Do any of you remember the children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Voirst? In the story, Alexander is having an especially bad day. He really wants to escape to Australia, but in the end, he accepts that some days are just like that. Yesterday, I felt exactly like Alexander—well, I don’t know if Australia was on my list of exit routes—I was more of an “anywhere but here” kind of gal yesterday!

Do you ever have a day where everything goes wrong and somehow you are responsible for the “everything” part? Honestly, I simply couldn’t right the ship no matter how hard I tried. And then, if you’re like me, you start beating yourself up—which is never helpful, by the way. So down the rabbit hole I went, longing for the day to end and hoping the dawn of a new day would put me in a better place, which it did.

So how can we survive a bad day? What can we do to turn it around or at the very least, look back in hindsight with some perspective? First, identify 3 things we are grateful for. Gratitude is a “snap out of it” exercise which puts everything in perspective. Second, acknowledge what we’ve already accomplished. If we only watch the blooper reel, we will forget there is a highlight reel. And finally, pinpoint the emotion that underlies this bad day. Labeling the emotion can put the brakes on our emotional response and help us process the situation from a more rational, calm perspective. I hope this helps for your next “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”

“Not everyday is a good day but there is something good in every day.” — Alice Morse Earle

With Gratitude,
Beth