8 Ways to Cope When Life Seems to Have Lost Meaning
Table of Contents
Dr. Marco M. Zahedi
Medical Director, Compassion Recovery Center
Dr. Michael Majeski
Licensed Psychologist (LP), Compassion Recovery Center
Everyone has periods of feeling down or bad. In fact, 3.8%, or almost 1 out of every 25 people, suffers from depression. Feeling like things have lost meaning can be an important sign that your mental health is going badly and that you need help. Taking steps to feel better, to improve your daily experience, and to add meaning back into your life will help you slowly improve.
There’s no quick fix to getting your mental health back on track. Instead, it’s important to talk to your doctor, to be open about how you feel with friends and family, and to make consistent and small steps to make things better. Let’s look at 8 ways to cope when life seems to have lost meaning.
1. Practice Mindfulness
Most of us spend a lot of time caught up in thought, worrying, feeling bad because our thoughts take us to negative places. Spending time in your thoughts and caught up with the past or the future means you aren’t experiencing the moment, which means that you’re going to have trouble feeling fulfilled, connected, or like you’re participating. That’s even true if you’re spending time with close friends and family, if you’re caught up being stressed or worrying about something else or lost in negative thoughts, you’re not connecting and you’re not feeling fulfilled, even when you’re doing meaningful things. Mindfulness is the practice of living in the moment and experiencing what you are doing in the moment. Here, you can try mindfulness meditation, therapies like mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), or even apps like headspace to get started. Here, meditation is part of learning to focus on what you are doing and to be in the present. That will help – but will require active engagement and actively trying to push thoughts away so you can enjoy what you are doing.
2. Actively Improve Your Space and Your Life
It’s important to take active steps to improve your life and to add meaning. Normally that starts by adding structure, taking care of your space, and looking into reasons why you might not feel great about life or where you’re at.
That might look like:
- Clean take care of your space so you live in a pleasant environment
- Look into reducing or removing things that cause stress or are not fulfilling. E.g., if you dislike your job, look int what you can do to change jobs and find a more rewarding career, if you feel like you’re stuck, look into what you can do to take a next step towards somewhere you want to be
- Make small but positive changes like setting up a routine, going to the gym, or joining a social club, take time to adjust to that, and then make another – they add up.
Eventually, you’ll want to look at what in your life needs improvement or fixing and then take small steps to make things better. The idea is to take care of yourself in the future – so you will have a better experience.
3. Set Small Goals
Setting and achieving goals is an important part of feeling fulfilled and like things are meaningful. At the same time, the worse you feel, the harder it is to commit to goals or to put in the work. That often means you’ll want to break large goals into smaller ones, take things a step at a time, and get to achieve your small goals as you work towards a bigger picture. What does that look like? Applying for a new job a week if you want a new job. Taking 15 minutes per day to clean up something in your home if you want your home to be cleaner. Taking a day a week to do meal prep for 3 days. Enrolling in a part time college course to move towards an education goal. Look at your goals, figure out how to break them down, and then take small steps. You will get there eventually.
4. Invest in Social Time
Friends and family make us feel fulfilled and cared for. This means that investing in social time is important for ensuring that you feel good about yourself and your life. Here, you normally want to look into one-on-one time with a few people at a time, so you can connect, have meaningful conversations, and get to feel fulfilled out of it.
What does that mean? A few days a week should have close contact with one or two people. You can also engage in social interaction with more people, but it’s less important for feeling fulfilled. However, the barrier to social time with people can be fairly low. For example, having a video call.
5. Take Care of Your Body
Feeling good in your body is a first step to feeling better about your life. That means that simple steps like setting a sleep/wake schedule, taking time off to do nothing before bed, and exercising can immensely benefit how you feel about life. Of course, that won’t be immediate. Getting a few weeks of regular sleep and eating well won’t fix your mental health. However, it will set up a baseline over time that allows you to be healthier.
- Eat healthy meals following the guidelines of something like myplate.gov about 80% of the time
- Go to bed and wake up at about the same time most days of the week.
- Have a wind down period before bed where you turn off screens and stop doing anything stressful or that requires energy
- Engage in 30-60 minutes of light to moderate exercise per day at least 5 days a week (think walking, cycling, swimming, etc.)
You might be surprised to learn that getting enough sleep and walking about 30 minutes a day can significantly benefit your mental health. However, it’s true.
6. Engage in Meaningful Activities
If you’re feeling like life has lost its meaning, it might be time to look for meaning. For most of us, that means doing things to help others. Engaging in meaningful activities means working to improve life for yourself and for those around you. That can mean finding a meaningful job like work in care or in a charity. It might also mean volunteering your time to help others. Or, helping friends and family with projects and goals. The important thing is that you feel that you are adding value, and you can see results and feel good about yourself.
7. Explore Spirituality
Spirituality can be an important part of getting to feel good about yourself and your life. Spirituality can also be about religion or not. Here, spirituality is simply the acknowledgement that life is more than just a series of mechanical processes, there’s wonder and mystery in life. For many of us, finding that means being open to it, experiencing life in new ways, being in nature, and working on ourselves.
8. Get Professional Help
Even if you live alone or have always dealt with things feeling wrong or off by yourself, you don’t have to. There is professional help for mental health problems, and it can give you the tools you need to cope with life’s ups and downs and to build yourself up so that you have fewer problems.
If you or a loved one is struggling, it’s important to talk to your doctor. From there, you can move into counseling and therapy, with a treatment program tailored to your individual need and problems –so you can treat not only the symptoms but also the underlying cause.
