Why does your life suck?
As you work toward getting out of this rut and having a new outlook on life, the first thing you need to do is figure out what exactly sucks about your life.
If you’re not sure of where to start, here are some points for you to consider:
1. Your biology is at play.
Our biology plays a significant role when it feels like life sucks. Our brains are wired to scout for the bad stuff, a phenomenon psychologists call negativity bias. This means our minds naturally give more weight to negative experiences, fixating on perceived threats to ensure our survival.
Our biological goal of survival takes precedence over everything else.
So, when something terrible happens, our brains focus all our time and energy on handling that threat. As a result, we ruminate more on unpleasant events and use stronger words to describe them.
This bias toward negativity serves as a protective mechanism to keep us safe from potential dangers.
2. Your thoughts are negative.
Are you a glass-half-full or a half-empty type of person? Is your inner critic on high alert in your mind?
If your thoughts are mainly negative, it’ll be far more difficult to see your life in a positive light. Instead, you’ll focus on everything that’s going wrong, instead of seeing what’s going right. You may even perceive positive events in a negative light because of your fixed mindset.
With a negative mindset, it’s not surprising you think your life sucks. You’re merely agreeing with what your inner critic has been telling you all along.
3. You hate yourself.
You’re not a big fan of yourself.
It might sound weird to say it out loud, but deep down inside, you don’t like yourself. You think horrible thoughts about yourself and treat yourself worse than you’d treat an enemy.
Worse still, you let others treat you poorly too.
Outwardly, you might seem confident. Perhaps you’ve even fooled everyone else into thinking that you are. But the truth is, out of all the people you hate in the world, you hate yourself the most.
4. Your job sucks.
As a responsible adult, you take your financial obligations very seriously. You’ve got bills to pay, and people depend on you to take care of them. So, you do everything in your power to make sure there’s enough money for everything.
But you loathe your job. Every day you go to work, a piece of you dies inside.
Normally, you could manage your sucky job because the weekends are always just around the corner. But lately, once Friday afternoon rolls around, you start dreading Monday mornings.
You wish you could quit your job and do something else. But your bills and responsibilities won’t take care of themselves.
5. You don’t take care of your health.
Our overall health has a strong impact on our quality of life. We can’t neglect it without serious repercussions.
When we treat ourselves badly, we experience negative outcomes.
It sounds simple, but this is a difficult concept many of us struggle to grasp, and it can often take a health scare to wake us up.
But even before that point, our bodies often give us signs that something is wrong. We just fail to recognize those signs.
Sometimes that’s because we don’t understand that our health is more than just about our physical bodies. Our minds, emotions, and social well-being are critical to our overall health.
When we don’t feed our bodies what they need to function properly, our mental health becomes affected. If we neglect our mental health, it could impact our physical health. Our emotional health could impact our mental health, which in turn could affect our physical health, and so on.
It’s all a cycle where each part plays a critical role.
If you’re feeling as though your life sucks, check your health. Are you taking care of your body as you should? Could your feelings be the result of a physical, mental, emotional, or social crisis?
6. Your values and fundamentals are screwed up.
Are your values in alignment with your true self? Or are you living by values forced upon you by society, your family, or the environment?
Perhaps you’re chasing dreams that aren’t really yours. But since everyone else is buying a new car every two years, working high-pressure jobs, and having 2.5 kids, you find yourself doing the same.
It’s possible you think your life sucks because your values and fundamentals are all screwed up. They don’t align with who you truly are inside.
You’re unhappy because you’re living an inauthentic life. The worst part is, because you’ve been listening to others about the kind of life you should live, you’re not sure what kind of life you want to live. You don’t know what would make you happy.
7. You’re in a toxic relationship.
Your relationship with your significant other, friend, or family member is toxic. While there may be a lot of love and history between the two of you, you aren’t good for each other.
Your relationship dynamic is unhealthy, and it doesn’t bring out the best in either of you.
Being together is too much of a struggle. There’s always one argument or an issue that you’re trying to resolve. It’s one drama after another.
Or maybe you feed off each other’s bad traits. You just bring the worst out in each other. When you get together, you’re an angry, bigot. When, on a normal day, you really don’t care how other people live their lives—it’s their life, their choice.
Sometimes, you can’t believe the words that are coming out of your mouth or the way you’re behaving.
The relationship is sucking the joy out of your life and turning you into someone you don’t recognize.
8. You’re in a toxic environment.
The environment you’re in is toxic. It could be your job or place of worship. Maybe it’s where you hang out.
In this scenario, it’s not just one person who is toxic, it’s a group of people. The entire setup/system is unhealthy.
Maybe the management style at your office is organized in a way that breeds pressure, unhealthy competition, micromanagement, and stress. Because it’s the system that is toxic, everyone else seems to be toxic as well.
Your colleagues may not be horrible people. They might just be stuck in a bad situation, much like you are.
In situations like this, it’s easy to feel as though you’re the odd one out. The toxicity, plus the feeling of isolation, all work together to make you feel as though your life sucks.
9. You fear taking risks.
You’re not happy with the life you’re living right now. But it’s the only life you’ve ever known. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable. You know what’s expected of you and what to expect.
The only thing missing is joy.
But your fears of taking risks and the unknown trump your desire for joy. Or at least it used to. More and more lately, your comfort zone has started feeling like a cage that is keeping you locked in one spot.
You want to step out, but that fear holds you back. You’d love to try something new, but once you take a step to do so, thoughts of everything that could go wrong come flooding into your mind.
Your comfort zone feels too small, but you just can’t get over your fear of taking risks.
Finally…
Life sucks, but now you know why. But here’s the thing: knowing is half the battle. Now that you’ve identified these soul-sucking culprits, you can start tackling them one by one. It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight, but you’ve got the power to turn things around. Remember, your life doesn’t have to suck forever. It’s time to take control, make changes, and start living the life you deserve. You’ve got this!
