I know the LOA works & how it's necessary to focus on what you do want in order to bring it about.

Actually, you don't need to focus on what you want to get what you want.

If you decided you wanted something and then stayed in bed (maybe for months!) just feeling good when you were awake and simply sleeping whenever you were about to feel bad, you would still get what you want.

All the creation necessary for you to receive what you want happened in the moment you wanted it. There's no other focusing required by you on the subject. You need never think about the topic again to manifest it :)

However, you must now tune into the signal of what you want (like tuning into a radio station) to experience it in your physical reality...and you can use any subject you like to create this vibrational match

Coming to your question, intuition and gut-feeling (from a place of happiness/centeredness) should always come first in helping you make a decision. It really doesn't matter what your current reality is like because your current reality is already history.

Just by way of a personal example, I had another major "surfing the desire" manifestation yesterday. This surfing idea is a rather interesting manifesting approach where I push things to the absolute limit in my life and keep soothing, soothing, soothing any resistance that bubbles up, thereby effectively forcing the universe to comply with its own laws, usually through some bizarre coincidences to make physical reality match up with vibrational reality...which it had to do (and did) in this particular case also.

During the time I was molding this manifestation into place (over a couple of months), I was being told repeatedly by those around me that my course of action here (which was no action) was unwise and foolhardy. Even looking at the hard facts of the situation would back up those fears of others.

However my gut-feeling was that it was the right thing to do. I did nothing physically towards this situation - not one thing - when others were counselling considerable action. However, I did look for reasons to feel good about topics unrelated to the manifestational topic itself.

So, to sum up, for this particular manifestation, I purely relied on gut-feeling alone (even in an extreme situation), did not focus at all on what I wanted. I simply looked for reasons to feel good in my life, soothed any bubbling-up resistance, and let the Law of Attraction sort out all the details.

And the end-result has turned out to be about as good as it gets regarding that particular topic in my life :)

I've laced this answer with a number of links to other postings so I hope something in all of that pile of information provides the feedback you are asking for to help you in your current situation :)