When Life Feels Too Hard – A Therapist’s Message to You 🖤

They say life is precious and that life is a gift and life is short so you should be making the most out of it. But what if life doesn't feel like a precious gift to you? And what if the concept that you should be making the most out of life is another way that you end up feeling like you are failing at life? I've experienced large chunks of my life where the world and living has just felt like such hard work and times when I just wanted to kind of check out of life for a bit and whether I would turn to food for that. That was my way of just not dealing with this life that just felt overwhelming at times. But then I felt guilty for feeling so overwhelmed because I blamed myself for my lack of ability to cope. I didn't feel like an adult and I felt like basic things that other people found straightforward and easy just felt like mountains to me. And even though I still have moments from time to time where those feelings might come back, when they come back there is a sense of transience about them. I know that they will pass whereas in the past I really really believed what my mind has been telling me about life and about myself. Nine years ago I found a lump under my armpit and in my breast and I went to the doctors and I was waiting two weeks for the testing. And during those two weeks I had more hard lumps come up under my armpits on both sides and a couple more lumps appeared in my breasts. So in those two weeks, now I'm not somebody who is vulnerable to health anxiety, I think this was a reasonable conclusion, I really did believe that I had advanced stage cancer. I'd done my googling and I could not find any other explanation for these symptoms apart from the worst case scenario. And the speed that these tumors were appearing would mean that the prognosis was not looking good. So for those two weeks I genuinely believed I did not have long left on this planet. It wasn't even a case of I was worried about whether it was cancer or not, I felt like I knew that it was. And then when I went to the hospital to be scanned, when they scanned me the guy says to me, oh this is an infection. And he showed me the scan and could explain to me why he was so confident that this was an infection, it wasn't cancer. Here's the weird bit, my reaction in that moment was a sinking feeling of disappointment. And the words that came into my head were, oh now you have to live the rest of your life. For two weeks my future had completely disappeared. And for those two weeks I hadn't wanted to die, I was very aware of all the things that I wasn't going to get to do and that my life was about to be cut short. Yet when I was given this second chance, this opportunity and my future reappeared, my response was one of weariness. And even at the time I was shocked by my reaction. Life wasn't that bad, I'd just started studying to be a therapist, I was still struggling with binge eating but it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been in the years prior to that. And so you would think, you would think a moment like this, a scare like this would be the wake-up call that was like, yes life is precious and I have a second chance. Now we can't control our initial reactions to something, how we feel or the first thoughts that come to mind. So whilst I wanted to go into this self-judgement, like how could you have this reaction, where I eventually landed was one a lot more compassionate, of recognising actually how tired I was, how weary life was feeling for me. And in case you resonate with that weary, life feels too damn hard experience, I just want to share with you some of the things that I started doing to shift that and how I manage it when it comes up now. You may have heard the phrase, we don't see things how they are, we see things how we are. So when life feels hard, what it's actually saying to us is, what's going on in here feels hard. Because at that weary point, it's like a struggling to cope with whatever life is throwing at you. So I noticed and I recognised, why does sometimes life feels really easy and productive and things that, you know, my darker moments feel like big deals, they're just, they're nothing now. Versus the moments when I'm feeling lower, when like the world, the whole world seems to get dark and almost shifts on its axis. When I realise it's not the world that's changing, it's my state that keeps changing, that was when I found a lot of solace in self-development content. It really helped keep my head above water and I started to realise that how I was talking to myself and how I was thinking had a big influence on my experience. Now I'm not saying just think positively, this is all about like a positive mindset, but we absolutely can benefit from questioning some of the beliefs and assumptions that we have. So one that might come up for me is when something happens that I don't want to happen in life or something's more difficult than it needs to be, the painful belief is like this shouldn't be happening, this should be easier than it is. I'm outraged that life is being hard right now and just that reaction to the challenges that life may be throwing kind of makes the experience 500% worse or five times as bad. I don't know why I've chosen five, it just felt right. So rather than focusing on the problem being out there that life needs to change, I started thinking about it more like how do I shift my own inner state? What might I need? And that could be connection, that could be getting outside, that could be rest, that could be just getting one small task done that has felt overwhelming, making a small start, setting small goals, whatever it might be, but the intention is I need to shift my state, I need to shift my energy instead of remaining focused on the problem out there in my life that seems to be causing my reaction. It's the idea of being much more curious about our own reactions than the thing itself that caused that reaction in the first place. When we are suffering, when we are in pain, we become very self-focused. Attention tends to go inwards, it tends to become very fixated on the source of our discomfort, pain, distress, whatever it might be. And as such, we can become quite blind to what might be going on for other people. So another thing that has really helped me in those moments when my mind is telling me that life is so hard and life shouldn't be this hard, is to ask myself the question, what could I do in this moment to make life a little bit easier for someone else? Now that could be as simple as just sending a text message to say to somebody you're thinking about them or to check in with how they're doing. I'm not talking about giving yourself a load of extra tasks when you're feeling overwhelmed and tired of life yourself, but when we pull our gaze outside of ourselves and we look to others. Another one that I remember doing once in a moment where I just felt like everything was meaningless, was I got my phone out and I just made a donation to charity that I wouldn't have thought to do had I not been in that darker moment. So I made that moment mean, ah, I want to try to use this moment and create something good out of it. It's also embodying the concept of be the change you want to be in the world. When life feels hard, is there some small, small act you could do that might make it a little bit easier for someone else for a moment? I do want to touch on gratitude. Now I'm not talking about feeling grateful here, I'm talking about a cognitive acknowledgement of the things in your life that you see as good things. So we're not trying to force a feeling here, what we're doing is we're inviting the brain to try to shift tracks, to shift focus and be reminded of all the positive things in your life. It doesn't matter if you don't feel grateful, it doesn't matter if you don't have that feeling of appreciation, it can just be a cognitive exercise, a practice for looking for the good as well as the bad. It's also not trying to go, oh like I should just feel grateful all the time, I shouldn't even be thinking about these problems or I'm wrong to be focusing on this quote-unquote negative stuff. It is not wrong to get caught up in these kind of dark, heavy thoughts. You're not doing anything wrong. But one of the reasons why it can feel so challenging to shift your perspective because it feels like, oh I should be feeling more grateful, I should be looking for the positive and then you make yourself wrong and then it's just creating more of this negative energy and the self-blame. We know human beings, we tend to have a negativity bias, we become more focused on the problems because it makes sense, let's focus on the problems because then maybe we can do something about those problems. So it can be an active choice to bring in, to balance it out. You're not trying to convince yourself everything's good and wonderful when that doesn't try and feel true. We're not trying to gaslight ourselves here, we're just trying to allow the good and the not so good to coexist. Because when those heavy feelings come in, they will tell you that everything is terrible and that feeling of everything is terrible, we're not trying to push it away or force it away, we're trying to balance it out by bringing something else in as well. Another thing that has really helped me in dark moments is about meaning. What does this mean? Because the feeling that life is tiring and meaningless and pointless, that is a pretty potent combination for feeling pretty terrible. So a question that I like to ask myself in these darker moments is, what might life be trying to teach me right now? Now I use this one cautiously because I'm not trying to suggest, oh you need to be, you need to be taught a lesson. But for me, to think of life as almost this benevolent kind force that's trying to help me grow as a person, means that these more challenging, difficult times don't feel punishing. Because I would sometimes feel like a punishment, in my darkest times I'd be thinking, why me? What have I done to deserve all these terrible things? And it's not about deserving. Now you may very well go, okay but what about somebody who is in a really terrible position? Maybe they don't have enough to eat, maybe they're living in situations of abuse. You should be saying to them, what's the lesson here? And here's my answer to that. Being able to focus on self-growth and increasing our consciousness is a privilege. And it is a privilege that is afforded to those of us who have our survival and basic safety needs met. So if someone is in a situation where their very survival is at stake, no I don't believe sitting down and going, oh what's the lesson here? Unless that helps them or they want to do that for any reason. How can I sit here as somebody who's lived a life of relative privilege and say, gosh people in all these awful situations, this is what they should do. And it's why it's hard to talk about some of these big subjects on the internet. Because what I talk about could actually feel really invalidating to some people in certain situations. And that's the last thing that I would want. Yet I'm one human being speaking from one perspective. So there may be things that I say that will jar up against your experience. And that's okay, I'm not trying to claim that I have some kind of universal truth here. The main takeaways from this, and I've been saying this in a lot of my videos recently, and it probably needs a video of its own, is don't judge yourself for how you feel. You are not wrong for how you feel. You are not wrong for how you think. And that doesn't mean that there isn't space and opportunity to challenge that and to try to develop new perspectives. And it's not about, oh those new perspectives, that's the right way to do it. No, maybe those newer perspectives could mean that you feel a bit freer and you have a bit more peace in your life. And they enable you to keep consciously growing, which is what this channel is all about. And if all else that I say on my channel just isn't helping you, get yourself a cute cat. I'll guarantee you, it changes everything. I'm sorry, I feel like I just want to keep apologizing to people who are not cat people, because I just want to make this channel all about cats really. And the lessons that they're teaching me. Anyway, I hope that was thought-provoking. Thank you for watching. Stay conscious and keep growing.