October 2, 2025 • 40 mins
Hitting rock bottom is one of the most painful human experiences - when the future is blurry, the past feels heavy, and you barely recognize the person staring back in the mirror. Maybe it’s the end of a relationship, losing your job, battling addiction, or simply feeling like everything you built has crumbled. In this episode, we explore what those lowest points really feel like, why we sometimes end up there, and how, against all odds, they can become the very place where healing and transformation begin.
We explore:
• What rock bottom feels like
• The role of identity collapse and self-concept clarity
• Passivity, external locus of control, and addiction as routes to rock bottom
• Our dark night of the soul and searching for meaning
• Why rock bottom can motivate change
• 5 tips climbing out and rebuilding self-concept
If you’ve ever felt like you’ve lost control, lost yourself, or lost your way - this episode is for you.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. Guys, it's a big one today.
I just have to prepare you. We're going to talk
(00:44):
about rock bottom. We're going to talk about that moment
where you kind of look around at your life and
you think, how the hell did I get here? Not
in like the cute rom con style sense, but in
that dropping way where everything feels like it has collapsed
at once. Maybe you've lost your job, or the relationship
(01:08):
you thought with last forever has just ended, or you
are staring at your bank account and the balance can't
even cover rent, or all three of those things are
happening at once, or maybe nothing dramatic has happened, but
you just woke up one day and realized, Hey, I
don't even recognize myself anymore. I don't even like myself
and I definitely don't like my life. That is exactly
(01:31):
what we are diving in today. That moment, that pit
in the stomach is what so many of us call
rock bottom, that destruction. We're going to talk about everything
to do with this infamous low point, some of the
examples that I can give you, including some from you guys,
the listeners, why we get to that point, how we
(01:53):
get to that point, as well as looking at how
we might interpret rock Bottom a little bit differently to
hopefully maybe see it as a little bit of a springboard,
or maybe is something positive, if that's even possible. The
question I'm really just interested in is is rock Bottom
actually a fresh start? Is it actually a bit of
a trampoline, or is it a place that we actually
(02:16):
all need to get to at some point in our
life in order to move to the next chapter. We're
gonna talk about it together. We're gonna talk about, as well, addiction,
the dark Knight of the soul, if you've heard of
that concept, how psychology and spirituality really intersect at rock Bottom,
chronic illness, so many other things. This episode is broad
and wide. If any of you resonate with this topic
(02:39):
at the moment. I'm so glad you're here. I'm sending
you so much love. I see you, I hear you.
I'm glad this has found you. And I will metaphorically
hold your hand through the microphone through the screen for
this episode. And I really hope that what we talk
about today will provide some solace or maybe just a
little bit of understanding. And what I'm sure is a
(03:01):
very confusing, very strange time. I promised it won't last forever.
I have been there, and maybe, just maybe it is
preparing you for something more. Let's explore that possibility. So,
without further ado, let's get into the psychology of rock bottom.
(03:24):
I think part of the reason this idea of rock
bottom resonates with so many of us is because we
all kind of know what it feels like or we've
seen it. It's also incredibly personal. There isn't one objective definition.
Your rock bottom might not look like mine, and mine
might not look like yours. I know that my rock
(03:44):
bottom happened in twenty twenty one. I definitely talked about this,
but I went through two devastating breakups in one year,
literally within nine months of each other. I lost about
fifty percent of my friends in the three months after
I move cities where I moved cities to a place
where I didn't have a job, I didn't have anything
to do, I didn't know anybody. My mental health was terrible,
(04:06):
my bank account was a disaster. I was lonely, I
was tired, I was lost, and I can admit now
I was probably drinking a little bit too much and
everything was just going wrong. I also infamously had another
moment like this last year. I've spoken about my mental
breakdown in a couple of episodes, and that was another
really low rock bottom point. And I know it sounds
(04:27):
weird to say, I'm sure that I could probably go
lower someday. Part of me thinks that there is another
rock bottom waiting for me. Is it terrifying? Yes, I
think part of it is also exciting, and I'll explain why.
So that was my experience, And you know, that's just
one person. For another person, it could be an addiction
spiraling out of control. For another, it's like a quiet
(04:50):
collapse of your sense of purpose. One person DMed me
about finding out that her boyfriend had cheated on her
the same day she got fired another and said it
was when she realized she was in a cult. Losing
a parent to cancer was another one. Someone said when
they realized they were only confident when they blacked out,
or when they had to move back home with their
(05:11):
parents after going into a lot of debt for college.
And yet all these are very different, right, but when
people talk about them, there are these shared threads, these
like common emotional fingerprints that help us know, Okay, I'm here,
this looks like bottom to me, this is the bottom.
It can't get any worse than that, or then what
(05:32):
it is right now? Psychologists will tell you there are
certain markers that come up again and again when people
come into their offices and describe their lowest points. The first,
and perhaps the biggest, is a loss of control and
a loss of sense of self. Maybe you were once
the ambitious one, the reliable one, the one who had
(05:54):
it all together, and now it feels like where is
that person? You can barely recognize yourself in the You're
not making decisions anymore. Life is just kind of happening
to you. There was a twenty sixteen paper published in
the journal Academy of Management Review, and it used this
phrase to refer to facing rock bottom. It used this
(06:16):
phrase the crystallization of discontent. The crystallization of discontent fancy word,
but it basically means this point where you just feel
a total sense of loss. You feel a loss of self,
you feel social disorientation, even failure. And the authors say
that this leads to this feeling that you don't even
(06:37):
have an identity. It's that really painful moment when you
realize that who you are on the inside and who
you are in the world do not line up, and
maybe you can't find your way back to who you
really feel or think that you are, or who you
are in the past. That's the first marker. The next
marker is an inability to imagine the future. Bottom. Time
(07:02):
feels very slow and very sticky. You can't really see
beyond the next day. Sometimes you maybe you can't even
see beyond the next hour. You can't picture it getting better.
You can't picture yourself ever, not feeling how you feel
right now. Psychologists studying depression describe this as future discounting.
(07:24):
Future discounting is where distress literally makes it harder for
your brain to project yourself into tomorrow. I'll be the
first one to tell you, even if you can't believe
it right now, I promise you this feeling won't last forever.
It's just the current state that you're in that is
(07:44):
convincing you that it will. So there's this future discounting.
Then there's helplessness and regret. Maybe you've tried to fix
things over and over. You've tried to get your drinking
under control, You've tried to find your way back on
the right path, but nothing has worked, and now you
feel like, similar to what we said before, it never will.
(08:06):
This connects directly to Martin Siegman's idea of learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness we've talked about it on the podcast before.
This is a psychological state where after we basically experience
a number of really stressful events or life experiences, especially
(08:27):
experiences where we feel like we have no control, we
basically just assume that we don't and we give up.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
We get so.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Tired of trying over and over just for the outcome
to stay the same that we'd stop trying. Even when
there are steps presented to us, even when someone from
the outside could say, well, this is exactly what you
need to do, we just can't see it. And finally,
the final marker of rock bottom often is associated with
(08:57):
some kind of collapse, relationship breakdown, financial hardship, burnout, chronic illness.
Sometimes it's all these things at once. That collapse can
feel like a life demolition. Everything you thought was holding
you up, everything that you were relying on, has crumbled,
(09:17):
and you're kind of left standing in the rubble, being like,
what where do I even start right now? Like, what
is the first thing I need to rebuild when everything
is on fire? So maybe you're listening to this and thinking, oh, yeah,
that's totally me right now, I'm in that moment. Maybe
you've been there before, Maybe you're terrified of ending up
(09:38):
there one day, whatever you are thinking, wherever you are
right now, whatever you are feeling right now, I think
it's important to recognize rock bottom is not permanent. It
is absolutely not. People cannot live their whole lives in
a permanent rock bottom. We're going to discuss that a
little bit more later on, but I just want to
(10:01):
give you that reminder so that if rock bottom is
where you are right now, as we go into why
this may be has happened to you, you have a
little bit of hope for the future. So if you
are in this place, you might be asking yourself like,
how did I end up here? When did this begin?
One significant cause of rock bottom is that we may
(10:25):
have just experienced the entire collapse of our identity and
our self concept. This happens actually quite frequently when we
first reach adulthood. A particularly useful lens for us to
understand is this idea from Jennifer Campbell of self concept clarity.
(10:47):
Self concept clarity is essentially how clearly and confidently you
are able to say who you are or able to
identify who you are. It's the difference between someone who
can describe their values, describe their priorities, have a sense
of consistency within their goals and how they act, versus
(11:08):
someone who feels like they are living out seven different
identities and that their whole life is fragmented. When people
hit rock bottom, this clarity of self concept often plummets
your sense of identity. The lens through which you interpret
the world becomes deeply unstable. We can see why that
happens a lot in our twenties because things are shifting
(11:31):
so rapidly, things that we often rest a lot of
our identity on like our relationship, like what school we
go to, like our job, like our family, and because
you don't have anything to anchor yourself to, your internal
compass gets kind of thrown off the mark. Now, if
you have high self concept clarity, it's not just that
(11:54):
you know who you are, it's that you also know
what you need, so you are actively able to seek
social support, You are actively able to see your way
out of a crisis, to nourish good quality relationships. It
might not be that surprising, but research consistently ties low
clarity with mental health difficulties and loneliness, and also things
(12:17):
like anxiety and depression. This is all contributing to this
feeling of being at rock bottom. You can see why
maybe this has a lot to do with just the
decade that you're in, that this is just something that
you don't have to experience, but a lot of people
are for very similar reasons. Another significant pathway to rock bottom,
(12:38):
and something that I feel links to losing a sense
of identity is living in a passive state. This is
often described in psychology as having an external locus of control.
This is where we basically end up maybe unconsciously perceiving
life as something that happens to us rather than something
(12:58):
that we can influence. You might drive through your days
feeling like decisions are kind of imposed on you, that
everyone else has these opportunities and they're just kind of
passing you by, that every little thing you try to
get out of your situation does not work. Over time,
this sense of passivity accumulates stress and kind of creates
(13:20):
a slow motion resignation to life again. Studies have shown
that adults with an external locus of control are more
prone to anxiety, depression, and learned helplessness, particularly during major
life transitions like those that are common in our twenties.
In real life, what that means is that you know
you hate your job, but you feel like you can't
(13:43):
leave there's no other option. You know you don't like
your relationship or your friendships, but you feel like you
will never find anything or anyone better. You know that
your mental health is spiraling. You know that you're more
anxious than you've ever been. You know that things are
going wrong, but for some reason you cannot seem to
(14:03):
find a solution. Small choices get deferred until suddenly you
wake up and you feel trapped, which is of course
the predecessor to hitting rock Bottom. When looking into the
research on this topic, a lot of it's centered around
the role of addiction. And this can really be caused
by and contribute to a lot of the factors that
(14:26):
we've already mentioned before. And I'm not just talking about
an addiction to certain substances. I'm talking about addiction to chaos,
addiction to a certain kind of relationship, addiction to a
certain person. Before we get into this, I feel like
this is a whole new chapter for this episode. So
we are going to take a short break, go get
(14:47):
a cup of tea or wash them dishes. We will
be right back. We basically like we can't talk about
rock Bottom without talking about a d Someone even say
that the addiction space is where the idea of rock
Bottom was really invented or given a name. It is
one of the most powerful pathways to this moment or
(15:10):
this period of despair and loss, and just like fragmentation,
not just because of the behaviors themselves, but because of
the cascading kind of effects addiction will have on every
part of our life. Again, we're not just talking about
substances here. We're not just talking about alcohol or drugs
(15:31):
or gambling or whatever it is. There are so many things, relationships,
situations that we can become addicted to because in some
sense they give us a feeling of being actually very alive,
and when everything's going wrong, sometimes that's the only feeling
we want. A lot of neuroscience research, especially the work
of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, shows that addiction
(15:55):
of any form rewires the brain's reward systems. Normally, normally,
dopamine helps us feel motivated. We know what makes us
feel satisfied when we meet our goals. We know it
helps us experience pleasure. But what addiction does is hijack
this system, making it so that the substance that we
are engaging in, or the behavior, or the relationship or
(16:19):
the situation is the primary source of reward. And so,
over time, everyday activities that used to bring you joy,
like spending time with your friends, exercising, accomplishing goals hobbies,
they lose their appeal. They can't give you the same
hit that the substance or this thing can give you.
So as natural rewards or long term rewards lose, meaning,
(16:43):
self regulation through those things becomes harder and harder. So
the only resource we have left, or the only coping
strategy is to engage in the addictive behavior even when
it is clearly causing us harm. And with that tension
of knowing something is damaging us but feeling unable to stop,
it is very easy to see how that spirals and
(17:05):
spirals into rock bottom. The addictive behaviors basically begin to
dominate everything. They dominate obviously our life, but they dominate
that through our time, through our energy, through what we
think about, meaning that it kind of is like a
balloon that is expanding in a tight space that leaves
not much room for anything else. We also know it
(17:25):
erodes the social and structural scaffolding of a fulfilled life.
Relationships really do suffer under addictive tension. You know, Addiction
can lead us to break people's trust, to be irritable,
to neglect our relationship, to have arguments, and it can
(17:46):
also lead to tension at work, you know, jobs, maybe lost,
bills go unpaid, health deteriorates, and as these external supports collapse,
people often feel very very alone, as though the world
is closing in. And that's where rock bottom hits. At
that intersection of internal and external breakdown. Your rewired brain
(18:07):
is craving the addictive substance or behavior, and then you
also are no longer grounded by support or by things
outside of the addiction. It's very easy to kind of
float away with it. Addiction is obviously a very fast
tracked pathway to this. You don't have to have experienced
an addiction in order to feel rock bottom, but it definitely,
(18:29):
I think is a great way of demonstrating how it's
this culmination of a lot of things that pushes people
to the edge. I will also say rock bottom rarely
happens overnight. People can experience severe tragedy, and rock bottom
doesn't actually occur until days, weeks, months later, when they
(18:52):
realize what they've lost, or when they realize all the
other things that have kind of disappeared from their life.
So more often than not, it is a gradual accumulation
of strain, magnified by certain life events, by relationship breakdown,
by psychological breakdown, or kind of coming at once. So
this is why you might sometimes hear psychologists refer to
(19:16):
or compare hitting bottom to experiencing trauma, because similar to
when we experience trauma, it can often trigger a state
of survival mode. We can be so overwhelmed with kind
of what's going on around us or within us that
we either switch into the state of being on constant
hi alert and hypervigilance, or alternatively, we completely shut down.
(19:40):
At rock bottom, you feel these huge emotions sadness, despair, shame, guilt,
maybe anxiety, of course, but equally you might actually feel nothing,
might feel completely apathetic, because at the base of it,
(20:01):
what's really happening is that we feel out of control.
And if we were to meaningfully try and engage with
all the things that are happening in our life right now,
it would overwhelm us so completely we don't think that
we could manage, and so we just kind of turn
our back to it. It's not a deliberate thing. It's
a survival strategy. And here's where it gets complicated, because yeah,
(20:23):
that really sucks, and that's really awful and our life
is falling apart. But sometimes people interpret rock bottom as
kind of a good thing. Some people talk about it
like it is kind of necessary. It's a kind of
force that demands confrontation with ourselves. We have to get
(20:48):
to this point in order to confront deeper things that
we may never actually look face on. So you may
have heard of this phrase, the dark night of the soul.
It originates from a poem from like thousands of years ago,
maybe hundreds of years ago, like the sixteenth century, by
Saint John of the Cross. He was this Spanish priest,
(21:09):
and he basically used this phrase to describe a spiritual
phase where God withdrew his comfort, leaving people feeling lost
and alone. With this idea in mind, it was kind
of believed that this was a necessary path for spiritually
or religious people, where they had to kind of shed
self reliance and any existing detachments they had in their
(21:32):
life to have a deeper connection with God. God puts
them in this terrible hard place so that they find him.
Of course, that is a very religious and spiritually heavy meaning,
but psychologists and spiritual thinkers nowadays use it to describe
a lot more than just a spiritual epiphany. It's where
(21:52):
everything in life kind of falls apart and we are
compelled to really confront who we really are. Carl Jung
suggests that these dark knights are actually unavoidable psychological rights
of passage that force us to face what he calls
the shadow aspects of ourselves. The shadow aspects of ourselves
are the thoughts, impulses, fears, patterns, parts of our identity
(22:16):
that we habitually ignore or deny that are secretly sabotaging us.
And he argued that if we don't ever have these
moments of confronting them, the shadow will continue to control
us unconsciously. And so it's through these painful moments that
we are able to actually confront these messier parts of
(22:39):
us that are not working. You may have heard the
name Victor Frankel. He is a Holocaust survivor and a psychologist,
and he wrote this book, Man Search for Meaning, And
in this book, he basically argued that even when life
strips us of almost everything, our freedom, security, purpose, family,
(23:01):
there remains one freedom we can never lose, which is
the ability to choose how we respond. And so rock
bottom in this sense, at this existential crossroads, basically is
when we find ourselves and our true power clearer than
(23:22):
we've ever noticed it before. Basically, when the external world collapses,
you are forced to dig deep and find true meaning internally.
As paradoxical as it sounds, rock bottom is actually a
real fertile ground for growth, purpose, a renewed sense of direction.
(23:44):
So if we look at it in this light, you know,
maybe this is the place where momentum actually begins. There's
a blank page in front of you. You've been gifted
the chance to start over, and whilst that blank page
is terrifying, it can also be liberating. Modern psychology echoes
(24:06):
this through the idea of post traumatic growth. We know
post traumatic stress. Post Traumatic growth, though, is a concept
that kind of came to light in the nineties that
suggested that people who endure profound struggle from trauma to illness,
to loss, to major life changes to addiction often reports
(24:29):
significant positive changes afterwards. This might include things like a
deeper appreciation of life, stronger relationships, new priorities, heightened sense
of personal strength, and sometimes even a real deep spiritual development.
Of course, this is not always going to be the case.
(24:52):
We don't want to make like a mass generalization that
anyone who goes through trauma is going to come out
better than before, but psychologically from them description, this does
make sense. In some cases. Hitting rock bottom again disrupts
the old ways of being there routines the identities that
no longer serve us. You really have to evaluate, Hey,
(25:14):
what do I really care? About what do I really
believe in? Is this discomfort a sign that I meant
for more? One final way that we can understand this,
just to give you a few explanations, is through the
lens of crisis theory. And this idea is that when
(25:35):
a person faces a crisis so overwhelming that old coping
strategies no longer work, they are forced to develop new ones.
In other words, we are pushed to a point where
we really have to see how deeply can go, and
we really have to encounter and really acknowledge and appreciate
(25:58):
every single strength that we may have, every single skill
that we may have in our talkit, and the theory
is that that actually makes us feel better or more
capable in the long run. I've been really into ultra
marathon documentaries recently, and just like ultra marathoning in general,
as an observer, not a participant obviously, And something that
(26:20):
I've noticed in these documentaries is that so many of
these athletes talk about this idea of the pain cave.
I first heard about it from Courtney Dolwater, who is
my dream guest by the way, just the coolest woman ever.
If anyone has a hookup I she is my number
one dream guest. This woman is so cool. She's like
(26:41):
one of the best ultra marathon runners male or female
in the world. And she describes the pain cave as
this point in a race where every single part of
you wants to give up, Every single fiber of you
is saying, please, can we quit? And yet you find
this new reserve of energy and motivation and you push through,
(27:03):
and that is when you discover this whole new level
of what you're capable of, but also of who you are.
And I love that idea, Like I don't to be fair,
I don't ever want to be in that situation, Like
this woman is running like five hundred miles, which I
don't even I can't even compute how actually long that is.
But it's so fascinating to see other people discuss it
(27:24):
and to see how other people have discovered this. Maybe
that's really what this moment is for you. You're in
the pain cave? What can you discover about yourself? So
a really important caveat here for people who are experiencing addiction.
There is definitely this really strange rhetoric online that says
that the only way to overcome your addiction is to
(27:47):
find your rock bottom first. A lot of people talk about,
you know, what was the moment when you really realized
you needed to change? What was the moment where you
hit rock bottom where you know, you did something terrible
to your family, or you did something morally despicable or
something that disgusted you, and that in itself was like
a catalyst for change. I do think that sometimes this
(28:09):
can be very unhelpful. Firstly, who gets to decide or
define what that rock bottom is? And secondly it also
means that people really struggling with addiction, what they may
find is that they feel like they have to push
further in order to recover. So, like aside from the
(28:33):
clear health risks of this, people waiting for this elusive
rock bottom point may find that it never comes, may
find that they can always go deeper, may find themselves
further isolating themselves or burning bridges, or tunneling further into
their addiction to get to this point so that they
can rebuild. So, if you are facing challenges related to addiction,
(28:57):
I just want to say you do not need to
wait until the crisis point to get help or to change.
Same with mental health as well. At any stage the
moment that you realize, hey, this is really not working
for me. This doesn't feel good. Why am I doing this?
My life isn't happy. You can say to yourself, this
is my rock bottom. You don't have to wait until
(29:17):
it meets or surpasses someone else's story of rock bottom
to be able to get help. So, although rock bottom,
as I've described it can be seen as transformative, I
would urge you if you're struggling with mental health, with addiction,
rock bottom isn't a requirement for change. It's not at all.
With that being said, if you are here right now,
(29:40):
if you are at or near rock bottom, the question
really becomes, how do you climb out? I'm sorry, I
have to say it. I can't give you an instant fix,
I'm sorry, And I cannot give you a neat five
step plan that's gonna magically restore everything in your life
that has been removed or that you have lost, maybe
(30:01):
for a reason, but I am going to give you
some tools of how to make a start. First, and
some people won't like that, I'm gonna say this, but first,
let yourself grieve and show some self pity, let yourself
be sad for yourself. I think this sounds and feels
counterintuitive because the current culture around us really forces this
(30:26):
toxic positivity onto us all and tells us that you
are not supposed to let yourself suffer, or to feel
hard emotions, or to feel bad for yourself. Suppressing emotions
doesn't mean they disappear, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
It actually just makes them even stronger and likely to
pop up in other ways. If you're in this position,
(30:48):
you've likely had to let go of a lot, You
have likely lost a lot, you have likely really suffered.
Grieve these parts, feel those emotions. Maybe it's also a
way to counteract this numb state that you found yourself in.
You can't process an emotion if you never feel it,
(31:09):
so if you're at rock bottom, you're allowed to sit
in self pity for a little while. That is part
of acceptance. It's also part of processing and therefore being
able to act and move on from this moment. Second,
we've talked about this a few times, acknowledge that this
is your rock bottom. Narrative psychology shows us that the
(31:31):
way we frame our life stories shapes our well being
and how we view our lives, and that is incredibly important.
When you say to yourself, yes, this is my rock bottom,
you're not just naming your pain, which is obviously important,
but you're also situating it so it becomes a chapter
of your life, not the whole book. And that shift
(31:53):
and perspective from this is the end my life sucks
to this is just part of my story, an important
part of my story. The dark Knight of my soul
can soften the pain that you're feeling, or at least
give it a leaning or a reason. It transforms rockbottom
from this infinite pit that we know comes from future
(32:13):
discounting into this definable moment that allows you to kind
of almost project into the future and realize that in hindsight,
maybe I'm going to see this differently. Maybe not right now,
but maybe in the future. Next, seek out what we
call little islands of competence. At rock bottom, everything feels overwhelming.
(32:35):
Where do I start? What's the first step? What do
I do? The future is very blurry. The big picture
is a way too much to handle. So don't don't
handle the big picture. Focus on this small wins. Focus
on one thing you can do today that is going
to increase your coping, increase your productivity, increase your relationships,
(32:56):
improve things for you. You don't need to put the
added pressure on your to like overhaul your life in
a night or in a week, or to bounce back
and be like the happiest person alive, and that there
is some kind of timeline that you need to get
over this within a month or it's gonna last forever.
Just pick one small thing you think you can control
and do that for yourself today. Cook yourself a meal,
(33:17):
take yourself for a walk, journal for two minutes. Even
tiny moments of success begin to restore your sense of agency, competence,
and confidence. They remind you like, hey, yeah, I can't
control this big, terrible mess that I'm in. But I
can decide that I'm gonna go and order ice cream tonight.
(33:39):
I can decide that I'm gonna get out of the
house and do some exercise. I can decide that I'm
gonna book this appointment with my doctor. Those things snowball
into bigger things over time. Fourth and maybe this actually
should have been third, because I think it links to
our I think it links to one of the things
one of the tips I gave above. But just see
your situation in the context that it's actually existing rather
(34:02):
than the context that you've created for it. Zoom out
a little bit. It's natural to feel like no one
could possibly understand what you're going through, But I think
this is one way in which comparison might actually be
a good thing. It can be really helpful to look
at others who face similar struggles to normalize your own experience.
(34:23):
You know, a few months back, when I released that
episode talking about my mental breakdown, oh my god, I
was so scared and I was also in a terrible place.
But the amount of comments and messages I received from
people saying it had helped or that they were going
through the same thing was amazing. And guess what, it
(34:43):
made me feel better. Just the idea that this was
not something that I had to experience alone, or that
I was not the only person in the world who
had this feeling felt great because I didn't feel lonely
or isolated in my experience. So looking to other podcasts,
to books, to interviews, whatever it is, of people who
(35:07):
are going through the same thing, they are all social
opportunities for validation of what you're going through. They are
also living proof that other people have had challenges and
I've they've found their way through. That's vicarious learning, right,
a vicarious form of validation of like, hey, if they
were okay, maybe I will be as well. Last but
(35:29):
certainly not least change your environment. I'm not saying move
to a new city straight away. In fact, there have
been studies that have shown that your problems will follow
you there. But sometimes you just need small environmental shifts
that signal to your brain that are fresh started's underway.
And also, maybe you can move to a new city.
(35:51):
It might not fix all your problems, maybe all fix
one problem, and maybe that one problem is where everything
is stemming from. Just change your surroundings. Environmental psychology shows
us that our environment shapes our mindset, So rearranging your room,
buying new bedding, taking a different route to work, spending
more time in nature. These small cues can help break
(36:14):
old associations and create space for new patterns. Because you're
not in the same environment. They tell your brain and
your nervous system, hey, things are different now. Look around us,
things are different, which does make change feel more possible.
Making those really small changes in your routine leaves a
(36:34):
less room for old patterns and behaviors to resurface, and
that is what gives you a fresh approach to life.
Rock Bottom is truly terrifying. It can feel like the
end of everything we know. And yet I want to
remind you again, across psychology, philosophy, across spirituality and religion
(36:55):
and lived experience, we see that it's not the end.
For a lot of people. It is the pivot, it's
the threshold, it's the trampoline. If you are here right now,
I promise you that there is a point in the future.
There is a version of you in the future looking
at you right now thinking gosh, I don't think they
(37:17):
know how good it's gonna get. I don't think they know.
This isn't the end. Even if you can't see it yet,
even if the fog hasn't lifted, transformation is possible, and
it happens slowly until you blink and you are just
so grateful for the new life that you're going to
find yourself in. I'll be the one to tell you that,
even if you don't believe it at the moment, you're
(37:38):
going to be Okay. I've been there, and sometimes when
you hit rock bottom, literally the only way to go
is up. You can't tunnel any deeper. Everyone has a
point where they're like they really hit their threshold for
what they're able to tolerate or what life can give them,
(37:58):
and then their luck begins to change. All they begin
to change. So I feel that for you, I know
you're gonna be okay. I know that this moment is terrible,
but it's also influential. So just wishing you luck and
wishing you happiness in the future, and hoping that this
episode resonated with you, whether you are in your twenties,
in your thirties, in your seventies. I always feel like
(38:20):
there's capacity for us to change and that these moments
cannot be our whole life, So thank you so much
for listening. I also appreciate everyone who DMed me with
their rock bottom experiences and contributed to this episode. I
found them really quite emotional and revealing to read, and
they definitely informed how I approached this episode, so I
(38:42):
appreciate you guys sharing with me. I also want to
thank our wonderful researcher Libby Colbert for her contributions to
this episode. She is just like the most fantastic individual
and I'm so lucky that we have her on the
team now, So thank you Libby for your research and
for your fact checking and for finding some cool studies
(39:04):
for this episode. As always, wherever you are listening right now,
make sure that you are following along, give us a review,
give us a rating, especially if you're on Apple Podcasts.
Leaving a review really helps the show to grow, yeah,
and just find new people, So I would really appreciate
if you feel cooled to do so, if you would
(39:24):
kindly do that. Make sure also that you are following
us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast. It's a great
way to kind of see what we're up to, see updates,
get summaries of these episodes, and to ask questions or
suggest episodes you may want to hear. So until next time,
be safe behind, be gentle to yourself, especially if you
(39:46):
are in your rock bottom moment right now. We will
talk very very soon.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here,
back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. Guys, it's a big one today.
I just have to prepare you. We're going to talk
(00:44):
about rock bottom. We're going to talk about that moment
where you kind of look around at your life and
you think, how the hell did I get here? Not
in like the cute rom con style sense, but in
that dropping way where everything feels like it has collapsed
at once. Maybe you've lost your job, or the relationship
(01:08):
you thought with last forever has just ended, or you
are staring at your bank account and the balance can't
even cover rent, or all three of those things are
happening at once, or maybe nothing dramatic has happened, but
you just woke up one day and realized, Hey, I
don't even recognize myself anymore. I don't even like myself
and I definitely don't like my life. That is exactly
(01:31):
what we are diving in today. That moment, that pit
in the stomach is what so many of us call
rock bottom, that destruction. We're going to talk about everything
to do with this infamous low point, some of the
examples that I can give you, including some from you guys,
the listeners, why we get to that point, how we
(01:53):
get to that point, as well as looking at how
we might interpret rock Bottom a little bit differently to
hopefully maybe see it as a little bit of a springboard,
or maybe is something positive, if that's even possible. The
question I'm really just interested in is is rock Bottom
actually a fresh start? Is it actually a bit of
a trampoline, or is it a place that we actually
(02:16):
all need to get to at some point in our
life in order to move to the next chapter. We're
gonna talk about it together. We're gonna talk about, as well, addiction,
the dark Knight of the soul, if you've heard of
that concept, how psychology and spirituality really intersect at rock Bottom,
chronic illness, so many other things. This episode is broad
and wide. If any of you resonate with this topic
(02:39):
at the moment. I'm so glad you're here. I'm sending
you so much love. I see you, I hear you.
I'm glad this has found you. And I will metaphorically
hold your hand through the microphone through the screen for
this episode. And I really hope that what we talk
about today will provide some solace or maybe just a
little bit of understanding. And what I'm sure is a
(03:01):
very confusing, very strange time. I promised it won't last forever.
I have been there, and maybe, just maybe it is
preparing you for something more. Let's explore that possibility. So,
without further ado, let's get into the psychology of rock bottom.
(03:24):
I think part of the reason this idea of rock
bottom resonates with so many of us is because we
all kind of know what it feels like or we've
seen it. It's also incredibly personal. There isn't one objective definition.
Your rock bottom might not look like mine, and mine
might not look like yours. I know that my rock
(03:44):
bottom happened in twenty twenty one. I definitely talked about this,
but I went through two devastating breakups in one year,
literally within nine months of each other. I lost about
fifty percent of my friends in the three months after
I move cities where I moved cities to a place
where I didn't have a job, I didn't have anything
to do, I didn't know anybody. My mental health was terrible,
(04:06):
my bank account was a disaster. I was lonely, I
was tired, I was lost, and I can admit now
I was probably drinking a little bit too much and
everything was just going wrong. I also infamously had another
moment like this last year. I've spoken about my mental
breakdown in a couple of episodes, and that was another
really low rock bottom point. And I know it sounds
(04:27):
weird to say, I'm sure that I could probably go
lower someday. Part of me thinks that there is another
rock bottom waiting for me. Is it terrifying? Yes, I
think part of it is also exciting, and I'll explain why.
So that was my experience, And you know, that's just
one person. For another person, it could be an addiction
spiraling out of control. For another, it's like a quiet
(04:50):
collapse of your sense of purpose. One person DMed me
about finding out that her boyfriend had cheated on her
the same day she got fired another and said it
was when she realized she was in a cult. Losing
a parent to cancer was another one. Someone said when
they realized they were only confident when they blacked out,
or when they had to move back home with their
(05:11):
parents after going into a lot of debt for college.
And yet all these are very different, right, but when
people talk about them, there are these shared threads, these
like common emotional fingerprints that help us know, Okay, I'm here,
this looks like bottom to me, this is the bottom.
It can't get any worse than that, or then what
(05:32):
it is right now? Psychologists will tell you there are
certain markers that come up again and again when people
come into their offices and describe their lowest points. The first,
and perhaps the biggest, is a loss of control and
a loss of sense of self. Maybe you were once
the ambitious one, the reliable one, the one who had
(05:54):
it all together, and now it feels like where is
that person? You can barely recognize yourself in the You're
not making decisions anymore. Life is just kind of happening
to you. There was a twenty sixteen paper published in
the journal Academy of Management Review, and it used this
phrase to refer to facing rock bottom. It used this
(06:16):
phrase the crystallization of discontent. The crystallization of discontent fancy word,
but it basically means this point where you just feel
a total sense of loss. You feel a loss of self,
you feel social disorientation, even failure. And the authors say
that this leads to this feeling that you don't even
(06:37):
have an identity. It's that really painful moment when you
realize that who you are on the inside and who
you are in the world do not line up, and
maybe you can't find your way back to who you
really feel or think that you are, or who you
are in the past. That's the first marker. The next
marker is an inability to imagine the future. Bottom. Time
(07:02):
feels very slow and very sticky. You can't really see
beyond the next day. Sometimes you maybe you can't even
see beyond the next hour. You can't picture it getting better.
You can't picture yourself ever, not feeling how you feel
right now. Psychologists studying depression describe this as future discounting.
(07:24):
Future discounting is where distress literally makes it harder for
your brain to project yourself into tomorrow. I'll be the
first one to tell you, even if you can't believe
it right now, I promise you this feeling won't last forever.
It's just the current state that you're in that is
(07:44):
convincing you that it will. So there's this future discounting.
Then there's helplessness and regret. Maybe you've tried to fix
things over and over. You've tried to get your drinking
under control, You've tried to find your way back on
the right path, but nothing has worked, and now you
feel like, similar to what we said before, it never will.
(08:06):
This connects directly to Martin Siegman's idea of learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness we've talked about it on the podcast before.
This is a psychological state where after we basically experience
a number of really stressful events or life experiences, especially
(08:27):
experiences where we feel like we have no control, we
basically just assume that we don't and we give up.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
We get so.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Tired of trying over and over just for the outcome
to stay the same that we'd stop trying. Even when
there are steps presented to us, even when someone from
the outside could say, well, this is exactly what you
need to do, we just can't see it. And finally,
the final marker of rock bottom often is associated with
(08:57):
some kind of collapse, relationship breakdown, financial hardship, burnout, chronic illness.
Sometimes it's all these things at once. That collapse can
feel like a life demolition. Everything you thought was holding
you up, everything that you were relying on, has crumbled,
(09:17):
and you're kind of left standing in the rubble, being like,
what where do I even start right now? Like, what
is the first thing I need to rebuild when everything
is on fire? So maybe you're listening to this and thinking, oh, yeah,
that's totally me right now, I'm in that moment. Maybe
you've been there before, Maybe you're terrified of ending up
(09:38):
there one day, whatever you are thinking, wherever you are
right now, whatever you are feeling right now, I think
it's important to recognize rock bottom is not permanent. It
is absolutely not. People cannot live their whole lives in
a permanent rock bottom. We're going to discuss that a
little bit more later on, but I just want to
(10:01):
give you that reminder so that if rock bottom is
where you are right now, as we go into why
this may be has happened to you, you have a
little bit of hope for the future. So if you
are in this place, you might be asking yourself like,
how did I end up here? When did this begin?
One significant cause of rock bottom is that we may
(10:25):
have just experienced the entire collapse of our identity and
our self concept. This happens actually quite frequently when we
first reach adulthood. A particularly useful lens for us to
understand is this idea from Jennifer Campbell of self concept clarity.
(10:47):
Self concept clarity is essentially how clearly and confidently you
are able to say who you are or able to
identify who you are. It's the difference between someone who
can describe their values, describe their priorities, have a sense
of consistency within their goals and how they act, versus
(11:08):
someone who feels like they are living out seven different
identities and that their whole life is fragmented. When people
hit rock bottom, this clarity of self concept often plummets
your sense of identity. The lens through which you interpret
the world becomes deeply unstable. We can see why that
happens a lot in our twenties because things are shifting
(11:31):
so rapidly, things that we often rest a lot of
our identity on like our relationship, like what school we
go to, like our job, like our family, and because
you don't have anything to anchor yourself to, your internal
compass gets kind of thrown off the mark. Now, if
you have high self concept clarity, it's not just that
(11:54):
you know who you are, it's that you also know
what you need, so you are actively able to seek
social support, You are actively able to see your way
out of a crisis, to nourish good quality relationships. It
might not be that surprising, but research consistently ties low
clarity with mental health difficulties and loneliness, and also things
(12:17):
like anxiety and depression. This is all contributing to this
feeling of being at rock bottom. You can see why
maybe this has a lot to do with just the
decade that you're in, that this is just something that
you don't have to experience, but a lot of people
are for very similar reasons. Another significant pathway to rock bottom,
(12:38):
and something that I feel links to losing a sense
of identity is living in a passive state. This is
often described in psychology as having an external locus of control.
This is where we basically end up maybe unconsciously perceiving
life as something that happens to us rather than something
(12:58):
that we can influence. You might drive through your days
feeling like decisions are kind of imposed on you, that
everyone else has these opportunities and they're just kind of
passing you by, that every little thing you try to
get out of your situation does not work. Over time,
this sense of passivity accumulates stress and kind of creates
(13:20):
a slow motion resignation to life again. Studies have shown
that adults with an external locus of control are more
prone to anxiety, depression, and learned helplessness, particularly during major
life transitions like those that are common in our twenties.
In real life, what that means is that you know
you hate your job, but you feel like you can't
(13:43):
leave there's no other option. You know you don't like
your relationship or your friendships, but you feel like you
will never find anything or anyone better. You know that
your mental health is spiraling. You know that you're more
anxious than you've ever been. You know that things are
going wrong, but for some reason you cannot seem to
(14:03):
find a solution. Small choices get deferred until suddenly you
wake up and you feel trapped, which is of course
the predecessor to hitting rock Bottom. When looking into the
research on this topic, a lot of it's centered around
the role of addiction. And this can really be caused
by and contribute to a lot of the factors that
(14:26):
we've already mentioned before. And I'm not just talking about
an addiction to certain substances. I'm talking about addiction to chaos,
addiction to a certain kind of relationship, addiction to a
certain person. Before we get into this, I feel like
this is a whole new chapter for this episode. So
we are going to take a short break, go get
(14:47):
a cup of tea or wash them dishes. We will
be right back. We basically like we can't talk about
rock Bottom without talking about a d Someone even say
that the addiction space is where the idea of rock
Bottom was really invented or given a name. It is
one of the most powerful pathways to this moment or
(15:10):
this period of despair and loss, and just like fragmentation,
not just because of the behaviors themselves, but because of
the cascading kind of effects addiction will have on every
part of our life. Again, we're not just talking about
substances here. We're not just talking about alcohol or drugs
(15:31):
or gambling or whatever it is. There are so many things, relationships,
situations that we can become addicted to because in some
sense they give us a feeling of being actually very alive,
and when everything's going wrong, sometimes that's the only feeling
we want. A lot of neuroscience research, especially the work
of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, shows that addiction
(15:55):
of any form rewires the brain's reward systems. Normally, normally,
dopamine helps us feel motivated. We know what makes us
feel satisfied when we meet our goals. We know it
helps us experience pleasure. But what addiction does is hijack
this system, making it so that the substance that we
are engaging in, or the behavior, or the relationship or
(16:19):
the situation is the primary source of reward. And so,
over time, everyday activities that used to bring you joy,
like spending time with your friends, exercising, accomplishing goals hobbies,
they lose their appeal. They can't give you the same
hit that the substance or this thing can give you.
So as natural rewards or long term rewards lose, meaning,
(16:43):
self regulation through those things becomes harder and harder. So
the only resource we have left, or the only coping
strategy is to engage in the addictive behavior even when
it is clearly causing us harm. And with that tension
of knowing something is damaging us but feeling unable to stop,
it is very easy to see how that spirals and
(17:05):
spirals into rock bottom. The addictive behaviors basically begin to
dominate everything. They dominate obviously our life, but they dominate
that through our time, through our energy, through what we
think about, meaning that it kind of is like a
balloon that is expanding in a tight space that leaves
not much room for anything else. We also know it
(17:25):
erodes the social and structural scaffolding of a fulfilled life.
Relationships really do suffer under addictive tension. You know, Addiction
can lead us to break people's trust, to be irritable,
to neglect our relationship, to have arguments, and it can
(17:46):
also lead to tension at work, you know, jobs, maybe lost,
bills go unpaid, health deteriorates, and as these external supports collapse,
people often feel very very alone, as though the world
is closing in. And that's where rock bottom hits. At
that intersection of internal and external breakdown. Your rewired brain
(18:07):
is craving the addictive substance or behavior, and then you
also are no longer grounded by support or by things
outside of the addiction. It's very easy to kind of
float away with it. Addiction is obviously a very fast
tracked pathway to this. You don't have to have experienced
an addiction in order to feel rock bottom, but it definitely,
(18:29):
I think is a great way of demonstrating how it's
this culmination of a lot of things that pushes people
to the edge. I will also say rock bottom rarely
happens overnight. People can experience severe tragedy, and rock bottom
doesn't actually occur until days, weeks, months later, when they
(18:52):
realize what they've lost, or when they realize all the
other things that have kind of disappeared from their life.
So more often than not, it is a gradual accumulation
of strain, magnified by certain life events, by relationship breakdown,
by psychological breakdown, or kind of coming at once. So
this is why you might sometimes hear psychologists refer to
(19:16):
or compare hitting bottom to experiencing trauma, because similar to
when we experience trauma, it can often trigger a state
of survival mode. We can be so overwhelmed with kind
of what's going on around us or within us that
we either switch into the state of being on constant
hi alert and hypervigilance, or alternatively, we completely shut down.
(19:40):
At rock bottom, you feel these huge emotions sadness, despair, shame, guilt,
maybe anxiety, of course, but equally you might actually feel nothing,
might feel completely apathetic, because at the base of it,
(20:01):
what's really happening is that we feel out of control.
And if we were to meaningfully try and engage with
all the things that are happening in our life right now,
it would overwhelm us so completely we don't think that
we could manage, and so we just kind of turn
our back to it. It's not a deliberate thing. It's
a survival strategy. And here's where it gets complicated, because yeah,
(20:23):
that really sucks, and that's really awful and our life
is falling apart. But sometimes people interpret rock bottom as
kind of a good thing. Some people talk about it
like it is kind of necessary. It's a kind of
force that demands confrontation with ourselves. We have to get
(20:48):
to this point in order to confront deeper things that
we may never actually look face on. So you may
have heard of this phrase, the dark night of the soul.
It originates from a poem from like thousands of years ago,
maybe hundreds of years ago, like the sixteenth century, by
Saint John of the Cross. He was this Spanish priest,
(21:09):
and he basically used this phrase to describe a spiritual
phase where God withdrew his comfort, leaving people feeling lost
and alone. With this idea in mind, it was kind
of believed that this was a necessary path for spiritually
or religious people, where they had to kind of shed
self reliance and any existing detachments they had in their
(21:32):
life to have a deeper connection with God. God puts
them in this terrible hard place so that they find him.
Of course, that is a very religious and spiritually heavy meaning,
but psychologists and spiritual thinkers nowadays use it to describe
a lot more than just a spiritual epiphany. It's where
(21:52):
everything in life kind of falls apart and we are
compelled to really confront who we really are. Carl Jung
suggests that these dark knights are actually unavoidable psychological rights
of passage that force us to face what he calls
the shadow aspects of ourselves. The shadow aspects of ourselves
are the thoughts, impulses, fears, patterns, parts of our identity
(22:16):
that we habitually ignore or deny that are secretly sabotaging us.
And he argued that if we don't ever have these
moments of confronting them, the shadow will continue to control
us unconsciously. And so it's through these painful moments that
we are able to actually confront these messier parts of
(22:39):
us that are not working. You may have heard the
name Victor Frankel. He is a Holocaust survivor and a psychologist,
and he wrote this book, Man Search for Meaning, And
in this book, he basically argued that even when life
strips us of almost everything, our freedom, security, purpose, family,
(23:01):
there remains one freedom we can never lose, which is
the ability to choose how we respond. And so rock
bottom in this sense, at this existential crossroads, basically is
when we find ourselves and our true power clearer than
(23:22):
we've ever noticed it before. Basically, when the external world collapses,
you are forced to dig deep and find true meaning internally.
As paradoxical as it sounds, rock bottom is actually a
real fertile ground for growth, purpose, a renewed sense of direction.
(23:44):
So if we look at it in this light, you know,
maybe this is the place where momentum actually begins. There's
a blank page in front of you. You've been gifted
the chance to start over, and whilst that blank page
is terrifying, it can also be liberating. Modern psychology echoes
(24:06):
this through the idea of post traumatic growth. We know
post traumatic stress. Post Traumatic growth, though, is a concept
that kind of came to light in the nineties that
suggested that people who endure profound struggle from trauma to illness,
to loss, to major life changes to addiction often reports
(24:29):
significant positive changes afterwards. This might include things like a
deeper appreciation of life, stronger relationships, new priorities, heightened sense
of personal strength, and sometimes even a real deep spiritual development.
Of course, this is not always going to be the case.
(24:52):
We don't want to make like a mass generalization that
anyone who goes through trauma is going to come out
better than before, but psychologically from them description, this does
make sense. In some cases. Hitting rock bottom again disrupts
the old ways of being there routines the identities that
no longer serve us. You really have to evaluate, Hey,
(25:14):
what do I really care? About what do I really
believe in? Is this discomfort a sign that I meant
for more? One final way that we can understand this,
just to give you a few explanations, is through the
lens of crisis theory. And this idea is that when
(25:35):
a person faces a crisis so overwhelming that old coping
strategies no longer work, they are forced to develop new ones.
In other words, we are pushed to a point where
we really have to see how deeply can go, and
we really have to encounter and really acknowledge and appreciate
(25:58):
every single strength that we may have, every single skill
that we may have in our talkit, and the theory
is that that actually makes us feel better or more
capable in the long run. I've been really into ultra
marathon documentaries recently, and just like ultra marathoning in general,
as an observer, not a participant obviously, And something that
(26:20):
I've noticed in these documentaries is that so many of
these athletes talk about this idea of the pain cave.
I first heard about it from Courtney Dolwater, who is
my dream guest by the way, just the coolest woman ever.
If anyone has a hookup I she is my number
one dream guest. This woman is so cool. She's like
(26:41):
one of the best ultra marathon runners male or female
in the world. And she describes the pain cave as
this point in a race where every single part of
you wants to give up, Every single fiber of you
is saying, please, can we quit? And yet you find
this new reserve of energy and motivation and you push through,
(27:03):
and that is when you discover this whole new level
of what you're capable of, but also of who you are.
And I love that idea, Like I don't to be fair,
I don't ever want to be in that situation, Like
this woman is running like five hundred miles, which I
don't even I can't even compute how actually long that is.
But it's so fascinating to see other people discuss it
(27:24):
and to see how other people have discovered this. Maybe
that's really what this moment is for you. You're in
the pain cave? What can you discover about yourself? So
a really important caveat here for people who are experiencing addiction.
There is definitely this really strange rhetoric online that says
that the only way to overcome your addiction is to
(27:47):
find your rock bottom first. A lot of people talk about,
you know, what was the moment when you really realized
you needed to change? What was the moment where you
hit rock bottom where you know, you did something terrible
to your family, or you did something morally despicable or
something that disgusted you, and that in itself was like
a catalyst for change. I do think that sometimes this
(28:09):
can be very unhelpful. Firstly, who gets to decide or
define what that rock bottom is? And secondly it also
means that people really struggling with addiction, what they may
find is that they feel like they have to push
further in order to recover. So, like aside from the
(28:33):
clear health risks of this, people waiting for this elusive
rock bottom point may find that it never comes, may
find that they can always go deeper, may find themselves
further isolating themselves or burning bridges, or tunneling further into
their addiction to get to this point so that they
can rebuild. So, if you are facing challenges related to addiction,
(28:57):
I just want to say you do not need to
wait until the crisis point to get help or to change.
Same with mental health as well. At any stage the
moment that you realize, hey, this is really not working
for me. This doesn't feel good. Why am I doing this?
My life isn't happy. You can say to yourself, this
is my rock bottom. You don't have to wait until
(29:17):
it meets or surpasses someone else's story of rock bottom
to be able to get help. So, although rock bottom,
as I've described it can be seen as transformative, I
would urge you if you're struggling with mental health, with addiction,
rock bottom isn't a requirement for change. It's not at all.
With that being said, if you are here right now,
(29:40):
if you are at or near rock bottom, the question
really becomes, how do you climb out? I'm sorry, I
have to say it. I can't give you an instant fix,
I'm sorry, And I cannot give you a neat five
step plan that's gonna magically restore everything in your life
that has been removed or that you have lost, maybe
(30:01):
for a reason, but I am going to give you
some tools of how to make a start. First, and
some people won't like that, I'm gonna say this, but first,
let yourself grieve and show some self pity, let yourself
be sad for yourself. I think this sounds and feels
counterintuitive because the current culture around us really forces this
(30:26):
toxic positivity onto us all and tells us that you
are not supposed to let yourself suffer, or to feel
hard emotions, or to feel bad for yourself. Suppressing emotions
doesn't mean they disappear, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
It actually just makes them even stronger and likely to
pop up in other ways. If you're in this position,
(30:48):
you've likely had to let go of a lot, You
have likely lost a lot, you have likely really suffered.
Grieve these parts, feel those emotions. Maybe it's also a
way to counteract this numb state that you found yourself in.
You can't process an emotion if you never feel it,
(31:09):
so if you're at rock bottom, you're allowed to sit
in self pity for a little while. That is part
of acceptance. It's also part of processing and therefore being
able to act and move on from this moment. Second,
we've talked about this a few times, acknowledge that this
is your rock bottom. Narrative psychology shows us that the
(31:31):
way we frame our life stories shapes our well being
and how we view our lives, and that is incredibly important.
When you say to yourself, yes, this is my rock bottom,
you're not just naming your pain, which is obviously important,
but you're also situating it so it becomes a chapter
of your life, not the whole book. And that shift
(31:53):
and perspective from this is the end my life sucks
to this is just part of my story, an important
part of my story. The dark Knight of my soul
can soften the pain that you're feeling, or at least
give it a leaning or a reason. It transforms rockbottom
from this infinite pit that we know comes from future
(32:13):
discounting into this definable moment that allows you to kind
of almost project into the future and realize that in hindsight,
maybe I'm going to see this differently. Maybe not right now,
but maybe in the future. Next, seek out what we
call little islands of competence. At rock bottom, everything feels overwhelming.
(32:35):
Where do I start? What's the first step? What do
I do? The future is very blurry. The big picture
is a way too much to handle. So don't don't
handle the big picture. Focus on this small wins. Focus
on one thing you can do today that is going
to increase your coping, increase your productivity, increase your relationships,
(32:56):
improve things for you. You don't need to put the
added pressure on your to like overhaul your life in
a night or in a week, or to bounce back
and be like the happiest person alive, and that there
is some kind of timeline that you need to get
over this within a month or it's gonna last forever.
Just pick one small thing you think you can control
and do that for yourself today. Cook yourself a meal,
(33:17):
take yourself for a walk, journal for two minutes. Even
tiny moments of success begin to restore your sense of agency, competence,
and confidence. They remind you like, hey, yeah, I can't
control this big, terrible mess that I'm in. But I
can decide that I'm gonna go and order ice cream tonight.
(33:39):
I can decide that I'm gonna get out of the
house and do some exercise. I can decide that I'm
gonna book this appointment with my doctor. Those things snowball
into bigger things over time. Fourth and maybe this actually
should have been third, because I think it links to
our I think it links to one of the things
one of the tips I gave above. But just see
your situation in the context that it's actually existing rather
(34:02):
than the context that you've created for it. Zoom out
a little bit. It's natural to feel like no one
could possibly understand what you're going through, But I think
this is one way in which comparison might actually be
a good thing. It can be really helpful to look
at others who face similar struggles to normalize your own experience.
(34:23):
You know, a few months back, when I released that
episode talking about my mental breakdown, oh my god, I
was so scared and I was also in a terrible place.
But the amount of comments and messages I received from
people saying it had helped or that they were going
through the same thing was amazing. And guess what, it
(34:43):
made me feel better. Just the idea that this was
not something that I had to experience alone, or that
I was not the only person in the world who
had this feeling felt great because I didn't feel lonely
or isolated in my experience. So looking to other podcasts,
to books, to interviews, whatever it is, of people who
(35:07):
are going through the same thing, they are all social
opportunities for validation of what you're going through. They are
also living proof that other people have had challenges and
I've they've found their way through. That's vicarious learning, right,
a vicarious form of validation of like, hey, if they
were okay, maybe I will be as well. Last but
(35:29):
certainly not least change your environment. I'm not saying move
to a new city straight away. In fact, there have
been studies that have shown that your problems will follow
you there. But sometimes you just need small environmental shifts
that signal to your brain that are fresh started's underway.
And also, maybe you can move to a new city.
(35:51):
It might not fix all your problems, maybe all fix
one problem, and maybe that one problem is where everything
is stemming from. Just change your surroundings. Environmental psychology shows
us that our environment shapes our mindset, So rearranging your room,
buying new bedding, taking a different route to work, spending
more time in nature. These small cues can help break
(36:14):
old associations and create space for new patterns. Because you're
not in the same environment. They tell your brain and
your nervous system, hey, things are different now. Look around us,
things are different, which does make change feel more possible.
Making those really small changes in your routine leaves a
(36:34):
less room for old patterns and behaviors to resurface, and
that is what gives you a fresh approach to life.
Rock Bottom is truly terrifying. It can feel like the
end of everything we know. And yet I want to
remind you again, across psychology, philosophy, across spirituality and religion
(36:55):
and lived experience, we see that it's not the end.
For a lot of people. It is the pivot, it's
the threshold, it's the trampoline. If you are here right now,
I promise you that there is a point in the future.
There is a version of you in the future looking
at you right now thinking gosh, I don't think they
(37:17):
know how good it's gonna get. I don't think they know.
This isn't the end. Even if you can't see it yet,
even if the fog hasn't lifted, transformation is possible, and
it happens slowly until you blink and you are just
so grateful for the new life that you're going to
find yourself in. I'll be the one to tell you that,
even if you don't believe it at the moment, you're
(37:38):
going to be Okay. I've been there, and sometimes when
you hit rock bottom, literally the only way to go
is up. You can't tunnel any deeper. Everyone has a
point where they're like they really hit their threshold for
what they're able to tolerate or what life can give them,
(37:58):
and then their luck begins to change. All they begin
to change. So I feel that for you, I know
you're gonna be okay. I know that this moment is terrible,
but it's also influential. So just wishing you luck and
wishing you happiness in the future, and hoping that this
episode resonated with you, whether you are in your twenties,
in your thirties, in your seventies. I always feel like
(38:20):
there's capacity for us to change and that these moments
cannot be our whole life, So thank you so much
for listening. I also appreciate everyone who DMed me with
their rock bottom experiences and contributed to this episode. I
found them really quite emotional and revealing to read, and
they definitely informed how I approached this episode, so I
(38:42):
appreciate you guys sharing with me. I also want to
thank our wonderful researcher Libby Colbert for her contributions to
this episode. She is just like the most fantastic individual
and I'm so lucky that we have her on the
team now, So thank you Libby for your research and
for your fact checking and for finding some cool studies
(39:04):
for this episode. As always, wherever you are listening right now,
make sure that you are following along, give us a review,
give us a rating, especially if you're on Apple Podcasts.
Leaving a review really helps the show to grow, yeah,
and just find new people, So I would really appreciate
if you feel cooled to do so, if you would
(39:24):
kindly do that. Make sure also that you are following
us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast. It's a great
way to kind of see what we're up to, see updates,
get summaries of these episodes, and to ask questions or
suggest episodes you may want to hear. So until next time,
be safe behind, be gentle to yourself, especially if you
(39:46):
are in your rock bottom moment right now. We will
talk very very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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