If you’ve had one of those days where everything goes wrong, or everything feels difficult, you may feel completely drained and devoid of energy. Maybe a little pick me up would help? Here are some ideas for how to feel better on a bad day.
Accept that bad days are okay
One of the biggest tips for feeling brighter, quicker, is to actually just accept that you’re feeling crappy. I know it sounds counterproductive to sit with those feelings, but often what we do by trying to force ourselves to get over it, is to glaze over the challenging day we’ve had, and the emotions attached to it. This means we don’t deal with it, and it ends up lasting far longer in our mental space than it would if we just acknowledged how we were feeling. Acknowledging how we are feeling and why we may be feeling that way, and then accepting that it’s okay to have negative feelings will help you to process it and move through it more quickly than trying to cover it over with false positivity.
Make a ‘happy’ playlist
If you’ve got songs in mind that make you want to get up and dance like crazy the second you hear them, or songs that make you laugh out loud, then you need to pop them into a special playlist that you save for days like this.
Music has so much power for all emotions. Utilise the ones that make you feel good at times when you feel anything but.
Write a gratitude list
On bad days you don’t need any help focusing on what feels wrong or went wrong, so it’s vital that you also remind yourself of what went right.
A gratitude or ‘Today I achieved…’ list is a fantastic way to turn around the negative feelings towards the day and focus on what went right instead.
If you’re struggling with thinking of anything, start small. It can seem silly, like ‘I managed to get out of bed today’, because on days where you are really struggling those achievements are not small and deserve to be acknowledged.
Journal
You may have noticed that we are big fans of journaling, and for good reason. If you have a lot of powerful thoughts and emotions blocking your brain and smothering your mental capacity, then you need to find a way to release them. Journaling is one of the best ways to do that.
There’s no pressure to magically feel better, it’s more about taking any thoughts and putting them on paper. You’ll most likely find that seemingly irrelevant thoughts take over at first, but if you write them down then you’ll eventually get to the thoughts that are weighing you down.
Once it’s out on paper it can feel like you’ve removed a literal weight. It may not feel like knowing how to journal comes naturally at first, but stick with it. Try not to worry about what to write, just focus on writing everything you think. Everything.
Try and use these tips when you’re having a really bad day, and hopefully you can move through it and feel better more quickly than you might have before. And remember that a bad day does not mean you have a bad life.
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