step is concrete. None requires you to have solved anything first.

Step 1: Stop trying to solve the crisis

The first impulse in an existential crisis is to search for solutions. A new book, a new coach, a new approach — surely something must help. But the existential crisis is not a problem that has a solution. It is a question that wants to be heard.

Nietzsche diagnosed this condition with a precision that has lost nothing in nearly 140 years. In his posthumous notes, he described the forms of self-numbing into which a person flees when meaninglessness announces itself: “the attempt to work mindlessly, as an instrument of science,” “any kind of steady occupation, any little stupid fanaticism” (Nietzsche, 1901, §32). What he described is exactly what is packaged today as productivity, self-optimization, or a healing journey — the restless avoidance of the question through ever-new answers.

The first step, then, is to stop. Stop searching, stop solving, stop treating the crisis as an enemy. This does not mean passivity. It means giving the question space before you smother it with answers.

If you stand at this point and sense that the searching itself has exhausted you, a conversation that begins differently from the ones you have tried may be the first real step. A free introductory conversation is designed for exactly this — not as a sales pitch, but as a chance to say aloud, for once, what has not fit into any format so far.

Step 2: Distinguish what is truly missing

Jochen Kirchhoff described the fundamental situation in which meaning crises occur today: “Meaning has essentially been completely lost to the so-called modern person. They have nothing at all” (Kirchhoff, J., 2021). That sounds harsh, but it touches something essential: the great orienting frameworks — religion, a binding image of the human being, metaphysics — no longer hold. What is offered in their place are substitute activities: consumption, career, self-optimization. They fill the day, but they do not answer the question that returns in the night.

The second step demands an honest distinction. The question is not What can I do to feel better? — that is the coaching question. Nor is it What is wrong with me? — that is the therapeutic question. The philosophical question is: What IS this situation? What is really at stake?

Perhaps what you lack is not motivation. Perhaps what you lack is not emotional processing. Perhaps what you lack is a thought large enough to do justice to what you are experiencing.

Step 3: Speak what has no words yet

There is a fundamental difference between everyday talking-about and giving voice to what is at work in the soul. Most people in an existential crisis have already talked a great deal — with friends, perhaps with a therapist, with themselves in endless loops of thought. And yet something remains untouched. What actually wants to be said lies one layer deeper.

In philosophical work, this difference shows itself again and again: a person arrives and describes their concern. They explain, rationalize, contextualize. And then, when the right questions come, something else emerges — the raw thought, the real sentence. Not I am a bit disappointed, but You betrayed me. Not I feel disoriented, but I have lived my entire life by rules that were not my own.

Speaking this real sentence is not a therapeutic technique. It is a philosophical act. Something that sat as diffuse unrest in the body receives a form. And with the form comes clarity — not immediately, but as the beginning of a movement.

What you can do on your own: Take thirty minutes of silence. No music, no screen. Ask yourself the question: If I could say one single sentence — the sentence I have never spoken — what would it be? Write it down. Read it aloud. Notice what shifts.

Step 4: Recognize the crisis as a birth

Schopenhauer observed: “We console ourselves for the sufferings of life with death, and for death with the sufferings of life” (Schopenhauer, 1844, ch. 46). This oscillation between consolation and despair is the state in which many people remain trapped during an existential crisis. They swing between trying to restore the old and fearing what might come.

What the philosophical tradition reveals — and what is confirmed again and again in the practice of philosophical accompaniment — is a different picture: the crisis is not a collapse. It is a birth process. In the beginning, the new feeling is delicate, protected by a dense shell of habit. Then, at some point, a vital surge arrives — a clarity that sets the passage into a new way of seeing in motion.

This means: what appears in you as meaninglessness may be the shell dissolving — the old convictions, the old identities, the old certainties making room for something that has no shape yet. The crisis is not the end. It is the narrowest point of the birth canal.

What therapy accomplishes at this juncture — bringing the unconscious to the surface, enabling emotional processing — also happens in philosophical accompaniment. But the starting point is different: not a diagnosis, but an encounter in which what is at work in you is seen and taken seriously. Not repaired, not optimized — accompanied.

Step 5: Let the next step reveal itself

Frankl borrowed from Nietzsche the sentence: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” (cf. Nietzsche, 1887, III, §28; Frankl, 1946). But what do you do when the why itself is missing? When no meaning is visible to hold on to?

The temptation is great to become active now — to make decisions, to overhaul your life, to overcome the crisis through action. But wisdom shows itself precisely in recognizing this temptation: Is the impulse to act motivated by the matter itself, or does it come from a nervous need for control? The difference is decisive.

There are moments when not-acting is the wise step. Not out of resignation, but out of a sense that the time is not yet ripe. This is not weakness but a capacity — the capacity to remain in the open question until the question answers itself.

In philosophical practice, this shows itself again and again: what truly holds in the end is not a plan you set for yourself, but a step that emerges from clarity about your own situation — organically, often surprisingly, sometimes quietly. Schelling called the crisis the “moment of separation” that precedes all healing (cf. Schelling, 1809). Healing does not consist in ending the crisis, but in recovering the relation to that in which one’s own life is grounded.

What is possible now

Perhaps you recognize yourself in some of these steps. Perhaps, while reading, you sensed that what you are going through needs neither repair nor optimization — but to be heard.

Philosophical consultation is a space where that becomes possible. A conversation that does not aim at a result, but at clarity — about what is actually at work in you. The difference from what you have tried before lies not in the method, but in the stance: the person who comes brings not a deficit but a concern. And that concern is their path of understanding.

If you are ready for a conversation that goes deeper than the usual talking-about, I offer you a free 30-minute introductory conversation. No prior knowledge is needed — only the willingness to give space to what wants to show itself.

Sources

Frankl, V. E. (1946). …trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager [Man’s Search for Meaning]. Verlag für Jugend und Volk.

Kirchhoff, J. (2021). “Dem modernen Menschen fehlt der Sinn” [Modern people have lost meaning] [Video]. Gunnar Kaiser, YouTube.

Nietzsche, F. (1887). Zur Genealogie der Moral [On the Genealogy of Morals]. III, §28.

Nietzsche, F. (1901). Der Wille zur Macht [The Will to Power]. Posthumous compilation, §32.

Schelling, F. W. J. (1809). Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit [Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom].

Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation]. Vol. 2, ch. 46.

Frequently Asked Questions

What can I do on my own during an existential crisis?

The first step is to stop treating the crisis as a defect and start taking it seriously as a legitimate question. Instead of searching for quick answers, it helps to examine your own assumptions: Which beliefs no longer hold? What do I feel when I stop functioning? Philosophical accompaniment can deepen this process.

Does therapy help with an existential crisis?

Therapy can help stabilize acute psychological distress. But an existential crisis is not a clinical symptom — it is a philosophical question. When the therapeutic work is done and the question of meaning remains, a different kind of space is needed: one that does not diagnose but thinks.

What is the difference between an existential crisis and depression?

Depression has clinical symptoms and requires professional medical treatment. An existential crisis is the experience that the answers you once had to the question of meaning no longer hold. It can be accompanied by depressive episodes, but it is not a pathological condition — it is a philosophical phenomenon, a threshold, not a breakdown.