Good day/ bad day08/08/2008 5:00 pm

I came home the other night at my usual time, and my husband took one look at me, poured me a drink and said “bad day?”. That obvious, hmm?

In fact, I hadn’t had a great day, but it wasn’t that bad. And I think that’s an important distinction. There’s no objective scale of badness for bad days, which is why I think it helps to develop our own.

Decide, on a good day, what really deserves ‘very bad day’ status in your life, what’s merely troublesome, and what comes under the ‘suck it up, that’s life’ category. It's surprising, under those circumstances, how few things qualify as very bad - and how most of the things that send us home in black moods are just small, passing reflections of our own secret insecurities and ego.

So, at the top of my scale is death/ disease/ divorce, at the bottom is being rained on/ sworn at/ transport nightmares, and everything else is roughly in the middle At a subjectively bad moment, it gives me an objective scale to consult that lets me decide how much something that’s making me feel bad at that moment really matters and what I plan to do about it.

Why bother ? Three reasons:

1. It lends perspective, so we don't talk ourselves into a stinker of a day when, actually, considering all the things we will ever have to put up with in our lives, it’s not that bad.

2. It helps resolve whatever is causing the bad day. If we’ve decided, in the clear light of a good day, that falling out with a friend or being overlooked for promotion constitute a reasonably bad day, rather than the death/ disease/ divorce that constitutes a very bad day, we have a framework to start dealing with it beyond our immediate emotional reaction. Yes, we’re miserable/ hurt/ angry - our responses to bad days are often reflexes of subconscious needs and old hurts - but the scale helps us make them conscious. If we’re deeply upset over something we’ve judged as a ‘slightly bad day’ we know it’s about us, and not really about whatever or whoever it was that caused the bad mood in the first place.

3. It stops us imposing our bad mood on everyone else and turning their days bad too. I think that this is the most important of the three reasons. Taking responsibility for our emotions is the least we can do for the people we love. Coming home with a dark cloud over our head and making other people pay for our day is horrible. Fake it, if you must - emotional honesty is seriously overrated under these circumstances. If we’re lucky, someone will pour us a glass of wine and let us rant for quarter of an hour to get it off our chest. Don’t push your luck. Quarter of an hour is enough for anything except the really bad stuff.

It's not repressive to have rules for understanding and limiting our bad moods. It's liberating and helpful for us, and respectful and generous to everyone else. Being entitled to our feelings is not the same as being entitled to indulge them at someone else's expense.

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