Life isn’t always great. In fact, it can seem downright unbearable sometimes. You feel like you want to go to sleep and never wake up. I’ve been there a few times in my life. Life sucks in your teens, in young adulthood, or in old age. It’s not related to your age or experience.
Why Does my Life Suck?
Life can suck because of relationships that went wrong, because of something outside your control, or because of a big argument with a loved one. It can happen because the company you worked for went bankrupt and you were let go. Mostly, it happens when we take a path in life that is not the one we were meant to take. Have no fear – behind the cloud is always the sun, or behind a problem – a new opportunity. Here are 9 things to do the next time you think to yourself “my life sucks”.
1. Don’t Blame yourself for Feeling Frustrated
Accept and process your frustration rather than getting even more frustrated. Don’t get stuck in this feeling because it will take a lot of energy from you. Shift your thoughts to the now. Be mindful of your immediate surroundings. Focus on your breathing, the air going in your nose and filling your lungs. Focus on the people passing by outside your window, the warmth of the heater, the fact Christmas is coming and won’t be as bad as it was last year. Doing these things doesn’t take much effort and will help you calm down and starting thinking clearly again.
2. Don’t Ask Why
The all-too common question “why is my life so bad” doesn’t help us improve it. Focus less on the why and more on the “how” as in “how to make it better”. Look for small, practical steps you can take to improve things, one small one at a time. By doing that, you’ll start to feel less frustrated and more confident and begin moving forward again.
3. Find a Safe Place
When we feel too much around us has gotten out of control, we freak out. Realistically speaking, people often have no control of what happens and will go with the flow, follow rather than lead. We fear our reality. We don’t know what will happen to us tomorrow, in three days, or next month, much less in 5 or 15 years. The solution is to find a safe place to explore your feelings, needs, and thoughts. That place might be with a loved one – your mother, sister, father, or best friend. Be mindful of the fine line between feeling sorry for yourself and falling prey to the victim mentality, which will ultimately make you feel even worse.
4. Be Grateful
Obviously it’s hard to express gratitude at a time when it feels like everything sucks, but it’s an effort you need to make. Try to think of moments you enjoy, a time you experienced love and support, or when you made a good choice in your life. Write down things you’re thankful for. It might be having enough money to meet your important needs. It might be having a partner in your life, or other great relationships you were able to build. It might be a friend who calls and asks how you’re doing, and when this person calls, it’s because they really want to know. If you don’t have any of these things, at least you have a roof over your head, food to eat, drinkable water, and simple pleasures like a stroll in the nearby park. Nobody can take these things away.
Open your mind – you might realize a lot of things are going better than you realize. You’re in good health, your business is going ok, you have people in your life who love you. Focus on important things and let go of trivialities that don’t matter.
5. Ask Yourself Where you’re Going
This might not alleviate your depression, but happiness is not achievable without an effort. To be successful, you need the right attitude. Be positive and accept you are not where you want to be right now, and that’s at least one reason why life sucks. Now, think where you do want to be. Follow your intuition – it’s what you know without realizing you know it.
Calm down, take a look around, and ask yourself where to go from here. Remind yourself that this too shall pass and a new day will come. With taking action to move forward, you’ll see this hard time is only temporary. It might feel like it’ll last forever, but it won’t.
Sometimes we feel that we’ve been doing the same thing way too long, that we’re experiencing regression rather than growth. You’ll need to tough it out and be patient – or decide you’ve had enough, follow your heart, and move on to something new and better. But how do you know? Ask yourself what you’re discovering, if anything. Are you learning anything significant? Then, be patient. On the other hand, if you’re not gaining new and valuable experience, it’s time to take the next step in your life.
6. Find Comfort in Expression
Keeping things bottled up makes nightmares of your problems and makes it easy to exaggerate smaller things, like a petty family quarrel or a rough week at work. As an adult, you are capable of expressing dissatisfaction constructively. Talk things over with a loved one who’ll let you vent or put the entire issue in writing. Post online or read other people’s inspirational stories. Then, you’ll find comfort. Letting your thoughts and feelings out can be a relief and help create structure. You will begin taking small steps in the right direction or even seeing the big solution.
7. Remember Setbacks Can Benefit You
This might not be what you want to hear when you’re going through a hard time, but it’s true. Remind yourself of this because you’ll ultimately get something good out of the setback. An all too common way of looking at challenges, failures, and mistakes is as negative things that you must avoid at any cost. However, this approach often leads to stagnation in our lives. Life is a daily struggle. It’s out of negative emotions that most great things came. Ask yourself how you can adjust your course to keep yourself from having to deal with the same or similar circumstances in the future. This is the quickest way to keep the matter from causing you continuous aggravation.
8. Start Being Active
Studies have shown people who are physically active are just as happy as people who are a lot richer, but less active than they are. If you’re not active enough, now is the time to change that. You can start going for walks more often, take up cycling, play soccer or tennis with friends, or work out at the gym. When you get back, the situation will probably still suck, but not as much as it seemed to before. Now, you have more energy and improved focus and less inner turmoil.
When I became more active, it made a huge difference to my attitude and perspective. It helped me find the way out of a terrible situation. I felt less like a failure. Feeling worthless will make you act like a failure. If you think you suck on some level, you are going to no matter how high your expectations or ambitions are or how good you want to be in life.
When there are goals to attain and you’re not attaining them, trying harder is almost never going to work. The first step is doing away with the negativity clouding your mind. It starts with convincing yourself that you can do it, whatever it is. When you feel good about yourself, the results will follow.
What’s the most important lesson to remember? You have to be in control. You may be in a tough moment, but you should keep living like the external world does not control you. By noticing goals you’re achieving, no matter how small, you can go from sad to happy, from insecure to confident, from guilty to accepting. The world will change once you’ve made a commitment to change your mentality.
“Why Does Life Suck” or “When Expectations Align with Reality”
Usually, thinking you’re good is better than actually being good, at least in the early stages of one’s career. When you believe you are good at something, you’ll practice until you get better, you’ll do it more often, and doing it will give you a sense of satisfaction. You won’t get scared or stressed when you face an obstacle. When you think you are bad at something, that reflects on your reality. You get discouraged, and you might quit. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. You’ll never become good at what you want to do. And life will suck.
Stop thinking that your ability to achieve a certain goal defines your value as a human being. Repeat to yourself that you are capable and valuable and you can achieve your goal. Achieving it will confirm your value. It’s easy to give advice. Most of us have this mental block. We search for answers that we already have. It’s only when we learn to listen to our intuition that we find success.
It is a familiar situation: too much to get done, too much stress, sometimes health problems on top of that. You feel you’ll calm down once you get all your tasks done. You will feel more competent once that happens. But, you’re stuck. When you realize that, remind yourself how competent, valuable, and awesome you are. Think positively and positivity will surround you – and vice versa. Make a list of all the great things in your life and the positive actions you’re taking on the road to self-improvement. And this brings us to our final thing:
9. Know it’s Always Darkest before the Dawn
Knowing this has helped people in a wide variety of difficult circumstances. You were out of luck on the job market. You live day to day because it’s the only way to cope. Your dating life is DOA. Your social skills are really bad. Your business isn’t picking up. Things look bleakest right before they’re about to get better.
When you hit rock bottom, there’s no place to go but up. That’s often because the lowest point makes you change something about how you do things. It’s also because there exists a certain innate balance in life. You only need to keep going. Don’t give up. Keep taking action and something good is about to occur. Seeing this happen over and over will strengthen your resolve to take action and keep right on living even at the most miserable stage of your life.
