What To Do On Your Worst Days

Trust me, I get it - Not all days are sunshine and rainbows. Some days are simply harder than others and it’s often out of your control when they come. As much as we’d like to have a strong mindset and leverage gratitude and perspective to improve our perception of the day, that’s not to say we can magically make hard days easy.

Let me share a fact that offers an important point of reference. Let’s say that the worst days of the year are the days that fall in the bottom 10% of all days you’ve experienced. That seems pretty fair. With that logic, 10% of the 365 days in a year means that you have 36 really bad days. And further, if 1 in 10 days are really bad and they’re spaced out evenly, then we can expect to have one every week and a half or so.

The argument I’m making is that our bad days are much more common than we realize. 

To me, this means that we should not judge ourselves for having them. We should not allow ourselves to completely deflate when we face them because we have them often. And most importantly, we should prepare ourselves for them so that they don’t drag us as far down when they do come.

A core idea I learned from HEROIC that I’ve integrated into my personal philosophy is the idea of raising your baseline. Yes, 10% of our days are going to be our worst days, but we can control how bad these worst days get. 

Rather than getting completely derailed from your work, you still get your main needle-moving task done. Instead of bingeing sweets as a way to cope with negative emotions, you stay determined to maintain a certain level of nutrition. Instead of allowing negative news to completely impact your emotional health and wellness, you have tools in place to help you process more healthily.

Our baseline is directly correlated with our standards. When we raise our standards we raise our baseline for how we show up on our worst days. Having higher standards makes your good days better and your bad days better because it gives you clarity around what you’re willing or unwilling to tolerate. It gives you a clear expectation for the quality of your daily choices even when you don’t feel like it.

In order to be more prepared for your worst days, so that you don’t slip so easily off track and recover fast, you need more structure, discipline, and clarity to your standards.

If you don’t know where to start with that, I’ve put together a video series about the 9 Super Habits that teaches you exactly where to start in helping you be more consistent in your health, more productive and focused every day, and more disciplined in your mindset.