How To Start Feeling Good Again After You Have Been Insufficient for Too Long

A guide to being reborn as many times as necessary until you don’t need to do it anymore.

During my 26 years of life, I have had many ups and downs.

There have been countless times when I have felt insufficient, incomplete, or like I couldn’t continue, and I have given up so many times that I would have won a “letting go of things” competition if there was one.

In these periods when I don’t feel completely myself, I lock myself in a bubble of sadness, where I feel like a failure and don’t want to do anything. I don’t go out with my friends, I don’t try new cooking recipes, and, more importantly, I don’t work on my projects.

I felt they were pointless and that it didn’t matter how hard I tried to work on them, I wouldn’t succeed.

Like me, thousands of people have periods of feeling like that. They are normal, and feeling insecure is part of the human experience.

What is not normal is to believe you will feel like that forever and not do anything to change this feeling. Although in those periods, I felt that I was not doing anything good with my life and that I would never be enough for the world, I know that deep down, this is not the case, mainly because I know that I have had periods of abundance, too.

For that reason, I always try to stand up every time, and in this article, I will show you how to overcome this period again and again (and all the times you consider necessary) until you don’t need it anymore.

1. Give yourself permission to feel bad for a moment.

First, you must understand that it is okay to feel that way for a while.

Sometimes, we feel insufficient because we are tired and overwhelmed by trying to be perfect all the time, so this period of rest is necessary so your mind and body heal.

When I feel like I can’t handle anything anymore and will never succeed, I stop everything I’m doing and become as unproductive as possible. During those moments, I try to do things that I used to enjoy in my free time and focus solely on them.

I also try to do a self-care activity that relaxes me. It can be as expensive as a spa day or something simple like going to a park to do yoga or read.

In the same way that nurses in hospitals try to take care of sick people in the best way possible so that they feel better, the best way to start feeling comfortable with yourself is to start taking care of your well-being and do things that make you feel good.

Giving yourself permission to just be yourself, not a successful person, not a hustler, not an office worker, just yourself, can help you understand that you are more than “an insufficient person that can’t do anything right” and that you deserve to do nothing too.

Giving yourself permission to feel bad for a while can help you understand what things are missing in your life in order to keep improving.

It’s letting the imposter syndrome explain to you what things you feel you need to improve on.

For example, sometimes I don’t feel successful enough because I don’t feel that I’m the expert that I claim to be, so this period helps me understand that I must keep learning in order to feel better.

2. Start by doing only one thing per day until you feel comfortable again with working for yourself.

After spending a while doing absolutely nothing (as long as my absence allows me without neglecting my obligations), then I begin to include things into my routine again one by one.

If my routine is 5 things on my list, then I just add one and focus on that thing, and that’s it for the day.

This helps me feel useful again, gradually, without suddenly becoming overwhelmed.

For example, if I previously did a routine of 8 exercises with a reasonable weight at the gym, I start by just doing a little cardio, stretching exercises, and maybe warming up. Then, the next day, I exercise a single muscle with a light weight, and then I add things to my routine little by little until I feel confident again.

If you don’t feel like yourself and are overcoming a mental health breakdown, the worst thing you can do to yourself is believe you can go back to normal right away.

What this would do would be the opposite effect, and the period of tiredness and sadness that you had previously could return with more force and you would feel that you are of no use.

However, when you come back little by little, you ensure that you are useful in that one thing and feel that you completed everything on your list without affecting your mind.

3. Set your own standards of success and work on achieving that limit.

Many times, when we feel insufficient or in a state of disappointment in our lives, it is because we feel that we could be someone much greater than what we really became.

To fix this, set new values of what success means to you, more focused on the reality you have now for the moment.

That means that if you set that, you could run 10,000 miles, and you could only achieve 3k, and decide to give up running because you feel it is not working for you; set 5k until you feel confident again.

With that, I’m not saying that you should give up your big dreams, only that for the moment, you should focus on small gains you know you can achieve until you gain self-esteem again to keep working for big things.

Remember that the goal is not to be conformist but to go back to the person you were before. And if that means lowering your own limits to feel better about your achievements, then that should be the focus for the moment.

Personally, feeling that I am achieving things that I couldn’t before makes me feel better about myself, so setting limits that I know I can achieve instead of those that led me to a period of depression helps me feel useful again.

4. Identify your power and give yourself credit for your achievements.

Another thing that helps me go back to feel like myself again is finding those things that make me feel powerful and good at it.

For example, right now, I am working on my YouTube channel, but many times, I want to give up because I don’t feel strong enough to be good on this platform, especially because there are many bad people who only work to make you feel bad with yourself.

At those moments, I focus my energy on writing my scripts for the new videos. I know I’m good at writing, and seeing everything I can create with my words motivates me and makes me feel I’m good at something.

Another thing that helps me return to my productive mindset is analyzing and celebrating my current achievements.

I’m not yet where I want to be, but I’m in a good place, even one better than a year ago.

Taking back the previous example, maybe I’m not yet a successful Youtuber, but I already have 2000 followers; in 2021, I didn’t have even 1000. It’s a small achievement, and I’m growing slowly, but I’m growing, and if I keep consistent, I can keep growing.

5. Keep adding things to your routine until you go back to your normality.

When you have many days in a row completing the one thing that is important on your to-do list and feel like you are doing fine (for example, you can complete the eight exercises in your gym routine again), then it is time to add another thing and keep the same process.

One thing that helps me feel like I’m working again for my dreams without feeling overwhelmed and going back on track is to do different things every day. For example, if one day I work out, the other day I read the book, and the other I write something.

All of those things are part of my day on a daily basis, but I just do it individually to feel like I can enjoy those things again and feel productive little by little.

This helps me feel that I’m working again but without the feeling of having to be perfect on all of them.

Remember that going back to feeling yourself again is not a matter of being good at everything you are used to doing again but feeling good about yourself when you do them.

Everyone has experienced moments in life when they feel insufficient, incompetent, and incomplete. These moments are part of life and a way to show us that no matter how good we are at something (or in many things), we are also humans.

However, we should not allow those feelings to stay there forever either. Especially since those feelings usually have nothing to do with our actual performance or capacities.

Deep down, you know you are growing but not at the rhythm you planned, and that’s okay. Not all the paths should be the same, maybe for some people it took less time than yours, but that doesn’t mean you would not achieve it too.

For this reason, every time I feel like this, I get back to myself by working on my self-care and healing my mind little by little until I feel like myself again. I first permit myself to feel bad for a day or two. We all need to rest of a successful mindset, and the impostor syndrome can help us to know what we need to work on.

But after that, start adding things to your life little by little until you feel comfortable with yourself again. This is important because sometimes we get a breakdown because we have a lot of things going on in our lives, and taking a step back can help us re-focus on what really matters.

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