Apathy is felt when you don’t really give a crap or have lost interest. You have no emotions towards something and you feel indifferent and detached from it. If you have experienced apathy around life or are currently experiencing it, you know it’s a horrible feeling. Apathy will keep you from living a life you enjoy. It will keep you from being productive in your day and your life and will take the meaning out of life and replace it with a feeling that nothing really matters. But, you can fight it. Following are 5 things to try if you are ready to fight your apathy.
1. Create A Vision For Your Future
When you experience apathy, it can stem from a lack of purpose in your life. When you don’t have any direction or vision for your future, then why would you care about anything?
We always have a choice to create a better life or get stuck where we are. But, sometimes we forget that.
I have a friend who has lost all interest in life because she has had a lot of struggles, and, instead of getting up and creating something good for herself, she would rather go back in time to a period where she was happy. She has no vision for her future, expect more of the same, and that’s a pretty depressing thought.
You must create a vision that pulls you forward to something better. You are capable of envisioning and achieving a life worth living. It’s available. But you have to make it happen.
If you don’t know where you want to go and what you want out of life, I highly recommend checking out Lifebook Online. When it comes to courses I’ve taken, it’s the number one program that I would recommend for getting rid of apathy in life.
It helps you think about what could be, rather than what is or what has happened.
It can help give you clarity on what you enjoy, what you want, and what will make you feel alive, on purpose, and important in life.
It can give you something to look forward to and something to appreciate in the moment.
2. Build Your Skills
In positive psychology, apathy is used to describe someone who doesn’t feel like they have the skills required to take on a challenge. Fortunately, knowledge to help build skills is easily accessible nowadays. You just have to get online and watch a video, take a class, or habitually learn about the skill you are trying to build. Then you need to put your new skill to practice.
Pick something you want to be better at and then go out there and find someone who can help you do that. No matter what skill you want to build, there is someone either offline or online who can help you do that.
3. Focus On Interacting With People Who Are Trying To Create A Better Future
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings. – Helen Keller
If you are constantly bombarded with negative images, stories, and predictions, then it can be very easy to develop an apathetic viewpoint towards life. Why bother caring about life when it’s so ugly and the ugliness is never going to end?
I like social media, sometimes, but a lot of time I find that it’s good for one thing – to depress the hell out of you! It’s full of people who focus on doom and gloom, and if you don’t use it wisely, it can be detrimental to your mental health.
Luckily there are a lot of optimistic people on social media as well. And if you can find them, and follow them while ignoring the others, life becomes much more positive.
And this rule applies to everything. There are negative people in your life who focus on doom and gloom, but there are other people who are positive and happy. Surround yourself with people who are positive and make you feel good and alive rather than scared and beaten.
That’s another thing about Lifebook Online – it has a group of people who are actively trying to create a better life for themselves, and you get inspired in so many ways. It helps you connect with the people who are doing good things and creating good things. It’s much more rewarding than listening to negative people yammer on all day.
4. Overcome Learned Helplessness
Learned helpless causes apathy towards life and will definitely affect your productivity. You may not even know you have it.
It occurs when you believe that you don’t have the ability to avoid bad things in life. Negative past experiences that you’ve had to go through over and over again can cause this limiting belief can stop you from even trying to have a good life because you don’t think you have any control over anything.
For instance, I have a friend who has always experienced negative intimate relationships. She has had jerk after jerk and she is in a state of learned helplessness. She doesn’t even bother trying to get out of her situation because the past has taught her that she will just end up in another relationship like this.
The good news is that you can overcome learned helplessness. Check out this detailed article on how to overcome learned helplessness.
5. Seek Professional Help
Apathy can stem from medical issues, such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and the list goes on and on. Moreover, some drugs can cause apathy.
I know a few people who had conditions that left them struggling mentally for no known reason until they figured out they had a physical condition causing it.
It’s important that you be honest with your doctor about what’s going on and let them help you discover any issues that may be occurring.
And, if your doctor doesn’t help you, find another one that will. Doctors are not gods. They are not always right, and sometimes they are apathetic towards their patients!
Sometimes doctors miss issues, such as hypothyroidism, and you are left feeling things like ‘this is just the way I am’ when that isn’t true.
