Am I Really This Useless?

I’ve gone through phases where it feels like everything I touch goes slightly wrong. Nothing catastrophic, sometimes it’s something as simple as sending the wrong email, forgetting an appointment you definitely wrote down, or saying something in a conversation and immediately wishing you’d phrased it differently.

On the surface, these mistakes seem minor. However, when they start to accumulate, along with the constant second-guessing, they begin to make you question your own competence. After a while, it stops feeling like a bad day and starts to feel like a personal flaw.

Once I’m in that space, there tends to be one particular thought circulates through my brain… am I really this useless?

The strange thing about these periods is that they don’t necessarily reflect reality. Often, they say more about how the brain is interpreting your experience than about your actual ability.

But if this way of thinking ultimately makes us feel worse, why does our brain do it?

To understand, we need to fire up the DeLorean, boot the TARDIS, or jump into a time-travelling hot tub (whatever your vehicle of choice) and travel back to a time long before Netflix, Hyrox, and air fryers.

The Evolutionary Hangover

From an evolutionary perspective, paying close attention to mistakes and threats helped us survive. Negative information carried more psychological weight than positive because missing a danger mattered far more than appreciating something that went well. This is known as negativity bias.

Our early ancestors weren’t dealing with awkward emails or calendar mishaps, they were dealing with lions, tigers, and bears (oh my) that would be on the hunt for relatively weak and defenceless creatures like us. Forgetting something important, misjudging a situation, or overlooking a threat could be fatal. So the brain evolved to prioritise error detection, becoming highly sensitive to anything signalling risk, failure, or social rejection.

It made more sense to assume something was wrong and double-check, rather than assume everything was fine and miss a potential danger.

Now this negativity bias might’ve all been well and good thousands of years ago when we’d just worked out what fire was, but now we have central heating, office jobs, and Amazon Fire sticks. The same mechanism that helped our ancestors before us hasn’t really translated well for this modern age. Today, the dangers are rarely physical, but the system is still running.

Instead of scanning for predators, the brain scans for mistakes at work, awkward social interactions, or forgetting to take the chicken out the freezer after your mum told you 3 hours ago. And because humans are deeply social, one of the biggest perceived threats is losing status, approval, or belonging. Feeling like you’re underperforming or “not good enough” activates the same alarm system that once helped keep us alive.

This is why one small criticism can outweigh a pile of positive feedback, and why, during difficult periods, your attention narrows around what's going wrong while everything going right fades into the background.

The system is biased toward false alarms. It would rather overreact than miss something important.

The Story the Brain Starts to Tell

Once the thought I can’t seem to do anything right takes hold, the brain doesn’t just sit with it. It starts looking for evidence. Evidence that we’re not good enough, evidence that we make too many mistakes, evidence that chips away at our very own character.

This is known as confirmation bias. This is the tendency for our minds to search for, notice, and remember information that supports what we already believe, while quietly ignoring anything that contradicts it.

The brain likes coherent stories. If it starts to believe that you’re underperforming, careless, or not coping well, it begins to scan your environment for proof. Every small mistake becomes confirmation. Every awkward moment becomes part of the narrative.

At the same time, contradictory evidence gets filtered out. The things you handled well, the problems you solved, the responsibilities you managed, they barely even register.

Over time, this creates a distorted picture of reality. It’s not that you’re suddenly incapable. It’s that your brain is selectively highlighting your worst moments.

The Loop

Once we’re deep into this self-imposed performance review, the toll becomes real. We start to feel more stressed, more overwhelmed, and mentally overloaded. Stress affects attention, working memory, and decision-making. In simple terms, the brain has fewer resources available.

And when that happens, you do become slightly more forgetful, slower to process, more prone to small errors.

Those slips feed perfectly into the story confirmation bias is already building, and suddenly you're stuck in a loop:

You notice a mistake → confidence drops → you monitor yourself more closely → anxiety about making mistakes increases → performance dips slightly → you notice even more mistakes.

After a while, it stops feeling like an off week. It starts to feel like you've somehow become fundamentally incompetent overnight.

But most of the time, what's actually happening is far less dramatic.

Your ability hasn't disappeared. Your brain is temporarily operating under strain while filtering your experience through a very negative lens. Your competence hasn't vanished. Your perception has shifted.

Zooming Out

These phases tend to arrive quietly. There's no single moment where you realise what's happening. The self-doubt creeps in gradually, disguised as "being realistic" or "holding yourself accountable."

But when you zoom out, the picture usually looks very different.

The same person who feels like they can't do anything right is often still solving problems, meeting responsibilities, helping others, and moving their life forward in dozens of small ways that barely register. Because the brain isn't wired to celebrate quiet competence. It's wired to look for problems.

Which means the feeling of uselessness isn't a reliable measure of ability. It's your survival brain doing exactly what it evolved to do: scanning for errors and trying, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, to keep you alive. It just hasn't fully updated its software for modern life yet. It still thinks forgetting an email attachment might somehow attract a tiger.

The truth is, everyone goes through these phases. Moments where confidence dips, small mistakes feel louder than they should, and the internal narrative becomes harsher than reality deserves.

But those moments don't define your ability.

One of the best ways to break the cycle is simply to know it exists.

Once you recognise the pattern, the critic in your mind loses some of its authority. The mistakes are still there. They just stop feeling like evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you.

Sometimes it's not that you're doing everything wrong.

It's just that your brain has temporarily decided to focus on everything that could be.