Five minutes to
reset a bad day

The point of this isn't to make a bad day good. It's to stop a bad hour turning into a bad evening, and a bad evening landing on the people at home who had nothing to do with it.

1. Stop the vehicle. Literally or otherwise.

   Don't carry on straight into the next thing. Pull up, sit down, shut the door. One minute of deliberately doing nothing is the whole foundation of the other four.

2. Breathe out longer than you breathe in.

   In through the nose for four. Out through the mouth for seven. Six rounds. If your hands are shaking or your chest is tight, do twelve. This is the bit that actually shifts your body out of fight-or-flight.

3. Name it in one sentence.

   Out loud if you're alone. "I'm furious because I got blamed for something that wasn't mine." Not a paragraph — a sentence. You are trying to convert a mood into a fact, because facts can be dealt with and moods can only be endured.

4. Ask: will this matter in a fortnight?

   Sometimes the honest answer is yes, and that's useful to know — it tells you this needs proper attention, not a car-park reset. Usually it's no. Either way, you've just put the thing in proportion, which is most of the battle.

5. Pick the next right thing, and make it small.

   Ring someone. Have some water. Eat something, because a surprising amount of "bad day" is low blood sugar in a bad mood. Walk to the end of the road and back. Then go in.

If every day is a bad day

Then this one-pager isn't the answer, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A tool like this is for weathering the odd rough one. If rough is the normal setting — for weeks rather than days — that's worth talking to someone about: a coach, a counsellor, or your GP.