Is it really just a bad day?

How many times have you said to yourself it’s just a bad mood?

Or it’s just an off day?

We all have off days but when does it get to a stage when we take that step back and say maybe this isn’t right?

Let me take you back a few years, to when I was in this position and couldn’t recognise that it was a problem. It started off small, and had no effect on work.

Let me give you an example, I had a 2 day fight with my partner at the time that started from her not squeezing the toothpaste from the end of the tube. Now I do have OCD’s (as I’m sure most of us do), but looking back now it seems like a silly thing to draw out for that long. But this was still the early days and I brushed it off as just one of those days. It’s normal, right?

Over the next few months those bad days turned into bad weeks, and then bad months. At this point, without me realising it started to affect my work life. Again, with small things.

I’m sure everybody has those times when you have your day planned and someone will say “oh, can you just do this as well?”. Normally not a problem but throwing out my diary then turned that good day into a bad one. This escalated as it tends to in business, with it going from just small things to the inevitable stage of “not this again” for new projects that come across the desk. The excitement and challenge that I’d always enjoyed about what I do had slowly faded into a complete lack of motivation to do anything.

“So this is I problem” I hear you say?

I agree, but it took me a long time in that state to actually realise that something had to change. Even when people in both my personal and professional lives mentioned it to me, I was still brushing it off as “it's just one of those days”.

Eventually I did notice that this was no longer normal, but even still when seeking help had the thought in my mind that I’m wasting people’s time with something that I should just deal with.

Now that I have a better understanding of what was happening and have learnt to look out for these small slippery slides, it’s easy to see where things have gone wrong in my past. But on top of that I can now see people going on the same journey. It’s a difficult topic to broach, especially with people that you know, and even when you do recognise it in others it’s not until they take that step back and realise that they are taking that journey down one the slides. So my challenge for all of you, ask yourself the next time you have a bad day, is it really just a “bad day”?