The feeling of getting up on the wrong foot is something that ends up leading to a bad day. Everything goes “irremediably” wrong. Find out why and how to reverse it. Read my new post!
We have all had the feeling that the day is going to go badly no matter what we do and it seems that as the hours go by our prediction it is being fulfilled. This is what is usually said to get up on the left foot. You get up and trip over something, hurting your little toe, then at breakfast your toast burns and in the shower the hot water doesn’t seem to want to come out. As a result, you leave home later, miss the bus and arrive late for work. A series of events are triggered that cause tension and discomfort that lasts all day or can even generalize over days, weeks or months.
Why does this happen to us?
When something bad happens to us, our mind immediately goes to think negative things. Following the example I gave you before, if you get out of bed and stub your foot, you’re going to think something like: “I’m so clumsy” or “we’re starting the day well” (ironically speaking). That thought will cause discomfort with yourself and will lead you to be more attentive to the next negative things that happen to you, overlooking the positive things because you are not paying attention to them. I always say that sometimes we put on certain glasses to see. Sometimes we put on the glasses of positivity (we see the positive but the negative is seen less) and other times we put on the glasses of negativity (we only see the bad and the good goes unnoticed). In these cases, what happens is that we pay more attention to the negative and therefore, we accumulate a series of negative events that end up generalizing and dramatizing the entire day. I’ll give you an example: it’s like picking up a grain of sand from the beach. In itself you won’t notice it or realize that you have it, but if what you do is accumulate grain by grain, in the end you end up having a mountain of sand. Well, what happens on a “bad day” is that we accumulate a series of negative moments and retain them in our memory.
We must keep in mind that throughout each day not only good or bad things happen to us, there is always everything, what happens is that perhaps they appear interspersed and we do balance unconsciously.
The self-fulfilling prophecy
To understand “bad days” you also have to understand how our mind works. In psychology we talk about the self-fulfilling prophecy to explain how we make things go wrong.
Let me explain: Imagine that before going to sleep you want tomorrow to be good because you have a job interview and you want that position for yourself. Your expectations will be high and you prepare to be the best candidate. But when you get up that morning you realize that the alarm hasn’t gone off and you’re a bit short on time. Your main fear is being late for the interview and making a bad impression. You start to get dressed in a hurry and run away. On the subway you start to think: “Just today, when I’m in a hurry, the subway is taking a while to come; on top of that, a train has passed that doesn’t accept passengers first and now it stops for a long time at each stop. You’ll see how I’m going to arrive late and they won’t work for me.” embrace”. That negative mentality makes you feel bad about yourself and even though you manage to arrive on time, you feel so frustrated by the mistake you made that you don’t have an open mind, you are unfocused and the interview goes badly for you. Well, that is the self-fulfilling prophecy: the main fear, which is that the interview will go poorly, ends up happening because your thoughts lead you to act in a way that you boycott yourself and what you fear so much happens.
Thus, every time we think: “today is a bad day,” we are predisposing for things to go wrong because our attitude It is negative. It is not a magical matter, things do not always happen because they have to happen, sometimes we cause them with our attitude and our thoughts. If in the previous example, while you were evaluating that you had arrived on time, you had sent yourself a positive message such as: “You have had a setback that can happen to anyone but you have overcome it and have managed to arrive on time. Now I am going to focus on myself , what I’m worth and showing who I am” probably that interview would have gone better for you.
What can I do to avoid having a “bad day”?
Sometimes unforeseen events and negative things happen without us being able to avoid them. That doesn’t always depend on us. But what we can do so that the day does not end up being a drama is the following:
- Evaluate each thing that happens to you in isolation: If you value the negative by accumulating circumstances, it is very easy to end up seeing the day as negative. And if the tendency is towards negativity, you can end up falling into depression due to the accumulation of bad days. For example: If you make a mistake at work, think about that mistake, not about all the mistakes you made earlier that day or days before. All that does is make you trust yourself less, blame yourself excessively, and increase the probability of making mistakes again.
- Take into account your resolution capacity: Stop looking at the day selectively. Try to assess not only what is going wrong but also your ability to solve problems. Don’t just think about how your toast burned, but how good you were to buy cookies just in case.
- Rejoice in your successes: It is true that looking only at what we do well makes us arrogant people. It’s not about doing that, but you have to try to find the balance. If you only value the negative, you will be a person with depressive tendencies, while if you are able to see what you do well throughout your days, you will live in a more satisfactory and also more objective way.
Think that we have to be friends of ourselves, not our own executioners.
Encarni Muñoz Silva
Health psychologist, registered number 16918
