14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not rare that we wake up and just know that “today’s going to be a bad day.” At times, we may even feel as if the entire universe has conjured against us to deliver us a blow that we may not recover from for the entire day, which means there’s nothing we can do to shake off the feeling. Not really so, LifeHacker says after going through all the trouble of looking up recent studies on how we perceive reality on these days and how to alter our perception of them to make them go away.
Scientifically speaking, there is no such a thing as a bad day – although there is luck, no doubt about it. What does exist is our perception of reality, which means that a bad day is a day just like any other that we perceive differently for a series of reasons. Learning to identify these and then to solve them one by one is actually the solution to ending a bad day. Moreover, not only can it be done but it can even be done in the manner of “three easy steps.” On the downside, says the aforementioned e-zine, this may sound easier in writing than it actually is.
“Reflect on the negative feeling you have right now. Is it stress? Anxiety? Frustration? What caused it? Try to label it in one to three words, but no more! For instance, it might be ‘frustration with clients’ or ‘anger from [clients].’ You know, something like that. Once you’ve labeled it, do not think about the feeling or events anymore. Move on and only refer back to the label if necessary. Matthew Lieberman, an associate professor at UCLA, has shown that the simple act of putting our feelings into a word or two can dramatically reduce the effect of those feelings. When you’re angry, simply attaching the word ‘anger’ to your feeling makes you less angry,” LifeHacker writes for the first step in the process.
That is to say, identifying how you feel and voicing it out loud is the first step towards improvement. Just like is the case with addicts – only less serious. Once this out of the way, the next step is to retrace everything back to the thing that triggered your current feelings and thinking of a positive outcome or, if that’s not possible, coming up with ways in which the situation could have been worse. This will allow you to reevaluate your current situation by putting everything into a different perspective, thus you will no longer be focusing only on the negative. Changing small details about your circumstance or surroundings can speed up this process, like playing a different music from what you’re accustomed to, going out for a walk or even shifting your position in your chair.
“Remember that the outcome of the previous minute is not indicative of the outcome of the next minute. Likewise, the last hour has no bearing on the next hour, and this morning is no indication of what this afternoon will bring,” LifeHacker says of step 3. That is to say: there is no such thing as a bad day. “The statistics show that people who believe in bad luck will have more accidents on Friday the 13th. Those who have a negative attitude are more likely to endow normal little mishaps with some mystical significance. Some psychologists even suggest that it’s a way of subconsciously avoiding responsibility for our actions. ‘It was Friday 13th, so I was bound to stick my fingers with superglue’ or ‘Accidents happen in threes, so after the first mishap the next two were inevitable.’ Of course it’s nonsense,” Peter J. Bentley, PhD, writer of “Why [Expletive] Happens: The Science of a Really Bad Day,” also says.
In other words, your day will be as you want it to be.
Follow me on Twitter @ElenaGorgan