A cheatsheet for bad days
When you feel stuck, lost, low, angry, and the likes.
Some people can magically crawl out of their low bouts simply by talking about it with others. Good for them! Introverts like me like to be left alone until we can make sense of things.
To make sense of things in such times and to bounce back, I compiled this cheatsheet over the years. It contains the wisdom of some of the greatest minds out there. Any non-wise parts would be me.
Here are the situations covered. Feel free to scroll down to the one you need today!
If procrastination is holding you back
If your creativity has hit a wall
If you need a fresh start
If you are super angry 🤯
If you’re feeling overwhelmed
If your world is full of problems
If procrastination is holding you back
Here’s an article by Niklas Göke on not letting procrastination get the better of you. It claims that you are not lazy, bored, or motivated. What’s holding you back is fear. Fear of failure, fear of appearing stupid, fear of not being good enough, and so on.
To address this fear, you keep reading self-help books, planning, preparing, strategizing, and doing all things that give an illusion of progress. You are living with the notion that once you decide to act, you’ll succeed. Until then, it’s not a failure.
In reality, delaying acting is worse than failing. You don’t need to perfect your act. You need the courage to put yourself out there as is.
“And the best advice for overcoming fear is the bland three-word sentence Nike turned into the most successful marketing slogan of all time: Just Do It.”
— Niklas Göke
So all you need to get out of your low bout is a tiny act. Something that keeps you moving in the right direction. If going to the gym is scary, start with pushups at home. If the idea of writing a book is scary, start with writing a page a day, and so on.
If times are rough
I fall back on this talk by Robin Sharma when I’m going through a rough patch.
He offers us five ways to make the best of the worst times:
Change your perspective by asking yourself how could this be worse. What are your blessings? What are you grateful for?
The greatest heroes, history makers, and artists suffered more than others. You can also leverage hard times for growth. Ask yourself how can you use these pains to make you stronger, more creative, and more authentic.
Suppressed emotions build up a hurt well within our subconscious. It blocks our natural creativity and productivity. Instead of running away from pain, feel it and release it.
Appreciate hard times just like you appreciate seasons. The deeper, wiser part of you knows that this is the best worst time you’ve ever had. When you look back at this time a week or two years from now, you’d realize that it made you wiser, smarter, and more successful. It could lead to future success stories of you like starting a new business, writing a book, etc.
It's in your greatest trials that you discover your highest strengths. Ditch your ego. Embrace your inner genius.
“A bad day for the ego is an awesome day for your soul and primitive genius.”
— Robin Sharma
If your creativity has hit a wall
The simplest way to get over your creative block is to take a break and let your unconscious work on finding a solution. e.g, a long walk or a run, a shower, a power nap, or playing with your pet or a child.
Sometimes, it helps to start not from the start.
Creative thinking isn’t linear. Don’t try to force-fit a linear structure to your mind. Instead, alter the sequence of work to match your thinking.
If you’re stuck at one part of your project, start another. e.g., if you don’t know what should be the next sentence in the article you’re writing, write the last sentence or the middle section. If you are stuck on what should go on the next slide in your work presentation, start working on the slide next to it, and so on.
My last solution to get your creative juices flowing comes from the design thinking world.
How Might We is a problem-solving framework that experts use to extract solutions from business teams. Instead of hunting for a solution in thin air, they load up the question with a unique point of view.
Smart questions lead to smart answers. For example:
Instead of “What can be the USP of our meditation app?” ask “How might we help our users make the most of their minds?”.
Instead of “How can we differentiate our running app?” ask “How can we help our users ace their next marathon?”
What I find most powerful in this framework are the seven cues that help frame the problems better:
Amp up the good.
Focus on emotions.
Take it to an extreme.
Explore the opposite.
Question an assumption.
Create an analogy.
Focus on an element.
e.g., Struggling with finishing an article? Instead of trying to solve the problem ‘How do I finish this article?’ ask yourself, ‘How might I use the block as an advantage?’
Once you reframe the problem as a How Might We, you’ll come up with creative solutions. e.g, take this time to read that article or listen to that talk that you have been meaning to. Go for a run and come back with fresh ideas on writing this and more articles!
As kids growing up in India, we faced random electricity cuts during summer. It disrupted our evenings, our dinners, our homework sessions, our bedtimes, and so on.
Instead of whining, my family used to amp up the good by getting friends and neighbors together. We would light a few candles and play antakshri, a singing game with two teams. I have some very fond memories of those evenings.
If you need a fresh start
The beginning of a new year, move, job, or a major event in our life offers us a chance to start fresh. We look forward to getting new and exciting things as key to happiness.
In this talk, Tony Robbins ascertains that the key to lasting happiness isn’t acquiring things or forming relationships. Rather, it’s making consistent progress in those areas of life.
Instead of wishful thinking, resolve to take control of your life. Follows these three steps to reboot your life:
Create a compelling and exciting vision for yourself. What is it that you badly, truly want? Something that you desire so much that you know you’ll make it happen, come what may! Something that pulls you, even when the going gets tough. e.g., losing weight isn’t a compelling vision. It will push you away when the workout becomes tough. Instead, the idea of looking ripped is compelling and exciting.
Give yourself strong reasons that will pull you through inevitable challenges. The reasons can be good or bad. e.g., if you quit your job to start your business, you burn your bridges. There is no other way but to succeed. If you go off target, you’ll bounce back.
Set an environment and rituals to support your vision. Rituals define us. What you spend the most time doing is what you get good at. And vice versa. Review your vision each day.
If you practice your rituals and review your vision every day, your brain becomes incredibly acute at noticing related events around you. Your unconscious works in tandem with your conscious and helps you make progress.
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
— Carl Jung
If you are super angry 🤯
When you’re angry at someone or something, it’s a bad idea to vent it out on others or take any big decisions. Anger makes us say things that we don’t mean, and do things that we regret doing later.
One of the best things you can do in this state of mind is sleep it out 😴. If you can’t, it’s time to summon your future self.
Write a letter to your future self. Writing for yourself is different from writing what others can see. You don’t need to hold yourself back. You can vent it all out and clear your mind. A very good mental exercise, especially for introverts.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed
When there’s a lot on your plate, it can get daunting. There are urgents and importants to take care of.
A nifty tool you can use in this situation is Eisenhower Matrix.
I wrote about it in detail here.
If your world is full of problems
Are we living in a computer simulation?
Sounds like something only the fans of a science fiction movie would be debating. But, the ancient philosophers, as well as great thinkers of our times, keep visiting the idea.
e.g., Plato’s cave allegory, Chuang Tzu’s butterfly dream, and Maya, the ancient Indian philosophy.
Coming to our times, Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford formalized the simulation argument in this paper in 2003. Elon Musk supported the argument in 2016. David Chalmers, a leading philosopher published a book, Reality+ in Jan-2022.
Metaverse as part of our reality makes the idea more believable.
You might be thinking why are we talking about this? It’s completely unrelated to your current problems.
Does it not make you think how tiny your problems are in front of the idea that this world isn’t real as we know it? 😱 How big a deal is a loss of a job, promotion, client, etc. if the world you live in is just a video game?!
If the simulation hypothesis is far stretched for you, beat this. You are one of the 7.9 billion people living on a planet that’s just one of the 100 billion planets in your galaxy. There are 100 billion+ galaxies in the universe!
It always makes me feel like a super tiny being. It helps me see the world and my problems with a fresh perspective.
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”
— Carl Jung