Not Every Bad Day Needs Fixing

Some days are just bad days. You wake up tired or irritated for no particular reason. Things that normally wouldn’t bother you suddenly do. You don’t feel motivated, grateful, or particularly happy. And almost immediately, we start wondering what’s wrong and what we can do to change it.

Maybe I should exercise, go for a walk, meditate, listen to music, think positively, or call someone. All perfectly reasonable ideas. But sometimes, in our determination to feel better, we unintentionally add a second problem to the first one. Now we are not only having a bad day; we are also frustrated that we are having a bad day.

We live surrounded by advice about how to feel better: books, podcasts, apps, routines, breathing exercises and endless lists of habits followed by happy people. I do that every week through this channel hoping it can genuinely help. But perhaps somewhere along the way, we have also absorbed the idea that feeling bad is a problem that always needs to be solved. I’m not sure it is.

Sometimes you are sad because something sad happened. Sometimes you are exhausted because you haven’t slept enough. Sometimes you are frustrated because life can be frustrating. And sometimes you just feel off and don’t really know why. Not every uncomfortable emotion needs an explanation, and not every bad afternoon needs to become an opportunity for personal growth.

Of course, if something is consistently making us unhappy, we should pay attention to it. But that’s different from believing that every uncomfortable feeling requires immediate action.

Perhaps part of being happy is being comfortable with the fact that we won’t always feel happy. A good life still contains bad days. They aren’t interruptions to life; they are part of it.

So sometimes, instead of trying so hard to turn the day around, we can simply let a bad day be a bad day.

Tomorrow gets another chance.