No matter how upbeat we try to be, we all have days when we feel discouraged. For me the past week has been a real challenge. You would think that a short week (I wrote this after Memorial Day week.) would make things easier, but in the end, the week felt like a failure. For some writers, just the act of writing helps them to feel better. For me that isn’t the case. As a matter of fact, when I started this post, I thought that I would probably just trash it because I didn’t see a way out of my discouragement.

One of the worst parts of being down like this is the feeling that I’m just being a whiner. I have friends who are facing much worse situations that I am, and yet I still feel REALLY CRUMMY! Unfortunately, my role with friends and family is to be the “cheerleader” (and super planner, but that’s a story for another day.) Although, I look nothing like a cheerleader, I’m the one who bucks everyone up, finds another avenue to explore or finds something that, if we fix it, will make everything all better.

Coming back from days like this is what resilience is all about and since I write a resilience blog, I tell myself that I BETTER HAVE SOME ANSWERS! I just don’t know what they are today. And that just adds to my discouragement.

This is different from a blah day. Blah days, for me, are days when I lack motivation. On a blah day I’m low energy and I don’t have anything I can point to for why I feel this way.

Discouraged days are the days where I can make list after list of everything that’s gone wrong. Little things make me scream or cry and I feel like a rat in a cage trying to find the door out. If I were younger I’d say I had PMS. Instead, I’m just discouraged.

What’s the Point?

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, it’s not to depress you. It’s actually to perhaps give you a little bit of hope and a bit of perspective. We all feel like this occasionally. It is a part of living. But today, the things I usually do to feel better aren’t working at all.

I’ve loved inspirational speakers for years. When I worked in a large corporate environment as a manager, my boss invested in me and sent me to a CareerTrack seminar. I don’t remember the topic but I loved the speaker and I walked out of there really jazzed. The problem is that now, when I’m truly discouraged or depressed, I can’t stand all that positive thinking. I answer back (in my head) that MY SITUATION IS DIFFERENT. Don’t they get it?

Unfortunately, although a positive attitude is often what we need to project to the world – casual acquaintances don’t really CARE about our problems – our psyches are constructed in such a way that we need to actually work thru the pain. We can deny our feelings for only so long and then those denied feelings come back and bite us in the butt. If we don’t realize that this is the way we work, we can get in real trouble.

So, for me the key is to be sure that what I’m feeling discouraged about is kept in the proper perspective and that I don’t wallow for so long that I can’t get out of it. Wallowing in your misery can be a good initial tactic for coming to grips with discouragement. But keep wallowing long enough and it turns into a minor depression which can deepen into a worse depression.

It’s the same as when you’re feeling a little sick. You can ignore some symptoms for a while, but if you let them go too long, you can end up with a real problem. One of the members of our Book Club, June, had, off and on, been feeling punk for a couple of months. Every once in a while she’d get a pain in her side which bugged her but eventually went away. Finally, one weekend, she felt really crummy. She had a fever, ached all over, had a worse pain in her side, and was nauseous. Her sister came over to check on her. Thankfully, June’s sister made the decision to take her to the emergency room. So off they went. The ER doctor diagnosed appendicitis. They took June into surgery and found that her appendix had burst. (She says that she’s a tough broad who tries not to let a little pain get her down!) Amazingly, they were able to load her up with antibiotics and send her home in a few days. (Aren’t the marvels of modern medicine WONDERFUL?)

At the beginning of this post, I said that the week had felt like a failure. In reality, no week is a failure. There are some things I’ve succeeded at this week and other things that have frustrated the heck out of me. There are tasks I didn’t complete or they didn’t come out the way I wanted them to, but there had to have been some good moments in there or I’d feel a lot worse than just discouraged. I’ve let my disappointment in some of the week become the experience of the whole week. I’ve spread my discouragement from one thing that was important to me to all of the stuff I did.

Climbing Out of the Hole

So what do we do to overcome the current feeling of being discouraged?

The first thing I try to do is give it a little bit of time. You might call this wallowing in the misery. It’s taking time to accept where you are. Just like you can’t make a plan to get to Baskin Robbins if you don’t know two things, where’s BR and where are you now – you can’t figure out a way forward until you’ve understood and accepted where you are right now. Shrinks (no disrespect intended) call this “processing the event.”

I start by taking time to let things sink in and settle. For me this is a very elaborate process. I have two “begin to process” tactics that I favor: I might go to a movie, hide in the dark theatre and eat popcorn OR I could curl up with some good beach reading. (You may consider the phrase “good beach reading” to be an oxymoron, but what I need to get me through is something that’s a good story, not too deep, with reasonably good writing. Look at the recommended page for some of the authors I like for this.)

Once I’m feeling a little bit better, I can examine the whole week and remind myself of the good stuff that happened during the week. For those of you who keep a to-do list, a quick review of the list and all the items you were able to complete should help you put the week in perspective. Be careful that you choose to do this task at the right time – when you’re starting to feel better – or you may do what I sometimes do, discount all the stuff you accomplished. (It wasn’t that big a deal… Anyone would have gotten THAT done… You know what I mean.)

I also know I’m feeling a little bit better when I can start to analyze how I got here, what worked and what didn’t. From there it’s a short period of time to when I can actually start to figure out what to do next. As I work through the problem, my energy level starts to rise and I’m able to consider actually doing something about it.

Don’t let me mislead you, this process can take all weekend. OR it can take a few hours. It certainly takes more time than it took me to write this post. There is no “right” amount of time. But the feeling of discouragement passes. New ideas for approaching the problem appear. Energy returns. Remember this after you’ve had a bad week.

What do you do when it’s been a bad day, week, month?