Dealing with Frustration and End a Bad Day

It’s not unusual that we wake up and just know that “today’s going to be a bad day.” At times, we may even feel as if the entire universe has conjured against us to deliver us a blow that we may not recover from for the entire day, which means there’s nothing we can do to shake off the feeling. Not really so, LifeHacker says after going through all the trouble of looking up recent studies on how we perceive reality on these days and how to alter our perception of them to make them go away.

“Reflect on the negative feeling you have right now. Is it stress? Anxiety? Frustration? What caused it? Try to label it in one to three words, but no more! For instance, it might be ‘frustration with clients’ or ‘anger from [clients].’ You know, something like that. Once you’ve labeled it, do not think about the feeling or events anymore. Move on and only refer back to the label if necessary. Matthew Lieberman, an associate professor at UCLA, has shown that the simple act of putting our feelings into a word or two can dramatically reduce the effect of those feelings. When you’re angry, simply attaching the word ‘anger’ to your feeling makes you less angry,” LifeHacker writes for the first step in the process.

“Remember that the outcome of the previous minute is not indicative of the outcome of the next minute. Likewise, the last hour has no bearing on the next hour, and this morning is no indication of what this afternoon will bring,” LifeHacker says of step 3. That is to say: there is no such thing as a bad day. “The statistics show that people who believe in bad luck will have more accidents on Friday the 13th. Those who have a negative attitude are more likely to endow normal little mishaps with some mystical significance. Some psychologists even suggest that it’s a way of subconsciously avoiding responsibility for our actions. ‘It was Friday 13th, so I was bound to stick my fingers with superglue’ or ‘Accidents happen in threes, so after the first mishap the next two were inevitable.’ Of course it’s nonsense,” Peter J. Bentley, PhD, writer of “Why [Expletive] Happens: The Science of a Really Bad Day,” also says.

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