Turning a bad day into a good day

Do you ever have those days when you wake up and have a hunch that it will be a rough day? Perhaps you didn’t sleep well or are dreading the lengthy list of things you need to do. You’re tired, unmotivated, cranky, and all out of balance. Whenever I have those days, I often say that I don’t feel grounded. As you go about your day, no matter how hard you try to shake it off, it feels like you’re going about your day with two left feet. Whenever I wake up feeling like this, nine times out of ten, the day is gone for good. The only hope is to survive the day and prioritize getting a good night’s sleep, so tomorrow is better. However, every now and then, I do manage to salvage the day. Perhaps it’s dumb luck, but maybe there are a few things we can do in these moments.

Why do we have these days?

There are many reasons why we might have days where the universe seems to be conspiring against us, but here are a few of the more common ones I’ve experienced and seen.

Poor sleep. Either you didn’t sleep enough, or your sleep quality was poor. It could be due to stress, sleep conditions (e.g., lighting, temperature), caffeine intake, etc. Regardless, you didn’t sleep well or woke up during the wrong sleep cycle, and it is throwing you off.
Stress. You may have a lot of things on your mind or a lengthy to-do list, so your mind is overwhelmed with the volume of things to do. Rather than settling into the day, it feels pressured to jump into the day immediately. It could also be physical stress (e.g., too much physical exertion without enough rest, physical pains).
Mental state. You might not be stressed, but maybe you’re depressed. Perhaps you’re angry or irritable due to things going on in your life.
Poor morning rituals. Sometimes you wake up, and perhaps you feel a little tired, but it’s your own decisions that negatively influence your day. This could be mindlessly scrolling YouTube for an hour or something like watching the news and hearing something disturbing or frustrating.
Bad luck. Everything is out of sorts. Your fridge stopped working, and your car broke down. Alas, it’s just one of those days.

How do you rebound from a bad start to your day?

Obviously, if you can take preventative measures or tackle any of these directly (e.g., getting more sleep), that will immediately help. However, we often don’t know what is happening or, quite frankly, are not in the mood to figure it out. We need to get on with our day and try to make it work.

Take accountability.

If you put yourself in this situation because you procrastinated on sleeping last night or spent your early hours watching YouTube shorts, you must own up to it. When cranky or irritable, it’s easy to blame external reasons or people (e.g., the neighbor whose car alarm rings at 3 am every morning), but the truth is that if you put yourself in that position, you need to own up to it. Yes, in an ideal world, things would be different (e.g., my neighbor would know they are being disruptive), but it’s not a perfect world, so we cannot cling to our ideals and then get upset when they are not met.

Sometimes, it is tough to recognize that you are the culprit. For example, yesterday, a family member pressured me to help with something that took up two hours of my morning. As a result, I fell extremely behind on my workday and felt scattered and ungrounded. I was annoyed at them for eating up my morning and for insensitively trying to guilt-trip me for help during a work day. However, I had to take accountability because even though they did that, I could have just said no. I should have said no if it was not a good time to help.

Something interesting happens when you own up to your mistakes and take accountability for your circumstances. You realize that the challenge you are facing is not outside of your control. You may have to admit that you messed up or could have done better, but you also empower yourself by realizing you are in the driver’s seat. You can actually do something about the current situation rather than continuing to victimize yourself.

Practice acceptance.

One challenge when taking accountability is that if you’re not gentle with yourself, it can have an adverse effect, and you may become too hard on yourself, resulting in self-pity or diminishing your self-worth. Therefore, it’s important to practice acceptance in addition to taking accountability. Acceptance allows you to redirect your energy. It’s done. It’s over. Now move on. It’s not worth clinging to this situation any longer. Accept the situation as it is right now and start planning how you will get out of it.

Acceptance is also helpful if you truly are not the culprit and have just been given a raw deal. For example, you couldn’t have predicted that your car would break down. It sucks, but it happened. Rather than expending your energy ruminating on what happened, reallocate that energy to accept the circumstance and focus on what you can do about it now.

Ground yourself.

Acceptance allows you to channel your energy and ground yourself. The challenge when your day is off to a poor start is that you often feel this pressure to catch up and salvage the day. The problem is that you’re mentally scattered, so trying to speed up will exacerbate the problem. When you speed up, your mind keeps bouncing around from one challenge to the next, and it feels like you’re playing whack-a-mole where you address one problem and another shows up.

If you feel scattered and behind, you need to slow down. Slow down, get it together, zoom out, see the bigger picture, and make a plan. Move on with your day slowly, but strategically. Check-in with yourself more than usual and reprioritize and reorganize constantly.

Final words…

We all have these days. Sometimes it’s our fault, and other times it’s out of our control. Regardless, time is a precious currency, and it’s important that we do our best to adapt to the circumstances and salvage our day. You must accept ownership and accountability for your missteps, accept the circumstance for what it is rather than ruminating on the past or getting anxious about what’s ahead, and slow down. Check-in with yourself constantly rather than trying to speed up. Lastly, when all else fails, and you can’t seem to turn the day around despite your best efforts, be kind to yourself. Prioritize getting a full night of sleep. It’s surprising how one good night’s sleep can make all the difference. Each day is a fresh new start, but the day’s success often starts the night before.

The hidden solution: Acceptance

Every lock has a key; similarly, every problem has a solution. When we encounter obstacles in our lives, our default response, in many cases, is to move into solution-seeking mode, trying to search for ways to fix what’s wrong. As we’ve all experienced, though, every now and then, we’ll encounter a problem that seems unsolvable despite our best efforts, leaving us feeling stuck. For example, you might feel stuck in a challenging relationship or a career with limited upward mobility. In these situations, it’s easy to get frustrated or feel helpless. However, there’s one solution available to us that we should always keep in our back pocket– acceptance.

Misconceptions and barriers to acceptance

There’s often a negative connotation that comes with acceptance. We think of it as something we’re forced into because we have no other choice. We associate it with powerlessness as if there’s a giant wall in front of us, and we decide to sit beside it and accept that we’ll never get past it. However, acceptance is more about clarity than surrender. You’re stepping back to see what the wall looks like and acknowledging its presence rather than blindly walking forward and colliding with it in frustration. Here are two common barriers to acceptance:

Feeling that acceptance is giving up or admitting defeat. Instead, you’re being realistic and acknowledging the limitations that exist at this moment in your life. In reality, we control much less than we think we control in our lives. For example, we can control how we prepare for a job interview but can’t control whether we’ll get an offer. Once you accept the things outside your control, it frees you up and allows you to invest that energy into things you can control. You’re making a calculated decision forward.
Blaming yourself or others. A common coping mechanism in trying to accept a suboptimal circumstance is looking for a cause or reason. Internally, a part of us feels that if we can identify the culprit, we can find a solution. However, this only gives us a false sense of control. You can blame the drivers in front of you for why you’ll be late for your doctor’s appointment, but it won’t change the fact that you will be late. The longer you spend in frustration or self-victimization, the longer it will take to experience the relief and freedom that comes from true acceptance.

What is acceptance?

Acceptance is a choice. It’s not just resigning yourself to your fate. It is a conscious decision that you are making. You’re relinquishing control of the circumstance to regain control of your life. For example, if you’re stuck in a disengaging job because you cannot find another job, you can choose to continue to be stressed and frustrated with the job market, or you can accept that it will take time and refocus your energy on recrafting your work or finding purpose outside of your work. You keep looking for jobs but stop checking your email ten times a day, hoping you landed an interview. You are choosing to invest that energy elsewhere.

Acceptance is freeing yourself from your own expectations. It’s about letting go of our expectations for how things should be and how others should act and even letting go of our expectations of ourselves. We tend to struggle with this the most when the barrier lies within. It’s easier to free ourselves from and accept external barriers (e.g., your flight gets canceled) because we can tell ourselves it was out of our hands. However, when it’s an internal barrier, such as being unable to speak up to a parent, we think we should be able to do something about it. In actuality, though, even in those situations, things are often outside our control (e.g., childhood upbringing and power dynamics that have created psychological barriers). Let go of the expectation that things should be a certain way.

Final words…

When we think about the five stages of grief, it is only when we reach acceptance that we find true closure. However, the utility of acceptance goes beyond grief; you can apply it to almost any challenge in life. It lets you let go of the thoughts and emotions holding you back and frees up your mental energy to find contentment and focus on something else. When you accept your circumstances and free yourself from your judgment, you realize that it is not the anchor that is holding you back, but it is you who is unwilling to let go of the anchor.

Navigating the unpredictability of life

When waking up in the morning, we hold an expectation for how the day will transpire (e.g., “I’ll drop the kids off to school, go to work, come back, have dinner with the wife and kids, call my dad,” etc.). Most of the time, our calculations are correct, but sometimes, something unexpected happens. It’s usually something small like getting a cold or your refrigerator stops working, but on rare occasions, it is something far more severe, such as a loved one expectedly ending up in the hospital or passing away. When something significant like that happens, it serves as a harsh reminder of how unpredictable life is and how little control we have. Time does heal these wounds as we gradually get back to “normal,” but we still carry with us the damage from the emotional trauma that we’ve endured. We’re told to have a five or a 10-year plan for life, but how do you do that when you don’t know what could happen? No one is exempt from these unexpected moments, but we can’t live our lives goalless and in fear.

How do you move forward?

Acceptance. We need to accept that this is a complex reality and a law of the universe. We’re a small fish in the ocean that can get swept up by a wave at any moment. However, we cannot let a fear of the unknown become a form of paralysis that inhibits us from living our lives. A fish still has to try to find food and avoid predators. It might get swept up by the ocean and face a hungry shark or find a nice meal and a safe place to rest.

Try, and you might fail. Don’t try, and you’ll definitely fail.

Gratitude. It’s important to be grateful and savor each boring and monotonous day. It’s easy to feel restless and trapped when living our lives and dealing with the myriad of responsibilities and expectations placed upon us. However, a dull day is a good day. Each day

Perspective. When dealing with small nuisances or when narrowly avoiding a disaster, it can be easy to overreact and hard to shake off the fear that comes with it. For example, last week, my grandmother fell in the bathtub, and while she managed to avoid a serious injury, I couldn’t help but get caught up in wondering what would have happened if she hit her head while falling. For a while, I was disturbed by this thought. By default, I jumped into solution-seeking mode and insisted my grandma get an anti-slip mat for the tub. I was trying to control the situation by exploring solutions to prevent this from happening again.

However, maybe she was just meant to have something like this happen to her, and not having an anti-slip mat was just an excuse. She could have fallen down the stairs or slipped outside on a snowy day while attending a doctor’s appointment. What would I have done then? If something’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen. When I recognized this, I decided to shift my focus. Instead of reflecting on what could have happened, I cultivated a mindset of gratitude and thanked God that she was fine.

Taming your fear. Fear is rooted in either a dependency or an attachment, and it rears its ugly head when something unexpected happens. For example, a child is emotionally and physically dependent on their parent. If something happens to the child (e.g., they get lost in a big store), it results in an overwhelming sense of fear. What will happen to me? How will I get home? What if I never find my mom? Once they find their mother, they will latch onto her and never want to let go. They’ll hug her, squeeze her hand tightly, and the next time they call her, if she doesn’t respond right away, they’ll relive that emotional trauma from when they were lost in the store.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it is healthy and beneficial for a child to always know where their parent is. However, we carry this type of mindset into adulthood, where it becomes counterproductive. Overbearing parents and clingy spouses are born from dependencies and attachments. For this, we need to practice a healthy detachment. This doesn’t mean you stop loving your family, but you have to be okay with letting go. You can’t bubble wrap all your loved ones and keep them in your sight 24/7.

Final words…

At the end of the day, we have to accept and get comfortable with the idea that life doesn’t go the way we plan it. In the blink of an eye, your life can change for the worse (or the better). While scary, recognizing that you have little control over your life can also be freeing. You’re not Superman, and you do not have to take on the responsibility of saving the universe. You’re just a small fish in a vast ocean trying to do its job.