You're helping all your friends pass math? Do you realize how awesome that is? That means you're not just good at math, you're a good friend. That's one of the best things you can be in this life. I'm still friends with all my best friends from high school and they make my life so much better every day. Sounds like they're really lucky to have you in their lives. Don't stress about not thinking you're good at stuff, just live your life, find new interests, explore them, and have fun. Not everything has to be about being "good" at something, often times simply experiencing things is perfectly fine.

I think everyone has already given really good advice, but I had one thought to add. Sometimes, when we get stuck in compulsive, repetitive behavior like this, it's because our brain is trying to resolve something. Usually taking a story from our past and building a different ending. So maybe in your case you failed at something, and the consequences were really dire, and now when you fail again your brain punishes you to try and keep it from happening. Or maybe you had horrible consequences from being overly confident and so your brain is trying to remind you never to do that again. Something like that.

One way out of stuff like this is to change the ending. So in your case, it seems like you could try and deliberately reward and comfort yourself after the next time you lose at a game. Maybe plan out in advance a gift or favorite food you could give yourself once you lose, or schedule a time to immediately sit down and talk with someone who loves you. Write down some affirmations of self-compassion and force yourself to look in the mirror and say them. Talk to yourself like a loving parent would speak to a child who messed up on something. It will definitely feel silly and weird to do these things, but whatever your reaction is, it'll hopefully give you useful information on why this sort of thing is happening.

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What's even more fun is you'll eventually find something you're good at, then you'll hit a level with it where you're so good that you end up thinking you're bad all over again lol.

Just find something you like doing, eventually you'll get better.

being good at maths is probably more useful than videogames. also chess is hard it's completely fine not to be the best. being 'good' at stuff is bullshit in general, just do things you like doing because you like doing them, this is how people who are good at stuff generally get good at stuff anyway.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN43sCyEanA

2. Doing things you're bad at isn't self-harm. Basing your self-worth on whether you're good at things probably is.

3. Getting good at stuff comes from practice. Talent is a myth. The most "talented" people always turn out to be people who had an irrational compulsion to keep practicing at something they were horrible at.

4. Wait, you're in high school? It takes like ten years of practice to be actually good at a thing. You literally haven't had the time. All your friends are trash at whatever you think they're good at too, and they probably agree with me because they're comparing themselves to professionals, not other high schoolers.

5. If you're really really attached to the idea of getting good at a thing, you should find a way to watch yourself from the outside, like watching replays of your chess games, and critically analyze that. Break it down into skills you want to work on, and spend the most time on whatever you're worst at, with the rest of the skills in rotation. Set a fixed practice schedule.

Nobody's good at chess or video games naturally. It's heavily dependent on practice- both how much you practice and how effectively you practice. For something like that, it doesn't make sense to say "I'm bad at" like it's some immutable part of your being. It makes morse sense to say "I haven't yet invested the time to get good at".

I'm not an expert on mental health, so I don't want to make recommendations. It sounds like you're getting seriously emotionally invested in something like chess or video games in a way that's unhealthy (and, as you say, may be a form of self-harm), so maybe the best thing to do is just steer clear of activities like that until you feel equipped to handle them in a healthy way. But it might also be a good idea to take up a hobby that you can practice in a way that doesn't make you feel like this, and feel yourself going from novice to being good at it. Maybe something non-competitive like a musical instrument or learning a second language. Even chess could possibly work if you got one of those apps that plays at your level, gives you tutorials and puzzles. But don't do any of the above if it's going to make you feel anxiety like you're describing!

Also if I had to pick one thing to be good at high school, math would be at the top of the list. I don't know what your plans for the future are, but being good at math alone is enough to unlock some really good careers.

Try Runescape. There's not much strategy or technique so much as the willingness to grind for hours.

You seem to have low self esteem but also very high expectations from yourself even on unimportant stuff. But if you are in highschool, I wouldn't worry THAT much, lots of people are like that in highschool. They push through and it usually gets better at the other side. I was a bit like that in highschool too.

Also, being bad at videogames is cool and good. Fuck the videogames, it's not important either way. At least math is more important.

i get what you mean. it feels pretty shitty to want to be smart and capable, but feel like you're not. i have a lot of trouble getting invested in things i'm not immediately good at. but your intelligence (and i suspect you are intelligent) can only take you so far. some skills only come with lots of practice, which means lots of failure, and learning to be okay with some amount of failure. go players, the weeb little cousins of chess players, have a saying for new players that goes like, "lose your first 100 games quickly." luckily with games, it doesn't matter that much if you lose, but you probably already know that.

sorry i don't really have anything that can help you much. i think your friends are pretty fortunate to have someone like you. hope you feel better.

Sometimes the path to being able to feel good about how well you can do something involves trying and failing over and over again, just out of the sight of others.

It's the ones that practice the most in private who perform the best in public.

Maybe some form of art or music? I've done music since my teens. The thing about the arts is that the feeling of being unable to be good at them is the reason they exist, contrary to what you may have heard about becoming rich and famous! That's only what it looks like from the outside. Scratch any successful artist and an insecure person bleeds. Take a shot at expressing that feeling.

I think for a lot of us who were good at maths or some other subject at high school, we forget that we spent many years of hard work in order to get to that point. The reason we forget is that for school, we're forced to do these things and then when we do well (and sometimes, even when we don't do well), we get rewarded with a certificate or high grades. I think one of the consequences of all that is that we forget that the math skills we've developed is still a result of all our hard work, and more importantly, it is an important part of us (whether or not you actually like maths); we sort of externalise it all, so to speak.

And so when we start something new, we sort of assume that we'd be just as good as the new thing as we would be at maths. But you can think of it like this, imagine having to do a high school maths exam when you were still in early grade school. You'd fail it pretty badly, right? That's how a lot of us approach new things (like chess).

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me_irl :sadness:

So many things look cool and interesting and I wanna do them, then I try and I suck.