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No one is immune to a bad day. Whether it’s at work, at school, or in our personal lives, a bad day can sap our energy, darken our outlook, and make us question our own personal worth.
As Harper Lee wrote, “Things are never as bad as they seem.” While these few, simple words hold much truth for all of us, it’s easy to forget them when we’re faced with a bad day, and everything seems to be falling apart.
If you’re having a bad day today, there are a few things you should remind yourself of before you let the bad day get you down.
10 Things to Remember When You’re Having a Bad Day
1. You’re not alone: plenty of people are having a bad day today. One of the most tempting thoughts to have when you’re having a bad day is that you’re completely alone and isolated with your problems. Not so! Everyone has a bad day sooner or later, and everyone knows what it feels like to have everything go wrong. Take comfort in the fact that everyone has been where you are, and plenty of people out there are dealing with their own set of challenges and setbacks, just as you are.
2. It’s never as bad as it originally seems. So you lost your keys, were late to work, messed up your presentation, and got reprimanded by your boss? Things may seem pretty bad today, but in a few days, and even in a few months, today will be a mere blip on your radar.
3. Bad days make you appreciate the good days even more. As cliché as it sounds, if we didn’t have bad days, we would never appreciate the good days as much as we do. This is why it’s so important to be present in the moment and live your life to the fullest: you never know how or when life will test you and present you with difficult challenges.
4. Every challenge is a lesson in disguise. Though it may not be immediately obvious, every problem you’re presented with is actually a lesson you can learn from. It may seem like a cruel twist of fate when life hands us difficult situations, heartbreaks, and disasters, but within every challenge we face, there is always a lesson to be learned where we can grow from it to be stronger, wiser, and more experienced.
5. Just as everything happens for a reason, a lot of things don’t happen for a reason. Did absolutely nothing go your way today? Did all your plans fall apart right in front of you? Just as things happen for a reason, many things don’t happen for an equally good reason. For example, maybe you got rejected for an internal position at your work that you really wanted and worked hard for. As crushing as it may be at first to get rejected, keep in mind that something even better is waiting for you down the road. It may be that it didn’t work out because your strengths weren’t suited for the job, or because you wouldn’t have clicked with the team you would have been on. Some things are just not meant to be, and for a good reason.
6. A bad day doesn’t define you as a person. When we’re faced with a bad day, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we somehow deserve to have only bad things happen to us. Don’t fall into this trap. Bad things happen to everyone, including good people.
7. Just because things didn’t go your way doesn’t mean you failed. Just because all your plans fell apart doesn’t mean you failed. Failure is when you give up and stop trying altogether. Sometimes our best-laid plans work against the solutions, meaning that we need to approach a challenge differently than we had planned for. If your proposed ideas and plans don’t work out, it simply means you need to tackle the issue a different way. Take a step back and reassess.
8. Things will look better in the morning. My mom always used to tell me this when I would get stressed, and she was absolutely right. No matter how bad the problem seemed during the day and into the evening, come the next morning, things would always look better.
9. Your setbacks make you stronger. Every time you have a bad day filled with setbacks and challenges, you become a stronger, more experienced person. Every challenge you’ve faced yet has in some way better equipped you to handle every subsequent, more complicated challenge. A bad day is no different. The next time you’re faced with a bad day with similar issues, you’ll be that much stronger and ready to handle it.
10. There’s always room for personal growth. No matter how many bad days that come our way, there’s always a way to grow from it. Perhaps your bad day has tested your patience and temper, and you want to find ways to be a more patient person. Identify the lesson within the challenge, and you’ll always find that you can grow from it.
