Why You feel like You can't do anything right

 

Dear Bloggers,

My apologies for writing my story late again. Things are a bit more difficult at the moment, as my is catching up with me and I’m not quite myself. And yes, that’s affecting my inspiration.

If you've ever felt like you can't do anything right, you might think you're the only one who has experienced that feeling. The truth, though, is that it's perfectly common to feel this way, and it happens to most of us at one time or another.

In a world where so much of how we experience other people in our digital world, it's easy to forget that the version we view of our friends, colleagues, and loved ones is the one they want us to see. Most people share photos and stories about the good times in their lives. And most do not share about when they're having a hard time in life.

There are different reasons why you might experience this feeling, and many assorted actions you can take to help alleviate it. Read on to learn why you might be feeling this way, and how to turn things around in your mind.

Why You Feel Like You Can't Do Anything Right

There are endless reasons why you might experience the thoughts and feelings that nothing you do in life is right; these are some of the most common reasons. Feeling Overwhelmed by Stress.

It's a common motif in our culture, especially since a pandemic began years ago. Stress makes life feel overwhelming, and it can impact our ability to think clearly. If you're feeling nervous, worried, anxious, or depressed, and you don't have a chronic condition involving those feelings, chances are that you're stressed.It might feel like it doesn't make sense to you that a simple task or project feels like too much, but it's important to understand that our brains, nervous systems, and hearts have really been through the wringer since 2024.

When you're feeling overwhelmed, your mind can slip into a tricky pattern where it feels like you aren't doing anything right. Fortunately, you can learn how to manage stress.

Self-Worth

We all have to be our own biggest champions in life. That's because having good self-esteem may boost your happiness. Having high self-esteem doesn't mean that you think you do everything right all the time, but it does mean that you think you're a person who is capable of doing things right quite often. It also means you know you aren't perfect, and sometimes you make mistakes just like every other imperfect human on earth.
Low self-esteem manifests in different ways, such as not feeling in control of life, having a hard time asking for help, being afraid of failure, not having good boundaries, and not speaking kindly to yourself.

Do you feel like a bully is living inside your head sometimes?

Boosting your self-esteem can help keep your thoughts from sliding down the slippery slope of self-loathing.

How do you Cope With Feeling Like You Never Do Anything Right

While it's normal to sometimes feel like you can't do anything right, that doesn't mean you have to just live with the feeling. Instead, there are a lot of different actions you can take that can help quell this notion and put you back on a positive path in your mind. Don’t let Yourself feel this way. Running away from our problems never makes them go away, and running away from our feelings doesn't allow us to move through them. Sometimes, all you have to do to get past a feeling is stop trying to fight it. When you're feeling like you can't do anything right, take a moment and just let yourself feel that. Once you're feeling a little calmer, try to delve deeper into where the feeling is coming from. This can lead you to understand if there is a larger issue at play that you need to deal with. If you have made a mistake, missed a deadline, burnt dinner, cut your bangs too short, etc. have some grace for yourself. We all make mistakes or miss the mark, and that is how we learn valuable lessons, gain skills, and grow emotionally.

How to achieve Self-acceptance?

Prove Yourself wrong by reviewing what You've done right. This simple task lets you know you're wrong about never doing anything right. In a journal, on your phone, or in a computer document, make a list of things you've accomplished, succeeded at, or done well at in life. It doesn't have to be complicated! Were you a good babysitter for a younger sibling at one time? Did you graduate from high school or college? Have you made a friend laugh recently? All those are things you've done right. And you will find that the good stuff outweighs your less-than-proud moments. We sometimes have to remind ourselves of these things to have a more accurate view of our reality.

Journaling is useful for stress management. It also is a way to visualize that you have, in fact, done many things right in life. Speak to Yourself the way You speak to others. Positive self-talk can get you through tough situations, and can also improve your self-esteem. When you're feeling like you can't do anything right, turn the table on yourself and imagine a friend or loved one saying that to you. What would you say to them? Chances are, you certainly wouldn't agree!

Instead, you'd point out everything you've seen them do right. You'd tell them they are a great person, worthy of thinking highly of themself. When it's hard to speak kindly to ourselves, a way to work around that is to pretend we're speaking to someone else.

Go for a Walk

Not only does walking reduce stress and improve your health, but a change of environment can also help you get out of your negative mind space. Going for a walk is a great way to clear your head of negative thoughts. Stop and smell the flowers, feel the sunshine on your arms, notice the breeze against your face, or say "hi" to a neighbor as you pass them. As you walk, let your thoughts wander away from the idea that you can't do anything right. When you get home, you just might feel a bit better.

Talk to a Friend Or Loved One

Holding your feelings inside isn't conducive to letting them go or, even better, helping them shift into more positive feelings. Talking to others and having connections is vital to human happiness, so even if you're feeling like you don't want to share about this issue, you'll probably feel better once you do.If it seems like there just isn't anyone to talk to, follow these guidelines to get started making and enhancing the human connections in your life.

If you want to talk to someone about this feeling but you're worried, nervous, or embarrassed, you can always text or email first. Asking a friend or loved one if they have the emotional availability to help you work through a difficult feeling is a great way to practice boundaries, and if they say "yes," you'll likely feel safer discussing it, knowing that they have the emotional space held for you.

Practice Self-Care

Self-care is a great stress reliever, and it also helps you feel more positively about yourself. Self-care is anything you do for yourself that makes you feel good. It can be physical, such as taking a bath, or emotional, like laying down and listening to relaxing music.

Do a Good Deed

Science has proven that performing kind acts for others helps us feel better ourselves. It's called prosocial behavior, and even if you don't necessarily understand why helping others will make you feel better, know that it does. Acts of kindness toward others aid our emotional well-being, and when you're feeling more positive, chances are your mind won't gravitate toward those self-defeating thoughts. Additionally, a kind act is also something you did right! Everyone wins when you practice being charitable toward other people.

Take a Break

It's not a failure in life if you just need a break. We all need breaks, and we all benefit from taking them! Taking a break reduces stress, makes us more productive overall and clears our heads.

That last benefit is key when you're feeling like you can't do anything right. Taking a break doesn't need to be complicated, and there isn't any specific task you have to perform for it to count. Just pause, ask yourself if you'd like to take a few minutes off, and see where that leads you. If it leads you straight to the couch with your favorite book in hand, that's totally fine! If you want to pet your dog, that's great! If you want to close your eyes for a few minutes, there is nothing wrong with that.

Taking a break is supposed to be enjoyable and unproductive.

When to Seek Professional Help

After trying these suggestions, if you find you are still struggling to reign in those negative thought patterns, you might want to consider seeking professional help. There is a specific type of therapy known as cognitive behavioral therapy that is designed to help you work through your maladaptive thought life and help you find better ways to cope with the stress in your life.

Take care of yourself and your loved ones they are your team mates now

The Old Sailor,

 

The ways expectation can sabotage your peace of mind

Dear Bloggers,

 

Do you ever find yourself feeling disappointed or angry because things haven’t worked out as you had expected? Maybe you recently expected your partner to do something and are annoyed that she didn’t do it. Perhaps you formed an expectation of achieving a life goal by this stage of your life and are feeling frustrated that things haven’t worked out as you planned. 

Expectation is defined as “a strong belief that something will happen or be the case.” We may place expectations on others or impose them on ourselves. You may find yourself making rules for yourself, starting with “I should…” - this is a clue that you have set an expectation for yourself. I set some life goals for myself in my early years that at the age of 65, I would be able to retire and would live free, as our home was paid for and there was nothing to worry about. The question is whether this expectation was healthy and realistic, or unhealthy and maybe even irrational. It became strange as the tax office took everything away from us. As they claimed all our money so I could not pay of our mortgage. When other people place expectations upon you and you do not meet them, you might find yourself feeling guilty. At certain points you thik that you are just a loser. It doesn’t surprise me that some became suicidal.

 

The expectations we make as humans are future-based predications of an outcome. This is flawed, as we cannot ever predict the future. Furthermore, we may consult the past and gather evidence of events that happened previously to inform our future expectations. Just because something happened a certain way before, doesn’t mean that’s how it will turn out this time around. This can be disappointing at best and life debilitating at worst; as mental health disorders such as anxiety, phobias and panic disorder can be defined as expectation disorders.

 

Most of your expectations will be formed from your own values, perspective or frame of reference. For example, you might feel disappointment after having expected to be given a leaving card by colleagues, because you have always arranged leaving cards for colleagues in the past. However, you did this from your valuing system - your colleagues might not value giving cards. If you judge the actions of others and form expectations based on what you would have done, you may regularly end up disappointed.

 

There is a way forward from this

The good news is, once you understand how your expectations are impacting your life, this gives you the power to adjust them if necessary. The first thing to do is spend some time reflecting on your expectations during past adverse events, in your relationships and life goals. This is a healthy way to use the past to inform your awareness, rather than to make predictions or underpin fears. Journaling is a useful self-reflection tool, or you could make mind maps or notes on your phone - find something that works for you.

Once you have identified your expectations and how they have informed past outcomes, you might recognise some patterns. When you become aware of patterns, you have the power to break them. It is pretty hard to break out of it sometimes.

To help inspire your reflections, let us consider some examples of how expectations can negatively impact different areas of your life:

In marriage/relationships

My wife is feeling angry and resentful. She cooks dinner every day and I, her partner, never offers to wash up. When my wife was growing up, if one parent cooked, the other washed up. Her silent resentment of me getting to sit down while she’s still in the kitchen, builds and she starts being snappy with him. I had no idea what I have done wrong or what her ‘problem is’. Now I know it’s me. Her expectation that I should wash up as that was formed by her past experiences. Her resentment is building because he is not acting in the way which she expects, but she has not communicated this expectation to me. I am just a simple man.

Here communication and explanation of her feelings of resentment could result in a change in my behaviour. If she continues keeping quiet, things will stay the same and her resentment will remain. It comes to escalation.

 

When i was about to turn 40. I always expected to be settled with a family and our own house by this stage in life. Instead I had to sell our house and buy something lived out and a lot smaller. And I find myself stuck in a lifetime with no prospects, after all those years being haunted by the tax office, I still have a little motivation to change it. For years I have not been aware that this is the reason for all our sadness. As the law suit against the tax office approaches, My mood dips lower and Iam still feeling hopeless about the future. To numb and escape from this feeling, I have started to join Facebook groups with fellow victims of this scandal.

Here I could benefit from working with a therapist to reflect on his low mood and hopefully realise that not meeting his expected goals by this point in his life, may be responsible for his low moods.

I am likely to have more enthusiasm to make the first steps to changing my life. Reframing my thoughts around the expectations I had, it will hopefully help me to realise he is not a failure. Feeling like a failure is often at the root of low self-esteem and low self-worth.

I have had many friends but due to the survival mode, I’ve lost many of them out of sight. There was no money to spend to arrange something; without communicating this to the rest of the world. We just stayed away from a birthday and all kinds of other parties as we could not afford anything. Furthermore, I was laid off at work, so I had to find a new job having no money for whatsoever even getting food on the table was a hassle, feeling let down by most of our friends. Some of them dropped off a box of groceries. Others never came by. Our kids helped providing food with their jobs and pocket money.

All of this could have been avoided if the Tax office had communicated with us about wat their intentions were. Instead, they made an assumption and set expectations based upon past salaries, when they decided to take everything from us, even our dignity. Furthermore, if they had spoken to us, it would’ve provided opportunity for us to explain how things were. That I worked under certain systems taxwise for a Danisch company. We could’ve made other plans and negosiations based upon this information. These examples show how important communication is in the real world the same goes for relationships and friendships. You cannot place expectations upon somebody, without even communicating this to the person. Although in the army there was only basic orders and low communication, only if something really happened you could ask them for help. It doesn’t matter how well you believe they know you, it doesn’t mean they can read your mind or pre-empt your expectations.

Similarly, it’s important to spend time reflecting on the expectations you have set for yourself. These may be from an internalised critical parent or authority figure from your own past; ask yourself is that “I should” your voice or somebody else's? Do you really expect this from yourself, or does somebody else? Perfectionism is underpinned by a fear of failure and can be so debilitating that a person can get into patterns of avoidance and procrastination; preferring to avoid, than risk getting it ‘wrong’ from their perspective.

Are all expectations unhealthy?

So far expectation has got a bad name in this blog, but not all expectations are unhealthy. Some are necessary and form boundaries in our relationships. For example, expecting your partner to remain faithful to you in a committed relationship is a healthy expectation.

Setting expectations in relationships and friendships collaboratively is a healthy way to ensure misunderstandings and resentment are less likely to occur.

Setting life goals can be motivating and end up as positive outcomes, but the way you react if you do not meet these life goals could be detrimental. Don’t aim to high and set your goals as possible ones and approach them with an attitude of patience. Be kind to yourself and flexible rather than fixed on a certain outcome by a certain time. Sometimes things don’t work out as you might’ve planned or expected, it can turn out to be the best thing.

It’s okay to hope that things will work out the way you would like and having future plans. Hoping is not the same as expecting.

If you have a painful life expectation that has not worked out, please seek the help of a therapist to work through this and grieve for your loss. Your feelings are still valid, even if you had set an unhealthy expectation, and you deserve space to work through them.

Understanding how ‘expectation’ can impact your peace of mind.

The Old Sailor,