I generally consider myself a pretty happy person. Every so often though, I wake up feeling a little off. While I’m typically super confident and positive, I’ve come to terms with the fact that no one is super confident and positive all the time. Regardless, I’ve found that the best thing to do is to accept it and take the following steps to feel like yourself again.
1. Take a break.
Sometimes I forget we all have limits. There are some expectations that we may not always meet. As college students, we work ourselves to the grind too often, and sometimes we don’t realize how stressed out we are. I’ve found that life gets much easier when we allot ourselves time to enjoy the little things, whether it be getting coffee, reading your favorite book or just taking a break and leaving the library for an hour.
2. Keep in mind that you are allowed to be something other than “happy” or “fine.”
Though it isn’t good to focus on the negatives, I feel like we often put a bad label on feeling anything negative. You should remember that you are allowed to have negative emotions. Every day will not be the best day of your life, and that is okay. It took me a long time to understand that I shouldn’t be forcing myself to be positive. Positivity comes naturally. It turns out that one bad day isn’t the end of the world. Things turn back around, and you’ll feel like yourself again in no time. Bad days help make the good days that much better.
3. Socialize.
Sure, it sounds like a given, and it also sounds super simple. And it works better than we think. My day might’ve sucked, my outfit may not have looked as great on me as I envisioned in my head, and I might want to just crawl back into bed and give up on the day because nothing is right and everything is left. All that means is that I’ve got a perfect outlet to vent, whether it be my boyfriend (side note: I need to thank him for all the girl drama that I subject him to on the daily) or my best friend. When all else fails, pacing around eating ice cream and ranting about how much it all sucks actually helps a lot. Sometimes we feel so awful that we decide to just cut ourselves off from people and sit alone, and while time to yourself is healthy in doses, punishing yourself by sitting alone with your own negative thoughts won’t do much.
4. Continue to love yourself.
If you’re like me, you like being in control of your situation all the time. This just means that we get frustrated when the control is taken away. I remember giving myself such a hard time for feeling so awful, blaming myself for my own bad day and negativity. I never should have done this. I should have always tried to be the most dependable person in my life, and I should not have been the one getting frustrated with myself for something I had no power over. It took time for me to realize that loving myself did not depend on any conditions. It was not supposed to be, “Yes I love myself… on the one condition that I can solve all of my problems on my own and be positive and happy all the time.” Collegiettes, even on our off days when we feel unworthy of attention and love, we need to love ourselves.
While it’s hard to go from rainbows and sunshine to not wanting to get out of bed, off-days happen to the best of us. What matters is that we deal with them in healthy ways. The good days will always outweigh the bad. As spring semester rolls along, I encourage you to keep this in mind. Good luck this semester!
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