I Feel Terrible
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Have you ever felt terrible without any apparent cause? There are many reasons for your feeling down and unwell. A rush of terrible feelings can happen to anyone of any age, regardless of gender and well-being. The truth is, life, in general, is full of exhausting tasks that wear down both your physique and mind. But what are the things that can make you feel terrible? Let’s dig deeper.
Feeling Terrible: The Causes
Among the hundreds of possible causes of your terrible feelings, here are the four most common reasons you might be feeling awful.
1. Iron Deficiency
If you’ve been experiencing a stronger flow during your periods or haven’t been consuming enough food with iron in it, your terrible feeling could be anemic. In other words, you have a low red blood cell count of delivering oxygen to your whole body. Without enough oxygen, simple tasks like getting up from bed or climbing a flight of stairs could feel extraordinarily difficult.
When you are too busy with work or life in general, you might forget to get enough nutrients from your meals. But anemia symptoms often showing up when you’re already on an extended run of iron-deficit diets.
2. Low Quality Sleep
You might be feeling terrible because you have been sleeping poorly in the past couple of days. Even if you sleep eight hours every night, a poor sleeping environment could reduce the quality of your slumber.
Among many factors, today’s most common culprit for low-quality sleep is the blue light emanating from your gadgets. It’s almost every millennial’s and gen z’s problem getting quality sleep because they have a pre-bed routine of scrolling Instagram or Twitter.
An unfamiliar sleeping position or low-quality mattress could also cause you to feel terrible when you wake up.
All of the disturbances that happen before and during your sleep could cause a high cortisol level when ideally, it should be low. This could lead to a disruption in your body’s circadian rhythm, leading to you not hitting the required three to four hours of REM sleep to feel fully rested.
3. Bad Physical Shape
If you are living a ridiculously sedentary lifestyle, there’s a good chance that your terrible feeling results from being out of shape. Today’s digital lifestyle harms our daily routines. The average person typically spends 11+ hours a day in front of a screen.
Maybe you’re working from home, or perhaps you have been binge-watching your favorite TV series for hours without getting up from the couch. When sedentary and passive behavior has become a lifestyle, you’re more than likely to be out of shape.
Being in bad physical shape could result in a foul mood and terrible feelings. While your poor physical form could lead to fatigue and difficulty moving around, it could also affect your mental condition.
4. Depression
When you have recently experienced traumatic events like the death of loved ones, getting fired from your job, or breaking up a relationship, you might just be griefing – and that’s completely understandable.
However, if you’ve been sleeping correctly, your diet is good, and everything in your life is as it should be, but you’re still feeling terrible most of the time. On top of that, you are slowly losing interest in the things that you used to love.
If that is the case, you might be suffering from depression. Depression affects your mood regardless of the situations in your life. It can make you feel worthless and unenthusiastic for most of the time you are awake. In severe cases, depression can even lead to suicidal thoughts.
What Is Depression?
Depression refers to a mood disorder that involves persistent sadness and a lack of interest in everyday activities. In the medical world, this state is also called a depressive disorder or clinical depression.
This disorder affects your feeling, thinking, and behavior, leading to many other mental and physical problems. Depending on the severity of the case, you might have a problem doing normal daily activities, which can cause you to think that life isn’t worth the trouble.
While many would think that you can just “stop feeling terrible” and “liven up,” it’s impossible to do that if you have clinical depression. It might require long-term treatment, therapy, and medication to alleviate depression.
Depression symptoms can vary depending on the severity of the conditions. These are the typical symptoms of depression:
- Feeling overrun and sad
- Lack of interest in most activities
- Drastic changes in appetite
- Weight loss or gain without any change in diet
- Having trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
- Increased fatigue
- Anxiety that causes physical movements (pacing, fidgeting, handwringing)
- Feeling guilty and worthless
- Difficulty in concentrating and making decisions
- Having suicidal thoughts
According to WHO, depression affects 265 million people of all ages worldwide. It is also one of the leading causes of disability that contributes to the global burden of disease.
But fortunately, between 80 and 90 percent of people suffering from clinical depression feel better once they get proper treatment, medication, and therapy
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How To Stop Feeling Terrible
Getting professional help is always recommended when your mental situation requires it. But you should also keep in mind that your emotions and mental conditions are yours to regulate.
Whether you’re starting a new job or moving away from home, the first person to know you are under stress is yourself. It’s okay to grief and feel sad – they are a natural coping and healing mechanism.
But when the negative emotions are starting to take over, these are the things that you can do to stop feeling terrible:
Take a Walk
Simply taking a walk outside can help alleviate the negative emotions. Walking can be a healthy distraction that also benefits your physical shape. But other than that, walking out offers a change in scenery that can help you feel better about everything around you.
Meditate
Meditation is a conscious activity of focusing your mind on something trivial, like how you breathe or the sound of the wind, or the flame of a candle. It exercises your mind to concentrate on one thing at a time. It’s a great practice to get the distractions out of your mind, which could free your head from things that don’t matter.
Hang Out with Friends
Humans are naturally social creatures, and looking for someone else’s support is a built-in protocol in our brains. When you’re having trouble in life, sharing it with someone who understands your emotions and experience can be an effective way to prevent yourself from feeling worthless.
Get Closer to Nature
Nature has many ways to brighten up your mood. Take a walk under the sunshine, go to the beach, take a hike up the hill, or enjoy the serene mood near the waterfall. When you’re staring at concrete walls and screens, it’s easy to lose a sense of the beauty and vastness of our nature.
Express Your Emotions Through Arts
Sometimes you simply can’t contain the negative emotions in your head, and pouring them out into arts can be a productive way to start feeling better. There’s also a sense of achievement when you’ve finished crafting your art, which could add another layer of good feeling for you.
Ways To Look Beyond Feeling Bad
There are many ways that you can do to see past the bad feelings in your everyday life. Being a glass-half-full person and having a positive mental attitude might be challenging if you have clinical depression.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t alleviate your terrible feelings. Some techniques have been proven effective in building a positive mental attitude to help you feel better.
Here are several tips and exercises that you can do to start feeling better:
Focus on Positive Things in Life
Uncomfortable and challenging situations are a part of life that you can’t completely prevent. When you are in such situations, try to shift your focus to all the good things you have, no matter how small or insignificant they seem.
There are always silver linings in every situation, but sometimes you have to look for them consciously. Even if it’s not immediately apparent, the good things around you can brighten up a cloudy day. For example, whenever you’re anxious about meeting a friend for lunch, you can think of all the snacks that you can get along the way or the sound of the birds chirping near the park.
Practive Feeling Thankful
Practicing gratitude is a great way to alleviate stress, improve self-esteem, and develop resilience in challenging situations. You can think of pleasant memories, kind people, or other things that can bring warm and fuzzy feelings at least once a day.
Feeling thankful and blessed could come from the little things in life. There are always think to be grateful for. You just need to adjust your perspective to see it. Be thankful that your neighbors are kind and caring families. Be grateful that your co-workers are very cooperative in today’s meeting. Be thankful that your air conditioner is working correctly in the summer.
Suggestions for The Future
Having negative emotions is a part of life, and as such, you should know how you can best deal with them. It’s essential to always take care of yourself and make the most out of the life that you’re living.
Making simple efforts to the way you live and perceive your life is not something difficult to do. Keep yourself happy by following these tips:
- Talk about your feelings with others: Simply sharing your feelings and letting out your emotion can help you maintain your mental health. It prevents a build-up of negative emotions that can negatively impact your mental health.
- Try to stay active: Keeping a regular exercise schedule can help you feel better about yourself and increase your self-esteem. Wearing out your body by exercising can also help you concentrate, sleep, and feel better in general.
- Maintain a healthy diet: Your body needs a mix of certain nutrients to achieve its best condition. Maintaining a nutritious diet is a sure-fire way to stay healthy both mentally and physically.
- Steer clear of addictive substances: It’s okay to have the occasional beer with friends. But avoid using alcohol to deal with fear, sadness, or loneliness since the effects are only temporary. What’s worse is once the effects wear off, you’re going to feel even worse.
- Stay connected with loved ones: There’s nothing better than catching up with your old friends. When you’ve all grown up and have your own lives, it’s easy to lose contact with the ones that matter slowly. Simply checking up on them could be a great way to maintain your feeling.
Feeling terrible is a part of this life, and it’s okay to feel bad about things. Knowing how to deal with it is something that you should learn for your benefit. The key to keeping up your feelings is maintaining a positive mental attitude, which you can achieve by doing all the things above. So, why not start today?
Feeling Terrible FAQ's
Will Finding Productive Hobbies Help My Bad Feelings?
Finding productive hobbies can help you negate all the terrible feelings that you’ve been having. Having a hobby that resonates with your interests is a great way to increase your ability to cope with stress.
There are countless hobbies – and only you can find the perfect hobby for yourself. After all, the whole point of having a hobby is to indulge yourself in something that you wholeheartedly enjoy. Nobody else can pick a hobby for you, but you can try to find the perfect productive hobby for you by following these tips:
Find something that you like
It might seem like an obvious point, but many people claim to have a ‘hobby’ because their friends are also into that hobby. Finding something that you can truly enjoy is the perfect starting point to finding a new hobby.
If you don’t enjoy doing it, why bother?
Tickle your brain
A productive hobby often makes you scratch your head and think hard to figure out something. Whether it’s winning a game of chess, growing a garden, or building computers, a productive hobby often requires you to learn something new – which could be a way to distract your mind from all the bad things in your life.
Create something awesome
If your daily routine is already frying your brain, you should find a hobby that doesn’t burn up the rest of your mental capacity. Finding a productive hobby that focuses more on physical activity instead of thinking could help you maintain your mental health and reserve your brain for another day at work.
Will Therapy Help?
Finding a wondeful therapist can alleviate a lot of tensions in your life. It can also bring you professional understanding and clinical knowledge to combate your internal problems.