Imagine the thought. Sit or lie down in a private place so you can say "Stop! Close your eyes. Imagine a situation in which you might have this stressful thought. Then allow yourself to focus on the thought. Stop the thought. Startling yourself is a good way to interrupt the thought. Try one of these two techniques: Set a timer, watch, or other alarm for 3 minutes.
Then focus on your unwanted thought. When the timer or alarm goes off, shout "Stop! These actions and saying "Stop" are cues to stop thinking. Empty your mind, and try to keep it empty for about 30 seconds. If the upsetting thought comes back during that time, shout "Stop!
Instead of using a timer, you can tape-record yourself shouting "Stop! Do the thought-stopping exercise. Focus on the thought, and then stop thinking about the unwanted thought—or anything else—when you hear your recorded voice say "Stop. Practice steps 1 through 3 until the thought goes away on command. Then try the process again. This time, interrupt the thought by saying the word "Stop! After your normal voice is able to stop the thought, try whispering "Stop.
At this point, you can stop the thought whenever and wherever it occurs. Pick another thought that bothers you more than the last one, and continue thought-stopping.
Other ways to stop thoughts You can change how you do thought-stopping: Close your eyes and take a deep breath. What would you be doing differently if you had hope? Then, you might go ahead and start acting as if you were hopeful. Sometimes, you have to change your behavior first and the feelings might follow.
So if you act hopeful, you might start to eventually feel more hopeful. But, there is always something you can do to solve a problem or to change how you feel about the problem. Spend some time thinking about potential solutions to the problem. Just see if you can come up with as many strategies as you can to address a problem.
Could spending time with family members help you feel a little better? Might you feel a little more hopeful if you took a mental health day from the workplace? They may be able to help you see things from a different perspective.
Or, they may offer strategies that can help you feel better. However, telling someone could be key to helping you gain a little more hope about your situation. Decide what step you are going to take first. Think of your plan as an experiment and your job is to run as many experiments as you can until you discover what works.
Hopelessness can be a symptom of a mental health issue, like depression. A mental health professional can assess your needs and discuss your treatment options, like talk therapy or medication. Most mental health issues are very treatable. Treatment can help you feel more hopeful about the future.
With a little help from someone else or a slightly different perspective, you might discover that things can get better. Is this a life or death situation, or is it a shade of grey?
Have I talked to my employer about this and explained my productivity will naturally be challenged given I am training someone? How dangerous is this situation, really, on a scale of 1 to 10? But what sort of psychologist does not then give you a treatment plan of what you can do next? That is surprising to us. The point of seeing a psychologist is to get help. The first thing that would help would be if you yourself stopped judging yourself.
It really is clear that you are super hard on yourself. Consider learning about self compassion. You might even want to try Compassion-based therapy. What is right about you? Otherwise you are replicating the critical environment your mother put you through. Cognitive behaviour therapy would be good as it will help you reprogram the negative, judging thoughts that trigger your fog.
If there was an exact big trauma as opposed to just constant emotional abuse, EMDR therapy is also recommended. Now i am also managing this with my Dad and Brother. Before i used to work in Web Development. I stop the Job and started working for my Own Company in Web Development which i like to do and in 2 just months i got good response.
I started believing i can achieve many things in coming time. But now a days completely lost. What should i do to focus on my Work both. Hi Vijay, that sounds really stressful. When we do things that are not what we truly want we lose our focus simply because deep down we are not interested. Especially if you are a passionate person, doing something you are not passionate about will feel like pushing against sand. Or you can have a really honest talk to your wife about how absolutely unhappy you are and share with her how important your own web business was.
And see what solutions you can find. But we suggest communication and brainstorming and being honest with yourself over judging yourself for being unproductive. When you get to the real reasons you feel so stifled by it you can find the right solutions.
Every since that day I have had trouble with my short term memory. I have just started a new job a month ago and everything that is explained to me is a blur. This is getting worse as I get older. I am 58 years old and I need help bad before I lose my job!
If you have other symptoms like edginess, mood swings, sensitivity to noise, anxiety, etc, you could have a sort of long-term form of it. Worth looking into and seeking some support. EMDR is a therapeutic tool that might help. I have always believed that this is because I have low IQ. I am very forgetful and worried every single moment that I will forget something. People have always told me that it is because I am artsy but it is seriously affecting every aspect of my life.
Please give me advise I feel stupid not being able to complete tasks. Thank you in advance! And then do reach out for support. If you are student your school might have a counsellor which could be a good place to start?
They might then be able to recommend you for testing. I always struggle to focus in the office meetings, specially after first minutes I struggle to understand things…. Hi Jo, we are sorry to hear you are struggling. The first thing to consider here is anxiety. What if that were not true? Where might this idea that you are never as smart or focussed as others come from? Is there any childhood experience that might be at its root?
All worth exploring. I am 20 years old. I am an active, smart, and athletic young man. However, in my teenage years I struggled a lot with low self-esteem, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsivity in my exercising.
I really loved soccer, and managed to be a top student whilst also being a skilled soccer player playing for one of the top teams in my city. I wanted to become a professional soccer player, and always felt my self worth was dependent on how I performed in games. For a while, I got injured, and as a result, gained weight and was unable to play for awhile. When I came back, I was made fun of, and I was dropped to a lower team. I was not given the love or acceptance I had felt beforehand when I was very successful.
It was a traumatizing experience for me as I had really high hopes and dreams and it caused me to later become obsessed with fitness and always anxious as to whether I was out of shape. As a result, I developed an eating disorder, and was near anorexic, and would basically force myself to endure physical torture until I would allow myself to eat.
I would often go to play in practices in winter in freezing temperatures without having eaten anything the whole day. Thankfully, I was able to eventually overcome these issues and realized I was basically killing myself and one day I decided to stop and return to balance.
As things began to look better, I began to focus more on my studies and got accepted to a University in my city. I gave up my dreams on professional soccer, deeming them unattainable and too risky given my poor experiences. Adjusting to life in my University posed a very difficult challenge and I struggled a lot with anxiety, depression, and started doing poor in my studies despite always being a top student.
Additionally, other issues related to adolescence or really beginning to weigh me down. I feel like I am crumbling. What actions would you suggest taking? I exercise every day, strive to eat healthy, and do well in school but I think my lack of a good social life is really hitting me. Where did you learn to speak like this?
From who? Someone in your childhood? You are enormously hard on yourself. Nobody can. You feel you are crumbling — but into what? Someone who is not perfect? Who sometimes makes mistakes and has down days? Who is like other people? What is so terrifying about that? Who is going to judge you? Nor can most of us fix everything alone.
We need support. And not from the family who has personal investments in us or might even be part of the problem. As you make clear, you are overwhelmed.
So do take this seriously. Most schools provide counsellors or access to low cost counselling. It takes a lot of courage to seek help, and is a sign of strength. And worry that person will judge them, too. The funny thing about human relationships is that the less perfect we are, the more comfortable we become with our flaws, the more others feel comfortable around us. So the more we stop trying to impress people, the better our relationships become.
We wish you courage. It makes time feel so short for me and everything flies by. Any thoughts? And not appearing as if you are struggling. You say you struggled with anxiety and depression — did you talk to someone and get a diagnosis? As we are guessing not. Please note however that this is NOT a diagnosis. We wish you courage! High school over these past three years has gotten harder and harder.
I have a partner, they help me through a lot but I still feel like an absolute failure to everyone in my life. I feel silly even typing this. It sounds like a mix of teenage hormones and drama alongside very real depression. So you do need help, but only you can decide you will accept it. And that means getting honest.
Do I need more time to heal? How much time do I need to get back to normal? And is it possible to do that on my own? Hi Hana, sounds like you are putting an awful lot of pressure on yourself and are judging yourself against some impossible standard.
What if most of us, at some point in life, go through depression? What if it was okay to reach out for some support? We agree with you that medication is strong and often not necessary. Sometimes we need to let the flood come and ride it out.
We are all different. Why not try a short term, lower commitment therapy? As for self-help, mindfulness might be a good idea here. It helps you to accept your thoughts and feelings without judgement.
I am 22 years old. I am a student of Software Engineering. I am in my second year at college. In the beginning, I saw that my friends were very fast at understanding everything in class while I was mostly trying hard to understand what the professor had said and how the problems are to be solved from my friends.
But I worked hard, studied online and passed the first year with quite satisfactory grades. But this year is very hectic and the number of techniqal subjects has increased. I find it very difficult to concentrate in class. Even when I concentrate and listen to the lecture I understand only small fragmants of it. My friends on the other hand are very quick at understanding concepts. They spend very little time on studying but they are still way ahead of me.
I know it is not right to compare myself to others but I keep getting the feeling that I am very stupid and maybe I am not intelligent enough for this field even though I really enjoy programming and software related work.
It is just gets very depressing to see others around me doing the same tasks with such ease whereas I have to take a lot of time to grasp new things. I just go blank and make the most stupid mistakes. In my recent exams I read a question completely wrong and wrote a completely different program. And completing tasks in limited time has also become difficult for me. Hi Sarah, we are sorry to hear you are you feeling so stressed.
In that case, your best course of action will be to seek out the help of a mental health professional. Whether you are dealing with depression, anxiety, a personality disorder, or other issue, there are very helpful forms of treatment including medication and talk therapy that can make a significant difference in your life.
Medication can help you to feel better as well as make it easier to practice the skills that you will learn in therapy. Therapy can help you to dig through your past and also work on how you view your present. Beyond seeking help from a mental health professional, there are also things you can do on your own if you believe you are living with anxiety.
Below are some ideas to get you started. What if you are living with depression? Be sure to first see a mental health professional to see if medication or therapy may be helpful in your situation.
Depression can interfere with your thinking and make you feel as though there is no use in getting help or that others have problems worse than yours and so you do not deserve help.
If that is your situation, try talking to someone about how you are feeling at the very least. See if they can make an appointment for you. Beyond seeing a professional, here are some things you can do if you are living with depression that might make a difference.
While there is an ideal of happiness , it is in fact true that nobody can be happy all of the time. We will all experience good and bad times in our lives, whether that is from one day to the next, or one year to the next. Of course, if you are struggling with a mental health issue, that should never be ignored. When you let go of the idea of eternal happiness, you allow yourself to accept your feelings and emotions, which paradoxically might actually make you feel a little bit better.
If to the outsider observer your life appears to be going well, what could possibly be causing you to feel this way? Beyond the possibility of depression, or another mental health issue, there could be a number of different reasons you feel this way. Below are some possible causes:. The common thread across these factors is that there is something missing in your life that is causing you to feel that something is wrong.
This can be the hardest problem to solve, because to the outside objective observer, you should be perfectly happy. In cases like this, writing in a journal could help you get to the bottom of your feelings. This is especially true if there is no mental health concern that would nudge you toward seeing a therapist.
When writing in your journal, be curious and ask yourself questions about what would make you feel better. Keep digging until you start to find some answers. The process of free writing can be a helpful way to unearth emotions that you might not be in touch with during your daily life. If you are struggling with the thought that there is something wrong with you, it can be hard to know where to start to make changes. Often, getting to the root of the cause of your feelings will help you to figure out the best course of action.
Are you not feeling well physically? Then it may be time to make an appointment with your doctor. The same could be true if you are not feeling well mentally.
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