I recently had one of “those days.” You know the ones, where absolutely nothing goes your way and things just keep getting worse the further into it you get. After a crazy day, I forgot to pick up groceries, so I scrounged around my kitchen for something to eat, dropped an egg, and then turned around too quickly and knocked a favorite bowl to the floor, where it shattered into pieces. After quickly cleaning up, I later stepped on a rogue shard that had flown, unnoticed, out of the kitchen and onto my wood floor.
Sheesh, I thought, ready to cocoon myself in bubble wrap. Can things get worse?
I envisioned choking to death on my dinner, ingesting some other shard of ceramic or maybe slipping in the shower later that night and hitting my head. I wasn’t sure my evening could recover.
It’s a thing, this downward spiral of doom. We all do it. But do we make it worse for ourselves? And do we have the power to turn our days around, or are we cursed once the spiral begins? To find out, I spoke with experts in psychology and neurology: Patrice Le Goy, PhD, a psychologist, therapist and adjunct professor; Matthew Leahy, PhD, a licensed psychologist in private practice; and Sanam Hafeez, PsyD, a New York City–based neuropsychologist.
It turns out that the spiral is real—though also semi-self-created. “The first bad thing may happen to us,” says Leahy. “But then our brain starts helping build the case that the whole day is ruined.” It doesn’t have to be, though.
Read on to learn some surprisingly easy ways to boost your mood and make things a whole lot better—and also recognize when it’s time to call it a day.
Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more life hacks, humor, cleaning, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.
Is there a scientific reason that some days are particularly awful?
Believe it or not, yes. A day that seems to be spiraling out of control comes down to both how your brain is wired to notice threats and what’s happening chemically once it decides something qualifies as one.
Le Goy points to negativity bias. “Bad days can spiral because we often give more attention to negative things than we do to positive ones,” she says. We’ve evolved this way to protect ourselves. “Negative experiences are more likely to feel threatening, and so to stay ‘safe,’ we have to be vigilant in recognizing these threats.” Plus, we tend to focus on the facts that support our new theory that everything is a disaster, and this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That mindset can shift our mood and our actions, inadvertently setting us up for more negative interactions.
But there’s more to it than simply perspective. “The amygdala is heavily involved in sounding the alarm,” Hafeez says. “If your brain decides there is a threat, it signals areas such as the hypothalamus to get the body ready to respond. Your heart may beat faster, your muscles tense and your attention can narrow toward whatever seems wrong.” Once that response is underway, she explains, “it can become harder for the prefrontal cortex—the part that helps with reasoning, perspective and self-control—to have as much influence over your reaction.”
That alarm also triggers a cortisol spike, which sets off a cascade of chemicals that send inflammatory signals through the brain. At the same time, that cortisol suppresses GABA, the neurotransmitter responsible for keeping you calm. With your calming chemical suppressed and your inflammatory signals firing, your brain gets stuck in a heightened, reactive state. That feedback loop is why a single bad moment rarely stays contained to just that moment: It keeps feeding itself. It’s also why, as Hafeez puts it, “the third annoying thing that happens at 4 p.m. can feel much worse than it would have if it happened first thing in the morning,” and why something you’d normally brush off can suddenly feel like the final straw.
What are the scientifically proven ways to recover from a bad day?
Sleep is certainly one of our strongest resets, but you don’t have to wait until the next morning to feel different. “A bad morning can still become a decent afternoon because the brain and body are constantly responding to what is happening in the present,” says Hafeez. “There isn’t a specific neurological point where the brain decides the entire day is ruined. Even after hours of stress, the nervous system can begin calming down when it gets signals that the immediate threat or problem has passed.”
When my own recent bad day went down, in addition to mentally listing all the other things that could go wrong, I chuckled as I envisioned myself as a slapstick comedian a la the Three Stooges or Kramer from Seinfeld, with my mishaps recast as a well-orchestrated, graceful (if goofy!) dance. Turns out, I was using a proven method for pulling myself out of the spiral. And that’s just one of the things you can do to take a beat and stop the inflammation loop when you notice your day going downhill.
Build self-awareness and reflection
“When we are able to pause and stay present, we can stop a bad moment from becoming a bad day,” says Le Goy. She calls this halt the single most important move available to you in the moment. “When we find ourselves spiraling, it is often because we are jumping ahead and making assumptions that the rest of the day will be as bad as this particular moment. When we take a beat, we can decide how we want to move forward, rather than being swept away on the negative emotion wave.”
A 2021 review in the journal Translational Psychiatry found a strong link between anxiety and depression and those who lacked the ability to notice their thoughts and feelings as passing mental events rather than absolute truths. Turning my calamity into a comedy short in my mind’s eye helped interrupt my own spiral.
Being realistic can help as well. Don’t expect you’ll do a full 180 and suddenly have a fantastic day; your mind won’t accept what it doesn’t already believe. Aim for a neutral day, one where you’re back in control of what happens. Part of that is not compounding the problem: Naming what’s actually going on (“I’m keyed up right now”) instead of escalating it into a verdict (“Everything is going wrong”) keeps one rough moment from snowballing into a ruined day.
Try mindfulness practices like journaling or meditation
Identifying what’s going on and calling it out can help break the spiral. Saying or writing out loud “I’m having a bad day” can be the beat you need to separate yourself from the negativity. “I feel like I’m a mess today” hits differently than “I’m a mess.”
The science backs this up. A 2022 study found that five 30-minute weekly mindfulness sessions significantly dropped serum cortisol and perceived stress levels in nursing students. Another showed that a mindfulness retreat produced bigger drops in cortisol and inflammatory markers than a comparison group who simply took a vacation with no structured practice. Rest alone didn’t move the needle; structured mindfulness did.
Change your physical environment
“If everything is irritating you, leave the room and do something random, even if it’s just walking around Target or taking a drive while blasting music,” says Hafeez. “A change of scenery can make the bad part of the day feel like it belongs to an earlier chapter rather than the rest of your day.” Even moving to a different room can be enough to interrupt the spiral.
A 2023 study put that theory to the test: 100 people took a 30-minute walk in either a natural or urban setting, and both groups showed significant, equal improvements in mood. Positive affect increased, and negative affect dropped, surprisingly with no real difference between the nature and city settings. The takeaway: Getting outside and moving your body seems to boost your mood regardless of the scenery, meaning the shift in context itself may be doing the heavy lifting.
Get up and move
Moving your body helps take you out of threat mode, even if it’s brief: a walk around the block, a few jumping jacks or anything else that shifts your physical state. “Get up and move, and get that stress hormone cortisol out of the body,” Leahy says. “You don’t need a workout. A brisk walk, stretching or doing something physically active can help move your attention out of your head and back into your body.”
The reason? According Hafeez, that movement gives the body “somewhere to put the energy that comes with a stress response and can help shift attention away from the stressful event.”
Experts more formally established that in a 2021 study where 83 young men did 30 minutes of treadmill exercise at varying intensities, then faced a stressful task 45 minutes later. The harder they’d worked out, the faster their bodies calmed back down afterward: Those who exercised vigorously recovered in about 81 minutes, versus 91 minutes for the light-exercise group.
Get into nature
“Nature is one I recommend a lot, and the science on this grows by the day,” Leahy says. “Being outside gives your attention somewhere else to go. Even noticing the sky, trees, weather or something beautiful around you can create some psychological distance from the problem. We don’t have to live in a nature preserve to get this benefit.”
Time outdoors also has a physiological angle: Sunlight, protein-rich food and, eventually, sleep all help your brain replenish the dopamine and serotonin it needs, rather than simply masking a low mood.
Reset your breathing
Slowing your breathing, and making your exhale longer than your inhale, is one of the few direct physical levers you have on your stress response. Even doing it for just a minute can tell your body the emergency is over.
Hafeez explains the science behind that: “Slow breathing with a longer exhale can reduce physiological arousal and encourage the parasympathetic, or ‘rest and recover,’ side of the nervous system to take over.” She’s referring to a 2023 Stanford study of 111 people who spent five minutes a day, for a month, on one of several techniques: cyclic sighing (breathing with long exhales), other breathing patterns or meditation. The breathing groups beat meditation on mood improvement by about a third. And the cyclic-sighing group kept breathing slower all day long, not just during their five minutes of practice, meaning the calming effect stuck around well past the exercise itself.
Though these are separate tips, they’re really all deliberate interruptors that stop the spiral before it gets worse. Le Goy sums up why they work: “All of these practices help us build resilience. When we build resilience, we can learn to manage life’s ups and downs without letting them hijack our emotions.”
What’s the most important thing you can do?
Catch yourself while you’re still in the moment, before the feeling hardens into a verdict about the whole day. “Notice what the brain is doing,” Leahy says. “Don’t make a global judgment while you’re still emotionally activated. Instead of saying, ‘Today is awful,’ try, ‘The last 20 minutes were awful.’ That sounds almost ridiculously simple, but psychologically, it matters.”
That reframe isn’t just a nice idea. A 2022 review of 99 studies found that people who reframe stressful situations, rather than catastrophizing them, tend to be happier and less anxious and depressed. And the skill is trainable fast: Even a week of practice led to measurable improvements in how people handled their emotions.
What’s the worst thing you can do in this moment?
Ironically, trying too hard to feel better. The experts point to the same trap: rushing to shut down the bad feeling instead of letting it exist for a minute.
Leahy says the real damage often comes from what we tell ourselves about being upset in the first place. “Sometimes it’s OK to just have a few hard moments,” he says. People start monitoring themselves, asking things like, “Why am I still upset? Shouldn’t I be over this?” Anytime he hears a patient say “should,” he pushes back. “That’s just the brain talking at you again,” he says. The goal isn’t forcing yourself to feel good—it’s to remind yourself that you’re going to keep living your day while this feeling settles down.
Le Goy agrees. Rushing to declare yourself “over it” skips the chance to actually tolerate the feeling and recover from it.
When should you just throw in the towel for the day?
When you’ve checked in with yourself and realized you’re out of fight, that’s the signal to stop trying to rescue the day and just let it end. But at the same time, realize it’s not the end of the world. “You can acknowledge and accept that you had a tough day without deciding that you are accepting a tough life,” Le Goy says. “The most important thing is taking time to check in with ourselves to see where we are in that moment, while acknowledging that we can make a different decision the next day or when we have the energy to do so.”
“Some evenings, the most productive thing you can do is stop trying to rescue the day,” says Leahy. His prescription is almost anticlimactic in its simplicity: Read a book, turn in early, remind yourself to start fresh tomorrow. You can also eat something, shower, get outside for a few minutes and spend time with someone you like. “Do something familiar and predictable,” he advises. And most important of all: Get some sleep rather than staying up late and mentally rehashing the day.
That evening is also a good time to check in on how you’re talking to yourself. “Self-talk is so powerful,” Le Goy says. “We often believe what we hear over and over, whether from other people or from ourselves.” Her litmus test: Would you say this to a close friend? “If not, it’s time to rethink that internal dialogue.”
Either way, all of the day’s issues don’t need to be resolved before bed. As Leahy puts it: “Tomorrow does not need you to solve today at 11:30 at night.”
About the experts
|
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on how to recover from a bad day, Tara Cox tapped her experience as a longtime journalist who frequently covers lifestyle topics and cultural trends. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Patrice Le Goy, PhD, LMFT, MBA, psychologist, therapist, and adjunct professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology; email interview, September 2026
- Matthew Leahy, PhD, licensed psychologist in private practice in Dallas; email interview, September 2026
- Sanam Hafeez, neuropsychologist and director of Comprehensive Consultation Psychological Services; email interview, September 2026
- Translational Psychiatry: “Decentering as a Core Component in the Psychological Treatment and Prevention of Youth Anxiety and Depression: A Narrative Review and Insight Report”
- Advances in Medical Education and Practice: “The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation on Trait Mindfulness, Perceived Stress, Cortisol, and C-Reactive Protein in Nursing Students: A Randomized Controlled Trial”
- Psychoneuroendocrinology: “A Short Mindfulness Retreat Can Improve Biological Markers of Stress and Inflammation”
- Frontiers in Psychology: “Measuring Affect and Complex Working Memory in Natural and Urban Environments”
- Psychoneuroendocrinology: “The Effects of Exercise Intensity on the Cortisol Response to a Subsequent Acute Psychosocial Stressor”
- Cell Reports Medicine: “Brief Structured Respiration Practices Enhance Mood and Reduce Physiological Arousal”
- Emotion Review: “Positive Cognitive Reappraisal in Stress Resilience, Mental Health, and Well-Being: A Comprehensive Systematic Review”
The post 6 Scientifically Backed Ways to Recover from a Bad Day When Things Just Aren’t Going Your Way appeared first on Reader's Digest.
from Reader's Digest https://ift.tt/QsdPHnO
Comments
Post a Comment