I don’t know about you, but I’ve never written “Have a bad day” on my calendar. Nope. Never once have I planned and said, “Gee, it would be GREAT to have a bad day on this day.” No one wants to have a bad day. No one. But yet we all know they are a part of life and sooner or later, one of those nasty, awful, no good, very bad days is going to come along (and of course, they happen on the worst possible day to have a bad day).
So what do you do when all hell breaks lose and life throws lemons at you (here’s my favorite recipe for lemonade by the way)? You refer to your stressful day plan, of course!
What? What’s that? You don’t have one of those? You have no idea what that means? Well let’s see what we can do about that!
One of my core beliefs is that there is no one size fits all plan. Victoria’s Secret may sell one size fits all thongs (yes, they do- go check it out). But I don’t believe that one size fits all actually truly fits. Yes, it can work and function. But it doesn’t truly fit YOU the way you need it to fit. So that’s where having your very own personal stressful day plan comes in.
A stressful day plan helps you automatically shift from your “every day plan” to a guide to help you stay sane and somewhat calm on the days where nothing seems to be going right. There are decisions already made for you, that fit your lifestyle and needs.
One of the first things I do when I work with my clients one-on-one is help them determine what things help refuel and relax them.
Knowing what refuels and relaxes you is a very important part of the stressful plan. When we’re in sessions together, I call this self-care. Self-care is essential for us to be healthy and happy, but it’s one of the things that we ignore in our lives. Instead of taking time to refuel ourselves, we don’t because we’ve got so much to do. But studies have shown that when we have taken time to do the things we enjoy, or to rest, or to relax, that we actually have more energy and get more done than when we don’t. I bet if you think long enough, you can find an example of that in your own life.
So while self-care is different than a stressful day plan, I like to pull things from my self-care list to add to that plan. Does a pedicure make you feel like a million bucks? Then schedule one at the end of a week that you know will be stressful. You have something to look forward to and you’ll nourish yourself. For me, someone touching my feet would send me to a not-so-good place, so having plans to have dinner with a friend would be a much better idea.
So here’s an example of what a typical day’s routine may look like, and what types of things to add to your not-so-good-day-at-all routine. They don’t have to be things that cost money. They certainly don’t need to be things that make your day more hectic. It needs to be a simple list of things that you can easily do that will take you away from your stressors and will help relax and hopefully rejuvenate you.