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We’ve all had them. That woman in your office that goes to the gym everyday at 5am? She’s had them. Your terrifying and immaculate boss, who manages to silence a whole room with the raising of one, perfectly threaded eyebrow? She’s had them too. That friend who managed to get a 1st class degree whilst being captain of the hockey team, working two jobs and volunteering at the local homeless shelter? Yes, she’s had them too.

I’m talking about bad days. Them days where everything seems to go wrong, and the strong independent woman you worked so hard to build seems to dissolve back into the terrified ten year-old you thought you had left behind. Whether it’s a bad grade you weren’t expecting, bad feedback from your boss on a project you worked hard on, or simply a late running train, a lot of things can ignite a bad day. Bad days are universal and completely inevitable. We can’t avoid them. What we can do however, is embrace them, because in the long run bad days don’t have to be so bad after all.

Here’s 5 reasons to embrace your bad day:

1. PERSPECTIVE

Bad days give you a sense of perspective. Often when we are worried about something (e.g a project deadline, a job interview or a bad grade) we can become completely tunnel visioned and our sense of perception can become completely skewed. When things don’t got to plan, when what we considered to be the ‘worst’ actually happens, we learn that it wasn’t the ‘worst’ thing at all. Sure we had a bad day, maybe a bad week or even a month as a result of things going wrong, but at the end of the day we continue to breathe, eat, sleep and live. Next time we have something to worry about, we’ll remember we lived through the ‘worst’ before and it will all seem a little less scary.

2. YOU IMPROVE

Bad days are inevitable and if you set your life up around avoiding them, you set yourself up to fail. This doesn’t mean however, that you can’t avoid the triggers for bad days. If you had a bad day because you missed the train for example, you could try and get to bed that bit earlier to ensure that you are up earlier in the future. If your boss ripped your presentation to pieces because of a typo on the tenth page, you could start asking a friend or colleague to proofread your future presentations to ensure they are completely boss-proof in the future. Each time something goes wrong and you have a bad day, you learn a lesson and you improve. Mistakes will happen again, but they won’t be the same ones.

3. YOU’LL END UP SPEAKING TO YOUR NEAREST AND DEAREST

When we’ve had a bad day we often find ourselves ringing up a loved one so that we can have a good moan. Whilst your mum would probably rather you didn’t only ring when you wanted to cry about what a cow Susan from accounts is, it can be a good initiator for contact. Even better still, a lot of the time your mother, friend or lover will probably reveal that they recently also had a pretty rough day. You’ll soon realise that you are just one of a whole herd of bad-day sufferers. We might be having bad days, but we are in this together.

4. YOU’LL LEARN HOW TO BEAT A BAD DAY

The more bad days you experience, the better you will get at coping with them. Whether it’s a burst of exercise, a massage, time with a loved one, a bath, or a glass of wine (or a bottle), we soon learn what cheers us up and can allow ourselves one of these treats when we really need it.

5. BAD DAYS CAN INITIATE CHANGE

Whilst the odd bad day is inevitable, the amount of bad days you are having should be closely monitored, because they can be an important symptom that something in your life needs to change. If you find the same triggers for your bad day seem to appear again and again, whether it’s an argument with your boss, an element of your job, or comments from a friend that seems to put you down at every occasion, it is clear that these triggers need to be either removed or tackled in some way or another. No one should be having more bad days than good days, so if you find your bad days tallying up, it may be best to take action and get to the root of the problem.

All in all, you control your day. The day does not have to end, being a bad day 🙂

Written by Sofia Geraghty

Sofia Geraghty

Sofia Geraghty

Sofia is a blogger living in London. She is Head of digital at parliament street ( a political think tank) and is particulalry passionate about social inequality and personal well-being.

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