Feeling worthless? Here are 8 reasons why and what you can do about it

Feelings of worthlessness can come at any time in your life, but if you are suddenly feeling like you can’t do anything right or that you aren’t worthy of the things you have in your life, you might be wondering what has happened to your self-confidence.

You are not alone. Feelings of unworthiness can be triggered at any time, especially during your development years.

What’s even more possible is that if you are struggling with your self-confidence as an adult, it’s likely that you have had some experience with others telling you that you aren’t worthy and you might have been harboring those old feelings in some way now.

If you can’t shake that feeling that your self-confidence is waning, it might be time to start exploring why that is. Here’s how.

1) People are telling you that you are no good.

It’s hard to understand why anyone would put someone else down, but many people grow up in households where they have been told repeatedly that they are worthless.

For many reasons, parents take out their frustrations with life on their children, calling them names or saying they are unworthy of being loved. This can especially be the case if you were raised by narcissists.

In other periods of life, your boss or coworkers may make remarks about your performance that make you feel like you are no good at anything.

It doesn’t help that, according to Scientific American, it’s natural for humans to care what other people think of them. This is probably, even more, the case when it comes to our close ones or people we work with.

You might have had a series of failed jobs or relationships or opportunities and now you feel like everything you touch turns to stone.

I know that breaking free from toxic people can be extremely difficult.

However, if there are people in your life who are tearing you down, you simply have to learn to stand up for yourself.

Because you do have a choice in the matter.

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2) If you’ve been telling yourself that you’re no good.

If you’ve grown up hearing bad things about yourself, it’s going to be hard to tell yourself something different.

But you do need to make sure that these thoughts are not your own.

If you are an adult when you find yourself feeling less self-confident or unworthy of your life in any way, you’ll need to ask yourself why you are telling yourself these negative things.

You wouldn’t say that to a friend, right? Why do we always treat ourselves poorly and give so much to other people?

Take some time to consider why you are having these ill-gotten feelings about yourself and explore where the thoughts are coming from.

It might not be from the comments of others. We often find it hard to place ourselves in society, especially if we haven’t had a good role model of self-confidence.

Younger generations are increasingly struggling with their self-esteem and self-image because of social media and how they think they should be acting.

In fact, studies have found links between social media use and loneliness, envy and anxiety.

More and more we are getting away from our most authentic selves. If you can just figure out why you are treating yourself so poorly, you can start to introduce more kind actions and thoughts into your day-to-day life.

3) You lack resilience

It’s understandable if you feel down in the dumps right now – the good news is that you can overcome this.

But the thing is, most people who feel worthless do so because they lack resilience.

Without resilience, most of us give up on the things we desire. Most of us struggle to create lives worth living.

We even give up on our own personal sense of worth.

I know this because until recently I had a tough time overcoming a few setbacks in my life. I felt like I lost all confidence, like my life was just passing by with no significance or meaning.

That was until I watched the free video by life coach Jeanette Brown.

Through many years of experience as a life coach, Jeanette has found a unique secret to building a resilient mindset, using a method so easy you’ll kick yourself for not trying it sooner.

And the best part?

Unlike many other life coaches, Jeanette’s entire focus is on putting you in the driver’s seat of your life.

To find out what the secret to resiliency is, check out her free video here.

4) You are comparing yourself to others.

You spend a lot of time looking at other people, reading about other people, wishing you had another life, made more money, had a different job or house.

Don’t be so hard on yourself.

If you find yourself doing this, you need to stop and start practicing gratitude for what you have in your life.

According to Susan Biali Haas M.D. in Psychology Today:

“If you commit yourself to being deeply grateful for what’s good in your life, and remind yourself of it daily, you’ll be far less vulnerable to comparison and envy.”

No matter how little you have or how worthless you feel, there are lots of reasons to be happy about the way your life is right now.

If you spend your time comparing yourself to other people, you’ll always wish you had more or could do more.

Instead, be an example of what is possible in your own life and start comparing yourself to the person you were yesterday and strive to be better than that person tomorrow.

5) You’ve experienced a great change in your life.

Sometimes a change in our identity can alter our sense of self. If you have been recently divorced or lost a job, you might not know how to quantify your value.

Many people look to their careers as a way to validate their success in the world and if you have recently lost yours, you might find it difficult to relate to others and the life you once had.

When you’re dealing with trauma or heartbreaking change, it can become easy to blame yourself.

Suzanne Lachmann Psy.D. explains:

“In an effort to gain control of your circumstances, in your head you may have convinced yourself that you were complicit or even to blame.”

Aside from any misery and negativity, you might have related to the loss to your identity, the negative thoughts you were having about yourself now aren’t helping.

It’s best to let yourself process what is happening and try not to judge yourself for what has gone down.

If you feel emotionally drained, you might identify with the 6 signs in this video (it also offers 3 tips to recovery as well):

6) You feel like everyone is against you.

You might find that you feel bad about yourself, not because of the thoughts you are having about yourself, but because of the thoughts you are having about other people!

Sometimes we put words in other people’s mouths and we think they are thinking things about us even when they are not.

If you feel like the whole world is against you, it’s not because they are out to get you, it’s because you think they are.

When you create these situations in your mind, you find that they often come true.

This is because you might be operating with a “cognitive bias“. These are rules of thumb that help you make sense of the world and make fast decisions.

Your “rule of thumb” is that people are against you and don’t hold positive judgments about you. This leads to errors in processing the world around you.

You’ll start to see evidence of how people are working against you, even when they are not.

In order to deal with this, you need to turn your attention inward and ask yourself why you think people are out to get you.

Question your thinking and try to look at the facts objectively.

7) You are negative.

Another thing you might need to consider is that you are the problem. It’s hard to hear, but it could be true.

Do you find yourself dwelling on criticisms or mistakes you’ve made? That negative events tend to draw your attention more than positive events?

This is actually more common than you think. Psychologists say that it’s natural for negative events to have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones. It’s referred to as “negative bias”.

If you are struggling to find your self-worth and if you are feeling bad about yourself, it might be that you want to feel like that and want others to feel bad for you.

We like to be victims in our own lives sometimes, even if we don’t like to admit it.

If you are feeling low and can’t seem to get out of the funk you are in, you might need to consider that it’s nobody’s fault but your own.

Nancy Colier LCSW, Rev. has some great advice in Psychology Today on how to deal with a victim mindset:

“Victim mentality focuses you on your suffering, specifically what you’re not getting. Try flipping your perspective and focusing on something that matters to you, that you do enjoy, and that you do “get.” Shift your attention from what you’re missing to what you have.”

If you let yourself get sucked into negative thinking and see the glass as half empty instead of half full, try reworking the way you think and force yourself to see the glass as half full.

8) There may be underlying health issues.

A final thing to consider is that if you look yourself in the eye and feel like you are not the problem, but you can’t get your thoughts under control and feel like you are not getting anywhere, it might be time to seek professional help.

You know your body better than anyone else and if you feel like something’s not right, you might be right.

Don’t sit around and wait to find out what is going on, talk to your doctor about how you are feeling and ask for the help you need to feel better.

(If you’re looking for a structured, easy-to-follow framework to help you find your purpose in life and achieve your goals, check our eBook on how to be your own life coach here).

What you can do about feeling worthless

1) Acknowledge and accept your situation

You don’t want to believe it: the fact that you feel worthless, meaningless, and like if you disappeared from the face of the earth, nothing would change and no one would care.

It’s a feeling you shun away and ignore, and you might’ve been shunning and ignoring it for years now.

But no matter how much you try to pretend it doesn’t exist, you know in the back of your mind that it dictates your overall demeanor — you feel worthless, and you can’t stop yourself from feeling this way.

But nothing will ever change if you don’t truly look at this feeling in the eye and tell yourself what needs to be said: this exists, it’s real, and it’s something that needs to be accepted.

Running away from it, hiding from it, and pretending it’s just a fleeting feeling will stop you from actually addressing the problems that might be causing it in the first place.

Meaning you end up trapping yourself in an endless cycle of feeling worthless, doing things that make you happy in the short-term to forget that you feel worthless, and feeling worthless again when that short-term happiness wears off.

So accept it. Look yourself in the mirror and say: “I feel worthless. Now, what am I going to do about it?”

2) Learn how to love yourself

Life has a way of dampening our spirits, filling us with anxiety, and knocking our self-esteem, but only if we let it.

You see, you feeling worthless is just your perception of yourself, built up in your mind. It comes from a place of fear, insecurity, and doubt. It comes from a lack of self-love.

It’s something I learned from the world-renowned shaman Rudá Iandê. He taught me that the way to find love and intimacy is not what we have been culturally conditioned to believe.

As Rudá explains in this mind blowing free video, many of us chase love in a toxic way because we’re not taught how to love ourselves first.

And chasing toxic love can be a huge contributor as to why you feel worthless.

So, if you want to start practicing self-love I’d recommend starting with yourself first and taking Rudá’s incredible advice.

Here’s a link to the free video one again.

3) Pay attention to when the lows hit.

When you notice that you aren’t having a great day, week, or month, pay attention to what is going on in your head.

It might just be that you need to replace a thought or try to do something else than what you are doing in order to change your confidence.

This can take time to develop the skills to notice your thoughts, but with practice, you’ll be able to recognize that your lack of self-confidence is just a thought in your head and you can start doing something about it.

A great way to practice being aware of your thoughts is through mindfulness.

APA (American Psychological Association) defines mindfulness “as a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment”.

Studies have suggested that mindfulness can help reduce rumination, reduce stress, boost working memory, improve focus, improve emotional reactivity, improve cognitive flexibility and enhance relationship satisfaction.

To practice mindfulness, all you have to do is bring your attention to your senses or your thoughts.

According to Mindful.org:

“Whenever you bring awareness to what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful. And there’s growing research showing that when you train your brain to be mindful, you’re actually remodeling the physical structure of your brain.”

As Mark Epstein, M.D, says in his book Thoughts Without a Thinker, meditators quickly understand the nature of the “monkey mind”:

“Like the undeveloped mind, the metaphorical monkey is always in motion, jumping from one attempt at self-satisfaction to another, from one thought to another. “Monkey mind” is something that people who begin to meditate have an immediate understanding of as they begin to tune into the restless nature of their own psyches, to the incessant and mostly unproductive chatter of their thoughts.”

When you allow yourself to take the time to step back and observe your thoughts, you’ll quickly realize you don’t have to believe your thoughts. Your brain is a thought-making machine ande everything it thinks doesn’t represent who you are as a person.

This will give you enormous liberation from the constraint of self-limiting thoughts. If you can’t help but think negative thoughts about yourself, remember that it’s just your brain. It’s not you and you don’t have to believe those thoughts.

4) Take responsibility

If you are feeling worthless in life, will you take responsibility for getting yourself out of this funk?

I think taking responsibility is the most powerful attribute we can possess in life.

Because the reality is that YOU are ultimately responsible for everything that happens in your life, including for your happiness and unhappiness, successes and failures, and for feelings of worthlessness.

I want to briefly share with you how taking responsibility has transformed my own life, including how I see myself.

Did you know that 6 years ago I was anxious, miserable and working every day in a warehouse?

I was stuck in a hopeless cycle and had no idea how to get out of it.

My solution was to stamp out my victim mentality and take personal responsibility for everything in my life. I wrote about my journey here.

Fast forward to today and my website Hack Spirit is helping millions of people make radical shifts in their own lives. We’ve become one of the world’s biggest websites on mindfulness and practical psychology.

This isn’t about bragging, but to show how powerful taking responsibility can be…

… Because you too can transform your own life by taking complete ownership of it.

To help you do this, I’ve collaborated with my brother Justin Brown to create an online personal responsibility workshop. We give you a unique framework for finding your best self and achieving powerful things.

I mentioned this earlier.

It’s quickly become Ideapod’s most popular workshop. Check it out here.

I know that life isn’t always kind or fair. After all, no one chooses to feel worthless.

But courage, perseverance, honesty — and above all else taking responsibility — are the only ways to overcome the challenges that life throws at us.

If you want to seize control of your life, like I did 6 years ago, then this is the online resource you need.

Here’s a link to our best-selling workshop again.

5) Accept the hard truth of value

We all want to be loved unconditionally.

By our spouses, our family, our friends — we want them to back us and support us even when we don’t really deserve it, because we want to know that they love us for who we are, not for what we may be offering them at the present moment.

But while you might have a handful of people who will truly love you unconditionally, you can’t expect society to feel for you the same way.

Society requires that you offer value in whatever way you can, and only through your value will you have a purpose.

And that means you need to be doing something to improve someone else’s life in some way.

Without providing a valuable contribution to society, you might as well be worthless in the eyes of everyone outside your inner circle.

For those who are outside our family and friends, we only want from people what they can provide for us.

If they have nothing to provide, then they have no reason to even exist: and that’s the hard truth on value that society demands.

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6) Start picking yourself up

You know what’s wrong with you: your biggest flaws, the reasons why you dislike yourself and why you might be feeling worthless, and your most influential triggers.

With all that in mind, it’s now time to ask yourself: “What am I going to do about it?”

There’s no step-by-step guide out there because we all have our own paths and needs.

The act of picking yourself up is different for each and every one of us.

But the truth is it all starts with that first step: the conscious and active decision to make yourself feel better, and to stop doing the things that are making you feel bad.

You’re in a rut, a cycle of negative feelings that will only continue to twist until you decide that you’re sick of it.

And if you don’t truly make that decision — and mean it — you might continue repeating this cycle for the rest of your life.

Stop making the choices that lead to short-term happiness right now, and start making those that lead to long-term happiness in the future.

7) Begin with little achievements

Feelings of worthlessness are hard to defeat.

We’re innately programmed to want to do things, and when we don’t feel like we’re doing anything meaningful in the world, we end up asking, “Why do I even exist at all?”

But you can’t start off with a bang, especially when you’re at your lowest.

No one can go from zero to a hundred in a single day or even a week, and the reason why so many people fail when they try picking themselves up is that they end up setting extremely high expectations, ultimately disappointing themselves when they fail.

So start small. Your first task shouldn’t be, “Get your dream job”, “Get a six-pack in a month”, or “Double your income ASAP”.

Your first task should be simple things like, “Run a kilometer or two”, “Cook yourself a nice meal”, or “Clean up your room.”

It’s not about proving to yourself that you can be your ideal self immediately.

It’s about proving to yourself that you’re capable of starting and completing goals that you set out to do. It’s about creating the habit of succeeding, by starting off with counting every little success.

8) Get a job or do better at your job

While this point may not apply to everyone, it does apply to some of us: your lack of a job (or your bad performance at your job) is weighing you down, even if you don’t like to admit it.

You want to feel valued and that means you need a system that values you, and there’s no better place to feel that way than at work.

So get a job. It doesn’t have to be the job you dreamed of as a kid. Maybe you wanted to be an astronaut or a scientist or a lawyer or a number of other things, but for one reason or another, life simply didn’t work out that way (at least, not yet).

But right now you need to do everything you can to start building your own momentum, and a job is the exact social structure you need to build routines, habits, and the foundation for greater success.

Already have a job? Then try to understand why you still worthless despite the fact that someone pays you for your time.

It may be that your job disconnects you too much from any kind of sense of accomplishment, and if this is the case then it might be time to either change careers or step up.

9) Help someone in need

If you’re reading this article, then you have a computer or a phone, and probably food in your stomach and a roof over your head.

You may have it rough, but there’s bound to be someone in greater need than you.

So help someone out.

What better way to give yourself the feeling of worth than by proving your worth to someone who needs your help?

It could be as simple as calling up a friend going through tough times, or lending a hand to a stranger in any way you can.

Too many of us convince ourselves that acts of kindness have to be these huge, grand gestures, and this prevents us from acting kindly to one another.

But acts of kindness can be as simple as helping an old lady unload the groceries from her car, or helping someone pick up something they dropped.

Acts of kindness should be everyday occurrences, embedded seamlessly into your life like chalk on a board.

You’ll never feel more valuable than when you turn yourself into the exact person that someone needs at that exact moment.

10) Become a part of the community

If you find the previous point works for you, then why not go a step higher and become invaluable not only to one person, but an entire community?

There are countless options out there to become part of a social group, community, or organization.

We can’t all get the feelings of accomplishment we want from our work — either because we don’t truly love what we’re doing, or because our role is too disconnected from the product or service we create — so many of us instead seek out this internal validation from social communities instead.

What are your hobbies and interests, and is there a community — either locally or online — that you could be a part of?

Ask yourself: how can you positively contribute to things you care about?

Become the positive influence you would like to see in others, and in no time at all you’ll find yourself becoming an actual and invaluable part of your new group.

11) Cut yourself off from negativity

Negativity builds upon itself, even if it’s two completely unrelated balls of negativity.

Even unstated, unspoken negativity can easily spread, and one person’s negative mood can bring down an entire group.

This is why it’s so important to protect your mental energy, especially when you’re already starting from the disadvantage of feeling bad about yourself.

When you feel worthless, your barriers are down; the mental walls we maintain to protect ourselves are all open, and any negative energy you might feel from someone else can seep in and further exacerbate your negative mood.

So eliminate those sources of negative energy from your life.

If you have friends or relatives who are always using you as their soundboard to complain about their own issues, you need to confront them and say something along the lines of, “I care about you and your issues, but I need to protect my mental space right now. Can we talk about something else?”

If they truly care about you, they’ll oblige. And if they don’t, then they’re not the greatest friends to begin with.

12) Continuously set goals

When you’ve fallen to the point that you feel utterly and hopelessly worthless, then you’ve conditioned your mind and behavior to a certain toxic state.

Remember the law of inertia: an object at rest will remain at rest, unless acted upon by external force.

And your mind and body work the same way — if you’ve done nothing for a long time, then everything in your system will continue trying to do nothing, despite your best efforts otherwise.

This means that change won’t happen overnight. Your instincts will push against your attempts to move, to work, to be better.

You might have two good days and one bad day, and that one bad day might make you feel like you’re back to square one.

This is why it’s crucial that you keep setting goals, every single day. Even if those goals are as simple as “making up the bed” or “taking a walk outside”.

Being a better person isn’t just about making better choices; it’s about making better choices consistently.

13) Reconnect with people who once loved you

We all lose people along the way. Life is long and tough, and people can come and go in the blink of an eye.

If you’re feeling lost, worthless, and alone right now, ask yourself: “Who can I reach out to who might help?”

If you look at your present situation, the answer might be no one. But dig into your past. Your college friends, highschool friends, childhood friends. Any groups or communities you might once have been a part of.

Even relatives you haven’t truly connected with in years. These people once loved you and once cared for you, and there’s no doubt that they know you enough to understand whatever problems led to your departure from their life for however many number of years.

Reach out with those old bonds and reconnect with them. If you’ve forgotten who you once were, they’ll surely remind you.

14) Take a step back and appreciate everything

Sometimes it’s really all just in your head, a matter of perception.

Your feelings of worthlessness may be completely unfounded; maybe you actually do contribute plenty to society. Maybe you actually do mean a lot to the people around you.

Maybe you’re so much more valuable than you actually think.

But sometimes we can get lost in our personal storms.

We’re our own worst critics, meaning a single failure or setback might make us feel like we’ve done nothing right with our lives.

This is especially true for high-functioning people — while you may be completely productive and efficient when you’re “on”, you may also be completely down when you’re “off”.

So think about what you’re really feeling. Is it as true as it feels, or is it just a result of something that happened right now?

Appreciate what you have, count your blessings, and think about everything you’ve already done.

Is your life really not something you can be proud of? In many cases, it is, and the only problem is your current storm and getting over it.

15) Get rid of your ego

Your ego is your greatest asset. It’s what makes you, “you”. It gives you a reason to pick yourself up, to get out of bed in the morning, and to make something of yourself.

We all begin our journeys by thinking about the ego, and our never-ending quest of appeasing and pleasing the ego.

But the ego can also become your greatest detriment. Once the ego becomes too big, it overshadows everything else.

Suddenly instead of just trying to please the ego, you’re now feeding it and its insatiable hunger.

You constantly need the affirmation and the validation of your successes and accomplishments to keep up with your ego’s needs, because you never attempted to rein it in when you could.

Now, even if you aren’t worthless, the unsustainable practice of feeding an ever-growing ego finally outgrew your own ability to satisfy it, and now you feel worthless.

If this is you, then you now have to go through the long and winding self-journey of killing your own ego.

You fed it for so long that now it’s bigger than your actual life, and its needs dictate your reality.

You have to learn to work for other reasons, to find meaning in purposes other than making yourself feel good.

As difficult as it may be, it’s essential you get to the point that you can truly get rid of the ego and say goodbye to that drive.

16) Ask yourself: What would happen if you disappeared?

As we said above, it all just might be a matter of perspective. You might just be feeling worthless right now, but your actual reality is far from it.

So an easy way to test this possibility is by asking yourself: what would happen if you disappeared?

Who would miss you? What things would go wrong? Whose life would be significantly affected by your absence? Your family, friends, partners, pets? Your personal projects, things you love and things you’ve dedicated your life to, and all the people you’ve met along the way?

Your life isn’t meaningless and you aren’t worthless. No matter how difficult it may be to answer those questions right now, you know in your heart you do have answers to them.

17) Identify your biggest flaws

Feeling worthless is rarely ever a cause of actually being worthless. It might not be that you don’t have any worth; it just feels that way because it’s the easiest way for you to understand your own negativity as an emotional manifestation.

In many cases, when a person feels worthless it’s less about their actual worth and value, and more about their perceived self-image, and the things they don’t like about themselves.

So what are your biggest flaws? Are you lazy? Are you unmotivated? Do you not know what you want in life?

Do you hate your job and want a career shift, but you’re afraid to do it? Are you unsociable and shy, but would like to meet new people and do something else with your life?

Write down a list of everything you don’t like about yourself, and then begin eliminating the lesser problems.

Try to come up with your three biggest issues — things you can actually work on — and ask yourself, “What can I do to change these issues?”

18) Get up and get moving.

You might not like to exercise, but there’s nothing better for boosting a mood than when you exercise.

Sure, there is a lot of science behind why exercise makes you feel better, but besides all the science and medical evidence of how endorphins boost your mood, exercising can help you connect with your body in a new way and you can discover that you are capable of things you didn’t even know were possible.

Harvard Health says that aerobic exercise is key for your head, just as it is for your heart:

“Regular aerobic exercise will bring remarkable changes to your body, your metabolism, your heart, and your spirits. It has a unique capacity to exhilarate and relax, to provide stimulation and calm, to counter depression and dissipate stress. It’s a common experience among endurance athletes and has been verified in clinical trials that have successfully used exercise to treat anxiety disorders and clinical depression. If athletes and patients can derive psychological benefits from exercise, so can you.”

Try running for 5 more minutes, hiking a new hill, or biking a little longer every time you go out and soon you’ll have a new routine that makes you feel great about your efforts.

19) Look for evidence of other times when you felt confident.

If you are feeling low about yourself and can’t think your way out of the situation, start looking to the past to provide you evidence of times when you used to feel better.

This isn’t about faking it until you make it though: it’s about rediscovering the things about those moments that made you feel good.

See if they still make you feel good now. If not, keep looking for the things that will help you rise above your thoughts this time around.

Practicing gratitude can be a powerful technique. All you have to do is think of 5 things you’re grateful for every day. Do it in the morning or before you go to bed. Write it down. Get in the habit of being appreciative for everything you have in your life.

The Harvard Health Blog says that “gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness.”

“Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.”

Practicing gratitude as you follow your own lead will help you see that there are lots of things in your life that are worthy of your attention and work to create happiness in your life and in the lives of others.

If you were happy before, you can be happy again.

20) Ask questions.

Another way to boost your self-confidence is to use low moments as an opportunity to learn about yourself.

If you approach your life with a sense of curiosity instead of feeling like you need to have everything figured out, you’ll be better equipped to go about your life learning and growing instead of feeling like you missed the last train to know-it-all-ville.

Ask questions about how you do things, why you do them, and what you get out of them. Use the information you discover to help you move forward.

For me, I find that writing in a journal every day allows me to get to know what I’m really thinking and feeling.

In the Harvard Health Blog, Jeremy Nobel, MD, MPH says that when people write about what’s in their hearts and minds, they better make sense of the world and themselves:

“Writing provides a rewarding means of exploring and expressing feelings. It allows you to make sense of yourself and the world you are experiencing. Having a deeper understanding of how you think and feel — that self-knowledge — provides you with a stronger connection to yourself.”

To get started, here are 4 questions to prompt your writing:

1) What do I really want?

2) What am I no longer willing to accept?

3) What makes me happy?

4) Are my current habits enabling me to live the life I want?

21) Be in the now.

A lack of self-confidence often comes from living in the future.

If you turn your attention to what is going on right now instead of living in an anxiety-filled-future focus, you can just put one foot in front of the other and work to like who you are right now, instead of worrying about who you will be in the future.

Being in the now allows you to accept where you are and where you’ve come from instead of putting pressure on yourself to get where you are trying to go later.

This is where mindfulness can come in to help live in the present moment. In the book Mindfulness for Creativity, Danny Penman says that mindfulness practices can help you be more open to new ideas, can improve attention and nurtures courage and resilience in the face of setbacks.

Furthermore, living in the present moment empowers you to take action.

If you followed the above steps and you understand what you want to do with your life, then it’s important to take practical action to make that a reality.

Here are some tips to take meaningful action in the present moment:

1) Focus only on single tasks, no matter how small it is.

2) Do your tasks in a slow, relaxed pace. Take it in and enjoy it.

3) Minimize checking things like Facebook. They’re distractions that take you away from the task you’re doing.

4) Tell yourself: Now I am…As you do something, simply tell yourself what you’re doing. If you’re brushing your teeth, tell yourself that and only do that.

5) Start a meditation practice. This is a great way to learn to calm your mind and improve your focus. You’ll find that you’re more productive when your mind is clear and you know what you need to do.

(To dive deep into how to improve your own self-esteem, check out my ultimate guide on how to love yourself here)

In conclusion

Feeling worthless is a common human experience for many people. Whether it’s from growing up in a non-supportive environment, a trauma-based event or the tendency to compare ourselves to others, feelings of worthlessness are difficult to deal with no matter who you are.

But learning to practice mindfulness to allow us to question our own thoughts and emotions allows us to take a step back from the mind and understand that we don’t need to think negatively about ourselves.

Taking an objective look at reality will allow you to see that you have a lot of potential and skills, a lot to be grateful for, and you don’t need to believe your own negative thoughts.