This is causing real stress in my life?

Your question: "How to make yourself feel better?" It all depends on what is causing my distress. More question: "Ive been extremely down about personal reasons.

And also I've found out all my (so called) friends have been talking badly about me behind my back... How can I stop all this from happening? Do I need to change or do I just go off by myself?" That would depend on what your friends are saying, whether you agree or not, and so on.

You cannot stop it from happening. It is none of your business anyway. What do you care what people say of you so long as it does not interfere with your life?

You can only control your own cognition, perception, and behavior, not that of seven billion persons around you. Consider this and ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in and whether that can be best accomplished by personal development or alternately by domination of what other people think and say. It is a very good benchmark of where civilization is going: "Many Muslims accused Salman Rushdie of blasphemy or unbelief and in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie.

Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted from Muslim anger over the novel. The Iranian government backed the fatwa against Rushdie until 1998, when the succeeding government of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said it no longer supported the killing of Rushdie. However, the fatwa remains in place." • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic... Those who chose the domination paradigm over compassion and rational inquiry also chose this, the Iraq-Iran war 1980-1988, eight years of mass murder, a conflict between Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein and a Shiite dictatorship, the Islamic Republic of Iran: "The conflict has been compared to World War I in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across trenches, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, human wave attacks across a no-man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops, civilians, and Iraqi Kurds." • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%... The implications are obvious given what is going on in the world today.

"On the morning of 7 January 2015 at about 11:30 local time, two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Armed with assault rifles and other weapons, they killed 11 people and injured 11 others in the building. After leaving, they killed a French National Police officer outside the building.

The gunmen identified themselves as belonging to the Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, who took responsibility for the attack. Several related attacks followed in the Île-de-France region, where a further five were killed and 11 wounded." • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_He...

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.