Changing the “Bad Day”.

Changing the “Bad Day”.

It is not uncommon to hear someone say that they have had a bad day. It means that all that happened to them that day since wake up had been unpleasant, whatever they did, unsuccessful and whoever they met have been less than friendly or had bad news.

Everyone’s had a bad day at least once… and we all know that sometimes a bad day can turn into a bad week. Since having a bad day affects your mood, it also affects how you treat your friends and family. In fact, having a bad day can turn you into an angry and negative version of yourself. When you have a bad day, you don’t want to deal with people. Although you need to talk to get things off your chest, you also don’t want to overload other people with your problems, so you feel even more frustrated.

Many things can make you have a bad day, from spilling coffee on the shirt you just put on to having an early-morning argument with your partner. You can also get in trouble at work for being late, you have a deadline coming up and a tool you needed stopped working, you received non-constructive or negative feedback… These seemingly small things can affect your inner peace and make you explode.

The need is to find ways to stay happy, even on a bad day. But how? One thing that needs to be done is to identify the cause. Small unfortunate details can make a day awful. When you think you’re having a bad day, it’s because you’re only focusing on the facts or circumstances you shouldn’t be paying that much attention to. The moment you realize that you should be focusing on other things, you’ll start to feel better. Some circumstances however deserve your whole attention. However, you might also be focusing too much on things that don’t matter but often it may end up ruining your day and affecting you emotionally. In many occasions, when you’re only having negative thoughts, you may tend to blow things out of proportion, giving too much importance to the negative things that happen to you when, in reality, they’re much less serious than they seem. It all depends on where your priorities lie. You should ask yourself why your main priority should be a thing that you won’t care about when everything in your life is finally in place.

In order to prevent this from happening, it’s fundamental to know what really matters to you, the things you want to make work, and the things you’re not willing to give up on. One thing you can do to make a difference is to do something you like. Doing a hobby or activity you like will get you in a great mood. Thus, you should listen to a song you like, call a friend you like talking to or even just go out for a walk at your favorite park. You can read a great book, cook a recipe you like, or go visit your best friend. Do what you love. As small as this may seem, it can really cheer you up.

Any type of physical activity will make your body release he hormones of happiness, which are behind the feeling of joy that comes after a good workout session. Apart from releasing these hormones, your body will be able to “disconnect” from the world during a workout. In fact, your mind will be more relaxed and you’ll focus only on the activity that you’re doing, leaving your fears and problems behind.

Perhaps the easiest way to regain happiness is to smile. A smile is perhaps the most genuine expression of happiness. Some studies demonstrate that by constantly doing something characteristic of a particular emotion, you can feel the emotion itself. Thus, feeling happy makes you smile, but smiling also makes you happy.

One other tried and tested method is to compartmentalize the day into segments. So your day could be six segments, like early morning, late morning, midday, afternoon, evening and night. You can choose to leave the unpleasantness in the early morning and set about doing the needful in the late morning and so on, thus disconnecting from the negatives of one section from the other. It has been proven to be one of the best negativity beaters.

Finally, it’s important to not get carried away by the negative emotions you feel on a bad day. Although some negative things may be going on in your life, if you let them affect you, you won’t be able to focus on resolving them. Furthermore, seeing only the negative in a bad day can prevent you from seeing the good things in life.

It will help to remember that you have the choice to be affected by a bad day or not. If you choose to pull your mind out of the morass that makes you unhappy, you can redeem for yourself. Every day is too valuable to be wasted in wallowing in sorrow.