Successfully Handling a Hard Day
“On a bad day, I have mood swings - but on a good day, I have the whole mood playground." – Charles Rosenblum
Have you ever had a really challenging day? One of those days that make you want to just crawl into a hole and close it behind you? Being human, you almost certainly have. So what you can do to get yourself through it?
The best advice I've heard about dealing with a frustrating day at work is to do something else; something constructive that you enjoy. This will help you refocus your attention in a more positive direction. Finishing a task you take pleasure in, even a small one, gives you a mental boost. I am currently working on renovating my house and I find that I particularly enjoy finishing some small task that gets me closer to completing the room I am currently working on does wonders. It allows me to get lost in the non-work-related details of my project. Success tip number one: change your focus after a difficult day by immersing yourself in a hobby or project that gives you pleasure.
Notice that I did not tell you to get your favorite comfort food and veg out in front of the television. While this may seem appealing after an exhausting day, it actually makes you even more tired and unhappy. You think you have put your brain on hold, but the details of the day are swimming freely in your subconscious. When the TV is shut off, the worst aspects of your day reappear with a stomach-souring vengeance, sinking any good your temporary escape might have accomplished. Resorting to alcohol, sugary or fatty foods and similar methods can mess with your blood sugar, magnifying your misery. Success tip number two: following a challenging day, avoid the escapist tendency.
While indulging your senses in such negative outlets may not work, finding positive pleasures can be very helpful. Sometimes the best remedies for stressful days are simple: taking a long, hot bath, listening to calming, relaxing music, reading a good book or similar pursuits. Having positive consequences, these activities can put you in the right frame of mind. If I am especially stressed after a tough day at work, one of my favorite activities is a good, long walk, especially in a natural area. A few miles of nature gives me the distance and composure I need. Success tip number three: immerse yourself in upbeat activities to relieve the tensions of a difficult day.
A common method for dealing with irritating days is to discuss them with others. This should be done with caution. Following a challenging day, you may find yourself focusing exclusively on the negative elements. Not only does this fix your focus on the worst, it may also irritate the other person! (How well do you enjoy hearing the lurid details of someone else's bad day?) If you must discuss what happened, do it with an eye towards finding ways to make tomorrow better. This has the twin benefits of being more interesting to your audience and changing your focus from problems to solutions. Success tip number four: rather than wasting other people's time reviewing your unhappy day, use your combined creativity to collaborate and find ways to deal with such days in the future.
Spending time looking for the causes of a bad day can also be quite rewarding. Searching for solutions to problems and difficulties will allow you to refocus and begin planning to avoid doing things that will cause similar events to happen in the future. If your bad day started with your arriving late for work because of an accident on the freeway, you may find that planning an alternate route or listening to a radio station that advises you of traffic snafus may work wonders in preventing future bad days. Success tip number five: review bad days to better plan for future prevention. Not only is this proactive, it often makes you feel better.
Another useful strategy for reviewing a difficult day is to review it with the intention of discovering the good things that happened to you. Even your worst day had positive events in it; we just don't see them when we're focused in the wrong direction. Instead, negative focus causes us to search for similar, supporting negative events to prove that a bad day was as rotten as we suspected. You can short circuit this process using success tip number six: spend time looking for the positive things that happened during your awful day and balance your perception. Doing so may help you to realize that your day, bad as it seemed, wasn't quite as awful as you thought.
Have a great month!
