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.

Declaring war on your anxiety

For those of us that struggle with anxiety, we know far too well that it can have devastating effects on your day-to-day life. At its worst, it can consume you all day and induce a state of mild paralysis where you feel that you can’t take action. What I’m referring to is not necessarily the type of anxiety you feel before giving a presentation (although it could be), but it’s when you wake up in the morning and feel tense and afraid. You’re subconsciously wondering, how am I going to survive the day? What’s going to trigger my anxiety? And oddly enough, sometimes just the fear of getting anxiety starts to cause anxiety.

A simple trick that I uncovered a few days ago to help me navigate my anxiety is to declare war on it. I woke up one morning, was waiting for my coffee to finish brewing, and despite feeling groggy, my mind started to run a million miles an hour, hoping that I wouldn’t feel anxious today. That very thought started to make me anxious. I don’t know what triggered this thought in my head, but I just got a bit fed up. I’m tired of this. Enough is enough. Today, I’m not going to let my anxiety control me. I took a deep breath, grabbed my coffee, went to my room, and proceeded on with my day as if my anxiety did not exist.

Did the anxiety disappear for the rest of the day? No. But for some reason, it wasn’t crippling or paralyzing. It was just something my body was doing on autopilot (e.g., getting tense, heart rate elevating). Sure my mind would still go down rabbit holes of anxious thinking, but there was a detachment from those thoughts. Luckily enough, things weren’t too bad from midday onward, and towards the end of the day, those thoughts significantly reduced.

Since then, I’ve made a conscious effort each morning to declare war on my anxiety. There’s no wow factor to this. It’s nothing magical. But making this affirmation, especially when I can emotionally get behind it, seems to make a difference.You have to bring this intention to not let your anxiety rule over you to your conscious awareness by saying it out loud (or in your head) in the morning. The anxious thoughts come and go, but it doesn’t define me, and therefore, it shouldn’t dictate my day or get in the way of me pursuing other things.

Not sure what to do? Do nothing

Worrying is like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.

When something is not working, when we feel lost, or when we don’t know what to be doing in the present moment, our mind nudges us into action. It could be seeking a solution, talking to someone about our stressors, or just distracting ourselves with a TV show or food. Through some mechanism over time, our mind has developed this strong belief that doing is always the solution. However, as we have experienced over and over again, action does not fix everything. Watching TV doesn’t always cure boredom, and venting doesn’t heal anger. If we’re lucky, we may achieve temporary relief, but the root of the problem remains – we always feel the need to control things, and as a result, we feel the need to always do something.

The Art of Non-Doing

Yesterday, when feeling a bit restless and in a rut, I wrote a journal entry/note on my phone:

I gave in today and tried to logically get myself out of the rut that I’m feeling regarding my monotonous day-to-day routine. I googled for ideas, I went on Reddit, I listened to talks, I tried reading, and quite honestly, none of it worked. Had I not stressed over this, I could have least enjoyed the past two hours. It wouldn’t change anything, but it may have been relaxing, and that might have helped.

I experienced a challenging emotion (restlessness), but no amount of doing was able to fix this. As a matter of fact, it may have made things worse because I felt tired and like I had lost valuable time on my day off, and I had nothing to show for it. When we feel unpleasant emotions, we feel the need to get rid of them. What we fail to recognize and admit to ourselves is that it is okay, and it is human, to experience negative emotions. Not every negative moment or feeling has to be a crisis.

We do not know how to sit with our feelings. The art of non-doing is recognizing that it is okay to not try to fix everything. It is okay to feel bad and let ourselves feel that way. Oddly enough, this acknowledgment in and of itself is empowering and a mood lifter. Does this mean give up or stop trying? Absolutely not! It means learning to distinguish between what you can control and what you cannot control and being okay with what you cannot control.

Non-doing simply means letting go, letting things be the way that they are, and letting them unfold the way they are intended.

Practicing Non-Doing

“When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body without getting caught up in that activity, we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand”
~Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation, at its core, is an exercise of non-doing. However, it is not the only way to practice non-doing. I have found that non-doing is about absorbing what is happening in the present moment as it shifts into the next moment. It is also about making a conscious decision not to be pulled in several directions by our feelings, desires, or external pressure. Non-doing can also manifest through effortless action (i.e., things that induce a state of flow). This could be listening to music, going for a walk, or swimming. The key here is intentionality. Is movement enabling your ability to be aware and present, or is it just another thing you are doing?

More than anything, non-doing is something that results through the decisions we make in our day-to-day. When you’re bored, do you automatically grab your smartphone and scroll through social media, or do you sit with it and be okay being bored? When someone messages you from work in the evening, do you immediately respond or put it aside and respond during regular working hours?

Final words…

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy”
~ Guillaume Apollinaire

If there’s a takeaway I can give from this post, it is this – the next time you’re in a rut, or you feel stuck, rather than jumping into action, take a moment to pause. Take just two minutes. Take a handful of deep breathes, analyze what is happening around you, recite a mantra to ground you, and/or ask yourself this question – do I need to be doing something right now and will it fix how I am feeling?

Breaking the Cycle of Anxiety

When faced with a situation that gives us anxiety, one of the most common responses is to do what we can to avoid or get out of that situation. For example, a socially anxious person might try to think of ways to get out of having to go to a party. A person who gets nervous around doctors may try to postpone their annual checkup. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. We see the source of anxiety as a threat, so we try to run away from it. Unfortunately, while we may gain short-term relief, the anxiety only remains dormant for a short period and becomes worse in the long-run.

The Cycle of Anxiety

The diagram below illustrates how avoidance leads to an endless cycle of anxiety.

The challenge with avoidance as a coping mechanism is that it often results in short-term anxiety relief, reinforcing the feeling that avoidance is a good way to reduce anxiety. However, as with just about any anxiety-inducing situation, it’s never a once in a lifetime situation. There will always be another social interaction waiting for us or another health issue that forces us to the doctor’s office. To make things worse, each time we engage in avoidance, the anxiety becomes a bigger hurdle to overcome.

The challenge then is that we are too anxious to engage in behaviors that will alleviate our anxiety, but our only other option, avoidance, increases anxiety. It is a vicious cycle.

With that, the question arises – what can we do?

Breaking the Cycle of Anxiety

The solution is simple, but unsurprisingly, it’s not easy. At the end of the day, the advice that any expert can give you boils down to one thing – you have to deal with the anxiety. You can’t avoid it. You have to approach it head-on. Often when we are anxious about something, we catastrophize and assume that the worst will happen. We might consciously even be aware that we are thinking irrationally, but it doesn’t reduce the anxiety or lessen the symptoms. What works is to face it. Challenge your negative assumptions and anxious thoughts.

That being said, you can approach this strategically to reduce the short-term stress (it won’t entirely go away, though):

Challenge your irrational thoughts. Negative and irrational thoughts feed the cycle of anxiety. Try to identify the cognitive distortions that you are guilty of and challenge each assumption. For example, you might say to yourself, “I have never given a good presentation before. I have always been terrible with public speaking.” In this instance, I would write this negative thought on a piece of paper, identify the cognitive distortion associated with it (i.e., overgeneralization), and then write a statement that challenges this claim. In this case, I would try to identify a few instances where I did have success with public speaking or did give a good presentation.
Start slow. If your social anxiety doesn’t allow you to speak with a cashier, the odds are that going to a large party full of strangers is not a good starting point. Instead, start with small things. When you order pizza, speak with someone on the phone rather than ordering online. Speak with a cashier rather than using self-checkout.
Break down the anxiety-inducing situation into smaller and more manageable tasks. If you are avoiding going to the doctor, step one is just to book your appointment. You can always cancel, so there’s no harm in scheduling it and adding it to your calendar. Start with that.
Rip it off like a band-aid. While some benefit from starting small and slow, others may benefit from the opposite – tackle the anxiety-inducing situation head-on. Get it over with. Don’t let your mind talk you out of it. Just do it. Now.
Control what you can control to increase the likelihood of success. In my childhood, I had some negative experiences going to the dentist. As a result, it’s always been a challenge to get myself to go. As an adult, though, I now have more control over my dental health and dentist. So the thing I did to help increase the likelihood of success was to thoroughly research a dentist with positive reviews. The odds are that they have good reviews for a reason. Nothing is a certainty, but I have increased the probability of having a positive experience.
Use the energy from short-term successes to address other areas of your anxiety. If you tackle an anxiety-inducing situation, and it results in a positive outcome, use the temporary positive feelings to keep tackling your anxiety. For example, if you struggle with public speaking but just gave a presentation that you feel great about, try to book and immediately have your next speaking engagement. If you are afraid of doctors and dentists and just managed to overcome your fear by going to the doctor, book your dentist visit and go as soon as possible. Ride the high and positive feelings from one encounter to address another.

Final Words…

The reality is that if you struggle with anxiety, it will always be there to some degree. However, with the proper techniques, it can become dormant indefinitely, and that’s the goal. Healthy behaviors that reduce anxiety operate in the same way that muscles do. The more you exercise and the more you practice, the stronger the muscles become. Stop exercising, however, and they become weaker. Similarly, with anxiety, you need to keep engaging in non-avoidance based behaviors to keep the anxiety away. Stop practicing, and it can return.