Do you ever have ‘blah’ days?
Days when nothing seems to go quite the way you planned or hoped.
Days when you see; all sorts of unfinished jobs, piles of ‘I’ll-get-to-you-later’ stuff and even more piles of ‘must-do-that-one-day’ stuff.
Days when there seems to be lots of niggling little things that you just don’t feel like doing. But leaving them undone would leave you feeling guilty, especially if you neglected them in favor of a more interesting project.
And you can’t get into the more interesting project because you know there are many other things that you should be doing first. The net result of that, of course, is that nothing gets done! Right?
Most of us have days like this sometimes. And in a moment I’ll give you some tips to help you move on. But first I’ll let you in on one simple secret. Knowing, understanding and acknowledging this will help get you out of ‘blah’ almost instantly.
Invariably nothing has actually changed. The piles of ‘to-dos’ were there yesterday and probably last week and the week before. You deal with a lot of little niggly things every day. You prioritize most activities every day and most days it works out just fine.
It’s just that today…well what has changed. The only thing that has changed is your perception, in other words your thoughts about the day and everything around you. So if nothing in the external world has changed then we need to look internally to change.
We need to do whatever it takes to jolt the internal thought processes into thinking slightly differently. We need to do something in order to change the internal thoughts with which we are viewing everything in our ‘blah’ day.
Here are some of the things that I have found over the years have worked well for me and for others. Hopefully you will find something here that is useful to you or that you can adapt and make work.
• Acknowledge that you are having a ‘blah’ day. Give yourself full permission to have it but put a very strict time limit on it. Maybe it’s mid morning when you finally recognize it as one of ‘those’ days. Then give yourself until lunch time, mid-day-ish and then wallow in it, in the full knowledge that you have only got a couple of hour to go before life – or your perceptions, your thoughts about what is going on around you, return to normal.
•Take time to tackle one of the piles of ‘must do one day’ jobs. Clearing some clutter makes way for new energy. Here again, give yourself permission to take the time away from what you think you ought to be doing for the duration of job. Just make sure it’s a comparatively small job. Clearing some areas can take a week or more and that’s not the idea!
• Sit down, comfortably, away from wherever you think you should be and ask yourself if you could actually put the ‘blah’ thoughts, (because thoughts is all they are), to one side just for a moment. Keep asking until you can acknowledge that you could put them to one side. Once you have acknowledged that you could do so, ask yourself ‘why not now’. Keep asking that until there is no reason not to put the thoughts to one side now, which you inevitably will.
•Take a walk outside preferable somewhere where you can experience some form of natural surroundings. Notice your surroundings, birds, sky, sun, grass shrubs, trees. Take it all in, breath it all in. No, I definitely did not say hug a tree. But if that’s you thing you go ahead…
•Do something nice and unexpected for someone, offer to help someone or give someone an unexpected gift. It doesn’t have to be big or expensive but you must do or give whatever with an open heart and graciously. And be grateful that you are in a position to do whatever.
Guess what. I’ve gotten out of my ‘blah’ day by writing this for you! Hope you enjoy it and hope it helps. And please feel free to pass it on.