Some days just start out as a shit morning and continue to hang on like a dog on a tyre regardless of what we do to change how we feel. 

Those mornings where getting started just feels like trying to run away in a bad dream.

Or those sort of mornings that entrenched apathy means you’re no longer even attempting to run and instead are staring into the abyss silently questioning what you are doing with your life, only to be deafened by the silence of an answerless echo.

Often, all we can do during such mornings  is focus on getting to lunch time and hope that being fed and watered sorts it out and resets us for a better afternoon.

And if it doesn’t, which it often won’t do, we can look a bit closer at what else could be ‘doing our nut in’, or making us so sluggish or irritable.

It will be common stuff that you probably already know about yourself. 

For me, a simple and standard operation is to clear my work station if chaos has insidiously ransacked the area. Dehydration also is a key cause to a deterioration in patience and general well being, so I know then to drink some water.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the sun comes out or I feel like doing a jig round the room, but it can often help.

Like switching the power on and off to fix the computer, these approaches are simple and often effective enough to get us rebooted and functioning properly.

However, again It may not.

When this is the case, which in real life and away from self help gobble-de-gook, it often doesn’t, it becomes about management rather than extinction of a situation.

And we also need to come to terms with the idea that, if the initial rectification methods have failed to resume play, it’s most likely a 24 hour problem and an acceptance that only ‘a good nights sleep and try again tomorrow’  attitude is required for these heavily skid marked and characteristically stubborn stained underpants type days.

I read this quote today that I thought was quite apt considering my day and my reflections on it afterwards –

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will, through work, bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea’.”

-Chuck Close, American artist who achieved fame as a photorealist through massive-scale portraits.

Sometimes inside these days, if we simply get to work the best we can, either on the job at hand or on perfecting our self management systems, and adopt a one foot in front of the other mindset on the road to a hopefully better tomorrow, it’s possible something positive can still be salvaged – or indeed discovered that other wise wouldn’t have been excavated about ourselves on a good day.

There’s an idea in Stoicism called ‘turning it inside out’ which basically looks at how we can turn adversity into something advantageous.

For me it gave me the opportunity to observe these type days from inside the eye of the storm. To use my knowledge of human psychology to try some ideas out and see what really worked for me and what to do when it didn’t and then make field notes for this post as I went along.

Then on my walk home, I pondered in my said lethargic state, the idea of why change can seem so hard to do.

Its not because changing something is necessarily hard, but because of how we are feeling at those times when we imagine we must change something.

Most of the time changing anything significant, I thought to myself is hard because of the state of mind we are in at that time.

It is similar I thought to having not slept for the last 72 hours and then told we need to go for a run, that to complete it, requires us to keep running until we reach the finish line which is erected at the end of a distance that can’t be disclosed. 

And the cherry on the cake is we’ll only know how far we must run at the end…..that may never come. We just have to run on faith.

That’s why we stay ‘as we are’ so much of the time.

The perceived pain of change inside the lethargy we are already consumed by, often seems worse than the pain of what we are currently experiencing. So we stay where we are.

And from that thought, although I knew the distance and where the finish line was, I overrode the desire to slump in front of the TV with a beer and instead, pushed myself to go for a run.

I know from previous experience, that the power of movement to break a state is very powerful and I also wanted to go through the process of doing it even though I didn’t want to.

Again I could observe this process and understand it from inside out rather than theoretically.

When I got home I felt better. 

And on reflection, when I sat down in my improved mood, I realised my whole day, that day that earlier had felt shit, could be viewed as a simulation day for me as a social scientist to observe and report back what I found.

Can you imagine if that was something I could produce in a workshop or course!? 

‘Simulation training days to test your skills outside the workshop and inside the real world?!

Some of us would pay….and pay handsomely for such things…..and yet here they are all for free, all inside of every shit day or challenging event!

However, still failing all this, we can simply climb under the duvet, bid the cruel world adieu until tomorrow, and attempt to sleep it off.

And let’s face it if nothing’s working and going to bed is the only thing we feel we can do, even then we can look at it as a positive action. Because it may not be a psychological issue to be analysed and instead one that is more a physiological condition that needs addressing, that’s as simple as needing a good night sleep to restore order to our world.

As a old wise man once said to me
‘sounds like someone just needs a good poo and a sleep’.