Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

Everyone has bad days. I define a bad day as when unexpected, unwanted things happen. Things go wrong. Usually it is a series, although one big event can certainly color a whole day.

On our good days, when we are “well-resourced,” we can cope with one of these events without too much disturbance. If we have several of these, or are not well-resourced to begin with, we begin to fall further and further into an internal state of disorganization. How do we to keep this from becoming a landslide? Here are 5 tips for dealing skillfully with bad days:

Accept it as normal.

As some of my favorite Buddhist authors say, your expectation that everything should go right and your protest when they do not is the cause of much of your suffering.

Why shouldn’t you have some unexpected, unwanted events? It’s part of life. See it as normal and a matter of simple arithmetic. How much they create suffering depends on how you manage them.

Put it in perspective.

How bad is it? Will it matter 5 years from now? How does it compare to what other people are going through? I just talked to my neighbor and hearing about her bad day helps me see how insignificant mine was.

Help your body with the stress.

A bad day sets you back. It may kick up stress hormones, lead to muscular tension, headaches, leave you agitated and in need of soothing. It’s easy to make a bad day worse by grabbing the wrong thing to eat or drink. That donut, for example, may give you a sugar high followed by a crash, further compromising your brain. Whatever you can do that helps your nervous system and whole body helps your mind too.

Notice What Your Mind Is Doing.

How you hold what is happening and what meaning you give it is critical to how stressful it is.

• Do you engage in catastrophic thinking, making a problem bigger and worse than it really is?
• Do you globalize, interpreting whatever happened in stable (ongoing) and universal terms? E.g. I’m just unlucky. Bad things are always happening to me.
• Do you have a need to “get points” for your suffering? Watch how you talk about your mishaps. Is there any way you cling to them?
• Identify Your Tools—And Use Them!

Knowing there will be bad days, you want to know what helps you reset. It’s different for everyone, and it’s good to have a full toolbox. These might include working with breath, taking a walk, receiving supportive touch, engaging in nurturing self-talk, petting your cat, listening to certain music, using a familiar practice like yoga or meditation, changing the channel by doing a little gratitude process, remembering what is going well, or tuning into spiritual support.

It's also good to know how to “hold your process” and to work with the parts of self that make up your internal ecology. Stress often leads to a state of regression where you lose your adult consciousness as your awareness blends into your overwhelmed inner child. Sometimes that child needs to be heard; other times the distress doesn’t lighten until we can differentiate from that child and come back to a more capable adult. The road to becoming an emotionally healthy is continually refining your tools.

Decompress and take stock.

At the end of my day, I often journal to take stock of my day. Last night, I knew it had been a more stressful day than usual with more “unexpected, unwanted events,” and I made a list of them. But then I did something new: I made a list of mitigating factors and what went well. So for example, my tech blunders had caused problems in two skype sessions, but both clients were patient and helpful. We found work arounds. And I won’t make the same mistakes again. Making my lists, I found that I had as many items in the second list as in the first.



We need to get the learning from our experiences and to metabolize them. It is not a good idea to just let experiences pile up. Unprocessed experience often shows up in health issues, bad dreams, and symptoms like anxiety.

Bad days vs. Bad hair days

There’s a popular phrase about having a “bad hair day.” This, according to online dictionaries, is when many things “seem” to go wrong. This brings attention to the idea that a cranky day isn’t always about what external events go wrong but where you are coming from.

Just as there are rose-colored glasses, you can get into a lens where everything seems not what it should be. On a bad hair day, you feel more clumsy, more ugly than on other days. Of your several possible self-images, you’ve reverted to one of your more negative ones. And likely you’ve converted to a map of the outer world that ain’t so pretty either.

I am making a distinction between objectively challenging circumstances and being in a place inside ourselves that creates a similar kind of suffering. Certainly, both can exist simultaneously, feeding each other. Bad hair days can require an even higher skill set to tame than the inescapable bad days that come to all of us.