When people ask, ‘why is everything so hard right now?’, it’s often because daily life has started to feel like wading through deep water. It’s become heavy, exhausting, and completely consuming.
Everything might look OK on the surface. You have a good career, a cosy home, and family and friends you love. But underneath it all you’re battling a persistent, deep fatigue. Even simple tasks seem to demand massive amounts of energy, making it easy to feel overwhelmed, stuck, or isolated.
Perhaps you’re struggling to concentrate or feeling disconnected from your surroundings. Maybe you’ve become trapped in a loop of worry, anxiety, or anger. Either way, you’re probably fighting the urge to pull away from friends, family, and activities you usually enjoy.
The Impact of Life Right Now
Before we dig into the past, we need to acknowledge that life right now is a lot. We’re all dealing with economic pressure, information overload, digital fatigue, and a highly volatile global and political climate. The world is shifting rapidly, and many of us are being forced to juggle competing demands without reprieve.
In short, things may feel overwhelmingly difficult because they are. It’s completely normal to be exhausted by this, and you’re not alone in feeling this way.
However, it’s also possible the exhaustion you’re experiencing isn’t just about how much is on your plate right now. It could stem from patterns that have been running since childhood – deeply held beliefs you have about who you are, what you deserve, and what’s expected of you. Anxiety, low confidence, self-criticism and self-sabotage are almost always rooted in these things.
The Emotional Weight of the Past
Your past could be impacting your present if any of these things sound familiar:
- Everything feels hard, and no matter what you do, the same difficult experiences keep showing up.
- You find yourself stuck in overthinking to the point it becomes paralysing.
- You often experience intense anxiety, anger, or sadness that feels much bigger than what is happening in the actual moment.
- Relationships feel difficult, you’re struggling to open up, and/or you keep pushing partners or friends away.
- You find yourself feeling alone, even when you’re surrounded by people you care about.
- You’re prone to people-pleasing, over-compromising and taking responsibility for other people’s happiness.
- You constantly feel ‘on edge’ and need to be in control.
- You’re resistant to change and prefer sticking to deeply ingrained, familiar routines.
- You keep striving and pushing yourself, but never truly feel the satisfaction from your effort.
These experiences are linked to beliefs you hold about your worth, your place in relationships, and your safety, and they’ve probably been influencing your choices for a long time.
Unintended Consequences of Coping Behaviours
Over time, our beliefs evolve into coping behaviours. These are the conscious thoughts and actions we use to manage, tolerate, or reduce stressful, harmful, or challenging situations. They act like mental toolkits, helping us maintain emotional stability.
Coping behaviours can be healthy (adaptive) or unhealthy (maladaptive).
Adaptive coping behaviours include actions that resolve or process stress without causing long-term harm. For example, regular exercise, listening to calming music, and getting enough sleep.
Maladaptive coping behaviours provide temporary relief but create more problems or harm in the long run. There are obvious examples of this like substance abuse, emotional eating, self-harm, or social withdrawal. But there are also plenty of subtle, more socially acceptable, maladaptive coping behaviours. Things like:
- Channelling all your nervous energy into hyper-focusing on work tasks, chores, or complex side projects. Using busyness as a shield can eventually lead to burnout and fails to address the root cause of your stress.
- Hyper-independence that looks like refusing to ask for help, declining emotional support, and handling every crisis entirely on your own. This creates emotional isolation and often intensifies feelings of overwhelm.
- Excessive preparation or over-researching a problem is a classic ‘safety behaviour’ driven by anxiety. It keeps you stuck in a loop of planning to avoid the fear of making a mistake or failing.
Why is Everything So Hard Right Now?
It could be that the coping behaviours you’ve relied on to make you functional are now making you miserable. You may even be able to see this happening, but you may not know how else to be. Some of these patterns probably feel like a part of your identity.
If you’ve spent decades building a life, establishing a career, nurturing relationships and developing daily routines, realising you’re struggling instead of feeling fulfilled can be really destabilising.
Let Me Reassure You…
In the therapy room, clients often seem to feel guilty about even coming to therapy in the first place. They believe they ‘should’ be happy, they ‘should’ be grateful for the life they have. But feeling low, anxious, unfulfilled, or lonely doesn’t mean you’re not grateful for the positive things in your life. These are signals or messengers carrying important information.
The nagging dissatisfaction and discomfort you’re experiencing is a sign you’re ready for growth and change. You’re course correcting from something built on difficult experiences and external expectations to something more authentic.
Psychologist Carl Jung calls this ‘individuating’ – becoming who you actually are rather than who you were supposed to be. Your discomfort is your deepest self refusing to be silent anymore. That voice saying ‘something’s not right’ is the healthiest part of you, insisting on truth even when the truth is inconvenient.
Remember, you’re not starting from zero. You have decades of accumulated wisdom, skills, self-knowledge, and resources your younger self lacked. And just because you now realise some of what you built was survival, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t you underneath it all. Now you’re able to identify the habits, patterns and behaviours that are no longer serving you so you can let them go.
My Tips for Coping When Everything Feels Hard
Shedding some of the old protective mechanisms that have served you so well up until now isn’t going to be easy, so it’s important you develop a compassionate inner voice to help you navigate this experience. Only then will you be able to face and acknowledge your true feelings and experiences and address the needs they represent.
The success metrics you might have measured yourself against previously also need to shift. Showing yourself more compassion means celebrating progress over achievement, or connection over perfection. I’m not suggesting you lower your standards. Instead, I want you to raise them to include dimensions you’ve been ignoring. Read Self-Compassion – The Missing Ingredient When You’re Running on Empty for more practical tips.
Finally, remember you don’t need to completely overhaul your life all in one go. I want you to start by testing new directions in small ways. For example, if you’re a chronic people-pleaser, small adjustments in communication or boundaries can reveal what’s possible before making bigger changes. Experimenting in small ways feels a lot less threatening but gives you valuable information, slowly building self-trust and increasing fulfilment.
Meet Jo – Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and EMDR Therapist in Knutsford, Cheshire
With more than 18 years of experience in the field of mental health, I help people gain clarity and untangle themselves from the past so they can experience more fulfilment and joy. If you’re struggling with any of the things described in this article, please get in touch. You can also join me on Instagram for more mental health education.
