How to Escape the Bad Day Trap

One of the most discouraging experiences for people striving to improve their lives is regressing after a bad day. This experience happens so often, in fact, that it has garnered an unofficial name: The Bad Day Trap.

Consider, for example, how many people stall on their weight loss efforts after a single dietary indiscretion causes them to abandon their nutrition plan. Or how frequently exercise habits are derailed by missing just a single workout. The suddenness and unpredictability of the Bad Day Trap can make personal progress feel like navigating a minefield; one misstep or miscalculation and weeks of hard work are lost.

Even among the most dedicated, The Bad Day Trap leads many people to rely on luck for their success, hoping for Fate to deliver them a period free of unexpected setbacks. So, they try—often repeatedly—waiting for the stars to align in just the right combination. Most of the time, this strategy leaves people back where they started. The Bad Day Trap gets them eventually.

Taking away the power of a "bad day"

There is a way to break this Sisyphean cycle, however. Specifically, you can escape The Bad Day Trap not by getting rid of bad days themselves but by taking away their power over your emotions and behavior. To do this, you need only begin to define success in terms of your progress patterns over time instead of your moment-to-moment performances and outcomes.

The most frustrating thing about bad days is that they keep coming. Seemingly no amount of prior experience, knowledge, or success makes us exempt. Warren Buffet, for instance, still has bad financial days despite 75 years of investment experience. LeBron James and Tom Brady still have bad days in their respective sports, even after decades of championship-level performances between them. Despite our many individual differences, the experience of bad days is one of the constants that connect us all across time, location, and social strata.

Bad days are not a problem because of their ubiquity, however. Instead, bad days usually only become problems when we expect unrealistic levels of performance or consistency from ourselves. It might seem intuitive that a quarterback throwing an interception or a baseball pitcher giving up a home run needs to let it go and focus on the next play or batter. Baseball reliever, Mariano Rivera, for example, was once quoted as saying that, “having a short memory” was one of the keys to his Hall-of-Fame career. Yet we too often fail to apply this same logic to ourselves and let short-term events fuel long-term setbacks.

When we become caught in the net of high expectations and rigid success standards, even momentary lapses in judgment can have severe consequences. We may react to ordinary mistakes, for example, with intense emotions and behavioral meltdowns. When our definition of success fails to factor in our human imperfections, lapses risk becoming relapses and solitary setbacks may become sustained regressions.

Escaping The Bad Day Trap requires replacing our schema for success. Instead of hoping to avoid bad days, we accept them as routine parts of the improvement process. Instead of condemning ourselves or our misfortunes when bad days occur, we focus on resuming our habits as quickly as possible. And instead of expecting linear successes, we adopt the model of the figure below and appreciate that the road to success is paved with errors and detours.

Source: Bernard Goldbach On Flickr

In practice, escaping The Bad Day Trap involves making small but important changes in how we evaluate ourselves. The aim is to take a bigger-picture perspective to your goals and behaviors that allow you to see actionable trends without getting lost in the minutia. We may re-define our progress on healthy eating, for example, based on trends in the quality of the food we are consuming over time instead of critiquing individual meals; we may begin to chart our weight loss progress based on weekly and monthly changes instead of by the sometimes maddening fluctuations of daily weights; and we may start forgiving ourselves for the inevitable missed workouts and poor sleep nights we nearly all experience from time to time and focus on the larger perspective of whether we are gradually getting better in these areas. It is easy to allow the weeds of life to consume the entire garden. Stop letting momentary events dictate your days and your road to success will expand.

Conclusion

Success means different things to different people. Health and happiness. Family and fitness. Community and contribution. In whatever form you define personal success, however, it is imperative that your success strategy accommodates bad days. Rather than falling into the trap of measuring your efforts by the metric of individual meals, weights, workouts, and workdays, learn to define success based on patterns and trajectories. Improving how you measure your progress will also improve your ability to perceive progress. In the same way that bad days on the stock market diminish in importance when viewed against the backdrop of annual cycles, bad days in the gym, home, or office lose their thunder when we focus on our goals at the level of the forest instead of the trees.