Ever woke up exhausted, moody, and less motivated than usual ? If yes, don’t worry. It happens to almost everyone, all the time, and will continue to happen. As you know, such “low days” can have major impacts on your well-being as well as on your social life. So here are a few tips to prevent (at least dampen) their impact  (and avoid prolongation into low weeks, or even low months).

  1. Accept your “tiredness”, avoid the idea of “just a bad day“: Very important first tip to unlock other tips ! On low days, even when feeling we’re emotionally unstable, our intellect might deny its own variations to preserve the ego, trying to fill “the template of day as usual”. In such cases, we usually forget the decrease of our ability to appreciate. Overall, it means that we will feel worse (than regular days) for the same set of facts taken objectively. Consequently, our usual first interpretation sum up in sentences like “It’s a bad day” or “events are against us”. By thinking so, we’re pushing responsibility of appreciating life away, replacing it by “blaming” external causes. So when tired, be reminded that you might act different and appreciate things less. It is only when accepting the biases of your own tired self that you will be able to start applying the other tips. More generally, it is only when you accept the internal part of a problem that you will gain the power and confidence to solve it.
  2. Disconnect to slowdown the emotional flows: With energy level lower than usual, your brain “information processing capacity” will drop. While we naturally avoid pushing hard cerebral “left-brain” tasks (like mental maths), we forget the decrease of our “emotional bandwidth”. Therefore, on top of  appreciating less the emotions we read (see previous point), what we will emotionally feel from others will be less accurate. Then, no need to explain why hurtful arguments happen more often in low days, when one is (or both are) not able to listen to the other. What I suggest would be to temporarily disconnect (take a break on all digital exchange tools, and postpone meetings)  and slowdown what you cannot cancel.  A funny exercise to understand this point is to keep all your e-mails and text messages in draft status on a low day, then come back reading it on a regular day. Disconnection policy might seem particularly hard in the beginning, as low days trigger a natural urge to express tiredness (or subsequent pain) or search for comfort in relatives. Still, slowing down and disconnect will not only improve the postponed moment with them, but also teach you to work on your own salvation. Note:  Also try to avoid TV when you are tired, since these are the moments where you are the most vulnerable to engineered influence (not to say “advertisement”)
  3. Avoid taking big decisions: Easily understandable point: As your mental skills will drop, big decisions are to be avoided on tired days as much as possible. I would even say “to be avoided in tired hours”. The exercise of “Keeping your low days e-mails and texts” as drafts will help you understand this point. Making decisions in a low vigilance state often increase risk of subsequent issues, probably bubbling future (or instant) additional useless workloads. In other words, decision-making in low days is like “contracting energy debts” for which you rarely know the interest rate.
  4. Anticipate and dampen energy peaks and hollows: Now that you are aware of your tiredness, and that you prevented (as early as possible) social or decisional risks, your remaining energy can be used to regulate the rest of your day. Learn to know your own pace and day-energy profiles, then prevent it before it happens ! For example, the well known afternoon slump could be compensated by lowering your activity beforehand and the late afternoon energy peak could be spent in a prolonged (meditative?) soft walk. This would help you a lot in comparison with “watching the first 30 minutes of a movie then collapse” or “enjoying a noisy pub beer for too short then collapse”. Please notice that the mindset is not to remove any pleasure, but rather to avoid displeasure of sudden interruption, or displeasure of not being present for the enjoyable opportunity. No need to mention the benefits of anticipative power napping (napping before the energy hollow instead of reacting to the hollow).
  5. Manage all your body, not only the brain: On low days your face will frown more and smile less, people will unevitably notice it. But what about what they (or you) cannot see or figure out visually ? For example, on eating, many know that on low days the sweety-or-fatty-food urge is stronger (not to mention coffee or smoking), because these super stimuli will bring a peak either in your blood sugar level or in “energy storage feeling”. Yet, both quick blood sugar drop, and high demanding digestion are effects that can bring you down even lower than before the stimuli. In short, you ate energy timebombs. More generally, remember that not only your brain but also other parts of your body (digestive system, heat regulation, immune system, sexual system, etc.) are using the same common source of energy. If one spends it all, be ready to create difficulties on the others. (Example article)
  6. Empty your mind: Have you noticed that on low days, you use way more the words “could have”, “should”, “disappointed” or just “surprised” ? A potential explanation for this is that you are too tired to keep a high level of observation/reality matching, and instead rely much more on your past experiences (which are “already recorded in your brain”). In such case, it becomes difficult for you to cope with reality beyond just its comparison with your mental models. In the same time, decreased creative thinking skills in tired days will hinder the process of problem solving, leaving it to the problem statement step. Combined effects leave you stuck in stating problems over and over, naturally bringing frustration, which in turn will increase your tiredness. How can you escape such a loop ? Usual solutions are abandoning after growing despair, relying on short-term stimuli (caffeine or other boosters) and risk a major drop afterwards. Last solution is to postpone the statement frustration-growing step by emptying your mind from the mental models, leaving the reality gap measurement and bridging for later. Emptying mind can be done through meditation or other practices you can easily find on the Internet.
  7. Allow yourself to express tiredness…only when close to resting opportunity: Expressing fatigue through words, face or body language is not a punctual process which ends with your sentence or gesture. As we inherited from these natural reactions (such as yawning) as a means to communicate with others, there is high chance that the ideas of resting and slowing down gets printed in both emitter’s and recipient’s minds. Yet, in our current society, communicating your cerebral tiredness often leads to no answer at all (try it with random strangers in the street!), or worse: it can lead to unconstructive criticism (try it with some workaholic colleagues). What happens then, in “no reaction” cases,  is that emitter naturally increases its emotional signal (like speaking louder if someone doesn’t understand, even if it’s not rational), which leads to printing a more intense idea of tiredness / willingness to rest in his/her own mind, while not really changing the situation. Therefore, I suggest to try to keep your tiredness to yourself (below a certain limit of course), up to a moment where you can really rest (for example, when close to a napping or sleeping opportunity). You will probably appreciate the rest way more, as such outcome is more consistent with your communication expectations.

To sum up: Be aware, protect yourself from external tiredness sources, then from future consequences. Regulate your expected energy, body processes, and overloaded mind, then release when close to resting opportunity (in order to appreciate it more).

Dealing with low days does not mean living like a monk, or avoid enjoying cheeseburgers, or shutdown your libido. On the contrary: those tips are here to make you enjoy these latter more, by awareness and balancing habits.With practice, those habits will become effortless, and become highly “energy profitable”. And even if you do not become “energy superman” (or woman), you will become more energy-efficient and better manager low days.

Low or high, have a smiling day (it helps a lot by the way)!

Smiling Axolotl

Thanks a lot to Marion for her inspiration for this article, for all the things she taught me directly or indirectly on the topic