How to get over a bad day at work

The inspiration for that article came from a horrid day I had at work, it made me think on how difficult or sometimes impossible is to carry on working when you are affected by something bad which happened during your working day.

Perhaps a bad frame of mind, interaction with bad client, or a time waster, mood related issues with your boss or coworkers – does all this sound familiar? If so, you are not alone, these are the wonders of working in general. When working at home, all these negative impacts may be much stronger when you working at home. We all can have bad days, sometimes it is not up to us, we wake up with fresh mind, we are ready to rock, then we start working and all these bad things happening preventing us from normal work and killing our productivity.

As you probably know I love my job, I have created environment which fits my lifestyle and allow me to build a career I always wanted, I’m also able to develop other businesses at the same time, I really have no reason why my days should ever be bad, but sometimes I cannot simply help it. Being very productive person and someone who value time I can get really annoyed if not stressed when I come across any obstacles while working and that horrible day I mentioned earlier was a good example. Instead of trying to treat it as a one off element where I have no control, I began to think on what I can do improve quality of my work when day start to become rotten. We are only humans and we do make mistakes, this is how we learn but a smart thing to do is to learn from these mistakes, analyse problems and come up with conclusions. You absolutely need to build up resiliency and need to grow a “thicker skin” so any obstacles which will come your way, you will be able to treat with ease, as long as you are prepared for them.

Here are few things you could do when your day isn’t on planned path:

1. Just go outside

As soon as possible, stand up and walk away, get a nice walk to clear your mind, try not to think what happened, focus your mind on world which surrounds you, the nature, look at the trees, look at the sky, a green scenery. All these will calm you down and mute the problems which bothering you. If you worry that you struggle to find time for it, you should not, the 15 minute walk will be enough, if you can make it longer, even better.

2. Do some work out

You can do it at home, gym or in your garden, I usually urge people to do exercises in the morning before they go to work, but if you are having a bad day, you can get rid of some anger by simply working out, remember you are working remotely, you can find 15-20 minutes for that if you need to. Your mood will be much better when you return to work

3. Dump all the problems onto the paper

This might be controversial to some but this method is used by therapeutists around the globe, write down all your problems, as soon as they “touch” the paper, they will materialise themselves and you will be able to look at them and your brain will be able to treat them same way it does with to-do lists. If you don’t have a pen and paper, use computer, send yourself an email with problems listed so you can see them. This will make feel you better, I have used this technique more than I can remmember.

4. Connect with friends or family

To get rid of negative feelings and emotions consider calling a friend or someone you love, someone who is a great listener. Talking about problems is another way to deal with bad day. You may actually realise that it is not as much as a deal as you though.

5. Shift to other, less complicated tasks

Carry on working could be a good relief method as long as you stop doing what you are doing and shift to other tasks which require less effort. Maybe make a phone call to positive clients of yours, or see if you have any unanswered emails which does not require any brain power from yourselves. Maybe you can help your other colleagues? This will also be doing something else.

6. Meditate

I have covered that topic extensively in one of the previous article. Meditation is one of the best tactics to deal with problems and get your focus back on track. 10-20minutes straight after bad experience will improve your day forward.

7. Listen to music

You can return to good mood by listening to music, it will help you relax yourself and shift your mood from bad to good. Just make sure you will opt for calm music experience, I personally prefer music with no vocal for that matter, the vocal creates a path in your brain which wants to learn the lyrics and subconsciously you will start remembering the song when you don’t want to do that.

8. Setup an improvement plan

If problem is caused by you, write it down, see how you can avoid making mistakes, if you have no control over the issue, setup the plan on how you can overcome the problem, if it is a bad client, maybe there is no point investing your time anymore? Write down the plan on how you want to act.

9. Empathy, empathy, empathy

If you were put into the bad mood by client, boss or coworkers which were rude or demanding to you, take into account that they are also humans and they may have a bad day or dealing with a stressful situation themselves. Don’t take it personally, suggest to come back to the conversation when they will be calm enough to do so and depends of your link to them, you can offer any of these tips I wrote. Last thing you want is toxic environment, maybe they don’t know how to tackle the problem, you now know, so share it with them!

10. Write down things you are grateful for

This is another controversial one, but it will help you realise that you are not at the bottom, there must be achievements and things which can be considered as your blessings, list them down, even every day, it will help creating you that visual point system for your life and achievements and things which you see on written down on the paper will materialise and you will be able to appreciate them more.

In summary, try to be positive every day, have some compassion for others, realise what you have and what you are able to do.

How you are dealing with bad days? Let me know in the comments below.

Cheers,
Lucas