Your guide to doing absolutely nothing

Rachael decided to give up the squirrel hunt and go home and have a crumpet

When you’re having a bad day nothing feels possible.

None of the pieces of your life seem to fit. The pieces of you don’t seem to fit.

Everything is simultaneously too much and not enough. You feel overwhelmed and yet underwhelmed by life. Frazzled yet bored.

Like searching for a grey squirrel on a foggy day with muck on your glasses, it’s not easy to see clearly when you feel like this. Your perspective has gone AWOL and every thought is draped in a black cloth.

It’s not a comfortable place to be. And we humans don’t like feeling uncomfortable. So we tend to swing one of two ways:

1. Turbo mode Quick, quick quick! What can I do to solve this? What can I do to cheer myself up? What can I buy? Where can I go? What can I drastically change? Like a six-year-old who’s just eaten the entire contents of their trick or treat bucket, we lose our heads. Manically dashing around looking for a solution, honing in on quick fixes that don’t fix anything and being very all or nothing about the whole business.
   

2. Blankety blank We reach for the nearest comforting thing; crap food, bottomless booze, mindless TV or the nearest warm body (hopefully someone you know and not a fellow shopper in the confectionery aisle at Tesco). We are on a mission to blank it out and forget how we feel. Forget our dissatisfaction and swim off on a fuzzy wave of sugar and instant gratification.
   

The problem with both these avenues is that neither of them make anything better. They keep you emotionally stuck.

So the next time a bad day decides to plonk itself on your head, you’re in exactly the same place; reacting rather than taking a massive deep breath and feeling the feelings.

Oh yes, I’m going to go all coachy on you. I would apologise but it really is for your own good.

Trust me, the best thing you can do when you feel minging is to actually feel minging.

Let the waves of grottiness wash over you and decide to do nothing but be really, really kind to yourself. Don't’ try to solve anything or play ‘whack-a-mole’ with your emotions. Just give yourself a break.

There could be a patchwork quilt of reasons why you feel bad - but you won’t be able to see all the hexagons clearly when your head’s wonky.

Doing nothing when you feel shite is not easy. But the more you do it, the better you will get at it. If you can accept that you’re feeling bad without knee-jerking into a reaction, you are taking your first step towards feeling better.

And then, when you feel calmer, that’s when you can make a plan. Decide what’s going to help you spread the bad days out and get chinks of light back into your life.

Your first step could be talking to a friend. Your next one could be to work with someone like me. Either way, you don’t need to soldier on alone.

If you’d like a chat to find out how I help women use bad days to help them understand what they really want and need in their daily lives – then please do book a call with me. I’d love to help you feel brilliant again.