How to overcome the feeling of helplessness
Sometimes you may feel like the whole world is against you. Life goes through a bad patch: things start to fall apart, failures haunt you, you quarrel with your loved ones, you lose confidence, and you are disappointed in your goals. But you can not give up and justify his inaction, feeling helpless. You risk becoming a hostage to the situation and losing all interest in life.
We have collected a few ways to overcome the feeling of helplessness and have maximum control over what happens to you and around you.
6 ways to overcome the feeling of helplessness
1. Learn to accept failure calmly
Suppose every failure is like the end of the world to you; no wonder you often feel helpless. You’re too sensitive to failure, scolding yourself for even minor mistakes and genuinely believing that people around you are laughing at your attempts to fix things behind your back.
Until you change your attitude towards failure, you will feel totally helpless. In order to solve your problems quickly and efficiently, you must first learn to calm down and analyze the situation. When you let your emotions run wild, they outweigh your rational judgment, and failure is seen as far worse and bigger than it is. In some cases, you may overestimate the problem so much that you won’t have the slightest doubt that it can’t be solved.
2. Get rid of pattern thinking
When you are evaluating a situation, eliminate words and phrases like “always,” “never,” “why,” and so on from your vocabulary. In general, the first thing that usually comes to your mind when you are faced with any problem is a fair question, “Why?”. You want to know what you did wrong and why you got into trouble if no mistake was made. You may then start drifting off into denial of your worth, convincing yourself and others that you are always unlucky and never manage to cope with your problems.
If you are so negative, to begin with, it is unlikely that you will be able to change your situation. You will continue to do nothing without finding a single reason to pick yourself up and work. Get rid of your pattern of thinking, then the feeling of helplessness will give way to the desire to use the opportunities that present themselves and to take life to the next level.
3. Don’t take the victim’s position
Always try to ask yourself whether you really have no control over the situation or you do have the power but do not want to use it. It is easier to stay in the victim’s position and blame the circumstances or people around you for what is happening to you instead of taking action. This way, you absolve yourself of responsibility and justify your inaction by saying that the problem should be solved by the person who caused it.
Of course, this attitude will not do you any good. You will be disappointed, but people like you don’t like to take responsibility, especially not for someone else. Sooner or later, you will have to pull yourself together and get involved. If you don’t, your situation will soon become even more miserable.
4. Do not place too much value on negative experiences from the past
It is common to feel helpless and helpless when faced with problems because of a traumatic event in the past. You may have had a similar problem; you may have made a stupid mistake and been ridiculed by others; you may have invested all your resources in a goal and not got the result you expected.
If you have been in a situation in the past where you could do nothing, you may have decided that nothing really depends on you. Therefore, when faced with the same problems again, you will feel helpless and continue to follow your old plan of doing nothing because, last time, your efforts did not pay off.
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The catch is that no two situations in your life are exactly the same. It’s foolish not to try to change something in your life because you might find that you can easily solve a problem that makes you feel uncomfortable and anxious. Don’t pay too much attention to negative experiences from the past; everyone makes mistakes, but that doesn’t mean that you should give up at the first difficulty, remembering your failure.
5. Don’t look for excuses
It’s easy to stay where you are by making up excuses. You can convince yourself and others that you are not up to the task, that there is no point in changing things because you do not have the knowledge and skills and that you feel fine under the circumstances.
Stop making excuses for inaction and find the strength to analyze your situation and make a plan to solve the problem. As much as you might want to give up and let circumstances dictate what you do and how you feel, you can’t let that happen.
6. Stop thinking you’re not in control
When you start to think you have no control over the situation you find yourself in, you stop taking any action to fix the problem. Instead of tackling it, you may even switch to some other goal where the result is tangible. There, you’ll get to feel in control of the situation, so you’ll ignore the real problem that requires you to take immediate action.
Stop assuming that you are not in control of the situation – this is not true. Even if something in the circumstances isn’t up to you, you can still choose how to react to what has happened, what experience to draw from whatever has happened to you, adjust to the new conditions or continue to deny the need. In every situation, there are things that you cannot control and things that are within your influence.
