I believe I am not alone when I say that some days I don’t want to get out of bed, while others I cannot wait to jump out of it, setting up the expectations for the day.
We all have experienced good and bad days. Many times we label an entire day as good or bad based on one particular moment, event or interaction that happens during the day, and even very early in the day, setting off the mood for the entire day.
Defining the day as “bad” is as easy as oversleeping on a work day after turning the alarm off; this sole action can start a grim ripple effect where we start running behind the clock on everything, bypassing our daily routine, missing the train to work, getting stuck in traffic and being late for a meeting, or having to skip lunch just to make up the “lost” time. It is not only about the actions, but also about the emotions and stress levels that go with them. On a day like this, one can feel frustrated, drained or overwhelmed, and thus the day itself can be described as messy, tiresome, unproductive, gloomy, miserable etc. The moment we dismiss the alarm, we potentially change how the first waking-up minutes are going to feel, and therefore how the day is going to be labeled in our mind, in the future.
My bad days are marked with feelings of disappointment in myself or others, or where stress levels are high in an unhealthy way. For instance, stressful working relationships can definitely contribute to how our days are experienced. 2019 was a year full of days filed under “bad” in the filing cabinet of my mind. I tried to avoid the stress by working from home, and was constantly seeking for positive moments with my colleagues and team to compensate for the negatively-charged circumstances I was confronting on a daily basis with the individual I was reporting to, and to make things worse, I used to anticipate how the day was going to be (i.e. bad), if my schedule included an interaction with the trigger of my anxiety and stress, self-fulfilling my prophecies along the way.
Making a good day go sideways is effortless, really; just interact with your nemesis at the office, watch the news (there is always something bad going on somewhere in the world), stream dark online content, or engage with social media comments with which you disagree.
The reason why a day can be ruined by pretty much anything (if we let it) has something to do with our subjective reality, and more precisely our negativity biases, where “things of a negative nature have a greater effect on our psychological state and processes than neutral, or positive things”. Negative things definitely tend to weigh more, and be more memorable than good things, even though, according to positive psychology, most moments in any given day are essentially good.
On the other hand, a good day is usually described as just “OK, unless there are some life-impacting uplifting events. In my good-days files I have either won something, travelled, graduated, got hired, promoted or married; although, these are pretty significant events for me to be marking them simply as good.
We tend to describe days as “OK”, instead of noteworthy due to the negative gradient, an element of negativity bias that contributes to the significance of the events in which “negative events are thought to be perceived as increasingly more negative than positive events as increasingly positive”.
In general, something we may catalogue as positive has less impact on our behavior and cognition than something equally emotionally-charged, but negative.
At the end of the day, our judgements of good and bad days are subjective, and thus inaccurate. The inputs I may consider as bad, and that may ruin my day, may be perceived as good from someone else’s perspective, and vice versa.
Let’s go back to the case of my good days working from home. For me, choosing to connect mostly virtually felt as a relief, while the perception from the other person was the opposite, making the situation worse, in the end. What was good for me, made the other person angry, and therefore for this individual the days I was working from home were rated as bad. Looking back, I would not change having worked remotely, I did what I had to do to protect myself and keep my sanity. Unfortunately, the same working setting was interpreted very differently on each side of the conflict.
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant”
Robert Louis Stevenson
On that account, I believe having good or bad days is up to each of us, and it depends on two things: how aware we are of our unconscious bias, and how we manage our expectations.
Awareness of our unconscious bias
If we consciously know that we tend to see the negative, let’s say in a particular context, then it may be wise to intentionally find something positive in that same context, instead. Next time you sleep in, instead of rushing, panicking, or letting that ruin your day, pause, and try to find something positive about that moment, or in this case, the delay. You may have been neglecting your sleep and that’s a sign that you need to do something about it, you may not be motivated to go to work anymore, and it may be worth exploring why and what options you have, or you may be working long hours and your body is telling you to take a break and change your working conditions. Once you can spot at least one positive thing, then your brain is in a better position to tackle all the nuances of the day, so you can align to the new flow of the day.
Let the day unfold. We all have heard those stories where people miss flights, and what could have been a bad day, becomes a good one. Here is a link to one example.
Managing our expectations
Ah, the dreadful expectations! We need to develop a critical approach towards our beliefs and assumptions, since in many cases they are the cause of our disappointments, and consequently our bad days. I propose to purposely approach a day with controlling our expectations on whatever causes us stress and anxiety, or that in general we perceive as negative, instead of trying to control other people’s thoughts or behaviour. For instance, if someone stresses you out, and you need to meet with this person, be objective and while interacting avoid judging, interpretations, giving meaning to words, or non-verbal language. Stick to the facts and you will be OK.
For all I know, my recollections of 2019 would have been different if I had picked out one doable positive thing every day, and had challenged my expectations. In addition, I would have had fewer files to label and more space to store good-day experiences that year.
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