I feel like I have no strength or desire to live. What to do?

Blows of fate, crushing failures and painful losses can accompany a person at any stage of life. Sometimes it happens that the world loses its colors, hope disappears, the meaning of existence disappears. It is in moments like these that the desire to fight and continue to exist disappears. And many begin to wonder what to do if they don’t want to live at all? These types of difficult moments must be overcome against all odds, even when you want to give up. It doesn’t matter what depressing and painful situations a person faces during a period of life. It is important not to succumb to their influence. After all, every day you live brings with it something new, previously unknown, and interesting. Today the sky is black and there is a thunderstorm, and tomorrow the sky will sparkle with a variety of colors reflected in the warm sunshine.

A similar thing happens in human existence. It’s as if there is no way out of the host of problems today, but tomorrow something happens that solves all the problems in one fell swoop. After all, everything can be improved or corrected, only death is irreversible. Therefore, as long as a person exists physically, hope must always glimmer within him.

I feel like I have no strength or desire to live. What to do?

This material is part of a collaboration between the Need Help Foundation and the Yandex.Q service.
The commentary was prepared for the project “SOS Questions” - these are safe and competent answers from experts to questions from people who find themselves in a crisis situation.

Photo: K. Mitch Hodge / Unsplash.com

Alena Kizino

Psychologist at the Children's Hospice "House with a Lighthouse"

People often look for an answer to the question: “Why am I living?” It is absolutely normal for anyone to try to understand what their role is. But if you feel completely exhausted, then this condition may have both a psychological and physiological reason.

Firstly, you should go see a doctor . It cannot be ruled out that you have no desire to live because you feel unwell, something physically bothers you, or you have a chronic disease.

Thoughts are the source of suffering

So we feel bad.
Very bad. Every thought about what happened causes the condition to worsen... Please note - it is the thought. That is, our thoughts are the source of our suffering. Let's figure out the mechanism of what is happening and, accordingly, find ways of what we can do to change the condition. There is an event that is inherently neutral. It is a fact. Objective. Which exists regardless of how we treat it, what we do. And there is our reaction to the fact - grief, tears, anger, suffering and much more. How are they connected? What leads from an objectively existing fact to our suffering and experiences?

There really is a “spacer” between them - these are our thoughts that arose in response to our beliefs. Let's look at an example. Fact: a woman’s husband unexpectedly left her. This is an event that happened in reality. What is the consequence? First of all, let's see what's going on in the head of the abandoned wife. The source of suffering is a bouquet of thoughts:

“I was left alone, and it was terrible. Loneliness is terrible. Nobody needs me. I can’t handle providing for myself and my children on my own. I will be poor. I’ll be poor, sick, old, useless to anyone.”

There may be many layers, but the essence is the same - in the future there will be nothing that will compensate for my internal inability to independently build a full-fledged life for myself and the lives of my children. And this is not an assessment. This is a statement. And when you honestly answered yourself and wrote down the entire bouquet of attitudes that you broadcast to yourself every time you think about what happened, now you have a chance to “eat the elephant piece by piece,” divide your entire “bouquet” into separate “flowers” and find ways to work with these beliefs. And correlate them with reality and understand - is this really so? Or is it just my fears and weakness that I am quite capable of overcoming? It's a lot of work, but it's worth it.

Forget about magic kickoffs

From childhood we are taught that inaction is always bad. Laziness is a vice, idleness is a sin, procrastination is the lot of losers. And no matter how bad it is, you need to get your butt off the couch, get out of your comfort zone, work, engage in self-development, be active and productive. It is not surprising that, having fallen out of a resourceful state, the first thing a person does is begin to blame himself for it.

Next comes attempts to force oneself to work, punish for inaction and stimulate oneself with threats. All of these are types of negative motivation. HR expert Daniel Pink argues that neither punishment, nor intimidation and pressure, nor the carrot and stick approach works in the long term. On the contrary, this approach leads to the fact that a person no longer sees the meaning in what he is doing.

The very existence of laziness as a vice or negative character trait in the modern world is being questioned.

Some experts say Laziness Does Not Existthat laziness does not exist at all. Others believe that it is a defense mechanism that saves us from overwork. Behind inaction there can be a whole tangle of reasons and feelings: fear of failure, lack of motivation, fatigue or illness, and, ultimately, a banal reluctance to do what is needed.

If you fall out of a resourceful state, you should think about taking a break and resting, as far as circumstances allow. Or switch to a kind of energy saving mode and do only the most necessary things, and postpone all other tasks until better times or delegate them to loved ones, friends and colleagues.

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