I don’t do well with stress. Even minor inconveniences can throw me off my game, turning a mildly bad day into a complete five-alarm fire. If someone asks a single thing of me during one of these spirals, I’m likely to blow up.
Whether you’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed or an avalanche of calamities happens to descend upon you, it’s easy to get bogged down by negativity, to feel like a black cloud hangs over your head. Anyone who’s had a bad day can attest to how these feelings can ripple out to other aspects of your life: You’re curt with the barista and they’re rude in return, you throw your bag down forcefully at your desk and break your glass Tupperware inside, you snap at your partner and they get annoyed. “When you’re in a bad mood, it shows up in your behavior and it shows up in your facial expressions and it shows up in your tone of voice and you might end up actually eliciting negativity from others unintentionally that way,” Ryan Martin, a psychologist who has studied anger and the author of Emotion Hacks: 50 Ways to Feel Better Fast, tells Vox.
Rather than lashing out at every unsuspecting soul who crosses your path, Martin outlines four tactics to help you defang your rage during those days when everyone at work needs something from you, your basement floods, and your best friend is mad at you.
1. Recognize that you’re crabby
When people are having a bad day, they tend to let that negativity inform how they perceive everything moving forward, Martin says. “It becomes a lens that they look through, and they start to interpret a lot of events as being negative, even neutral things,” he says. “Or they fail to recognize some of the positive things that happened along the way.”
By acknowledging I am having a bad day, you can stop the cycle of negativity and consider what concrete actions you could take to improve your mood.
2. Think about what has actually gone wrong (and what’s gone right)
One of those concrete steps is to pay attention to the things that have actually gotten under your skin and determine if they really are day-ruining, or merely inconveniences. “Part of what happens for people is when they get down… they get hung up on the things that they’re upset about, and they start to catastrophize a little bit,” Martin says.
Be realistic and consider whether the traffic you’re in will actually cause you to lose your job, or just make you a few minutes late. (It’s entirely possible you might lose your job, and a mindset shift won’t make that less stressful!) But maybe there are other things about your day that are going well: you enjoyed your breakfast and got out the door on time. Those are worth acknowledging, too.
3. Take control where you can
On days when it seems like absolutely nothing is going your way, it can be easy to feel like bad things are happening to you in a world where you have no agency. There certainly are scenarios — say, getting a flat tire — where things are largely out of your control. But there are likely other aspects of your day where you can establish more control. Maybe it’s rescheduling a meeting and taking a walk instead. Perhaps you call a friend just to say you’re thinking of them. By doing this, you put a little space between the unpleasant events and everything else. “I like to acknowledge that those things truly are independent of each other,” Martin says. “They’re bad things that just all happened all at the same time, but it isn’t actually a pattern that is related to those things.”
Recent research has found that taking concrete steps to manage stress is effective at minimizing negative emotions and improving mental health. And these stress-management tactics don’t take a ton of time and effort either: They can look like stepping away to relax for a minute, getting a good night’s sleep, practicing gratitude, or seeking out social support.
All communication skills elude me in the midst of a stressful day. Catch me at the wrong time, and I might snap. Offering a warning that you’re on edge isn’t a bad idea, but your delivery matters, Martin says. “What I don’t necessarily love is when someone essentially says, ‘Hey, I’m on the verge of a freakout,’ and then asks me to… deal with whatever mood they’re in, in a way that actually puts a lot of emotional labor on me,” he says.
Rather than lashing out at a friend and saying, “I’m not in the mood for your jokes,” Martin suggests a softer “I’m really struggling today, just wanted you to know,” or “This day has been so awful, I’d appreciate it if you had some patience with me.”
“My take is that people are often pretty good at giving people grace when things are voiced in that way,” he says.
Bad days, unfortunately, are inevitable. But we don’t have to make a stressful day worse. How we choose to react to stressful situations is entirely within our control.
