You’re Allowed To Have A Bad Day

My goal is that you have awareness about being in those phases and that you can use the tools to shorten them but they absolutely will still happen. There is not a life coach on the planet who will tell you? That there aren’t still difficult things in their lives.

And that’s often something on the business side that I coach women about where they think as soon as they her teaching women how to do anything homeschooling. Or, you know, Catholic mom, life coaching things that then they have to be happy or that their life is good all the time. No one has told them this, they just have this, this feeling about it. And I think there’s something that happens with Catholic moms as well, is that we really emulate the saints and their ability to have a positive attitude or to have peace in any situation. And I do really admire that. I do think that’s great, but at the same time, I do not think it means that I will live like that.

It seems very unlikely to me that anytime in the next 20 years, I will not feel sad or anxious or frustrated. We’re going to have bad moments, bad days, rough weeks, difficult seasons.

And we don’t need to make them harder than they are by denying them. And so, I want you to have a little grace for yourself. I want you to just whatever you’ve been going through today or this week, or this month. Just go hey kid, you’re doing okay. I see you. You got this? You want to come sit with me for awhile? It’s okay for you to feel kind of yucky. And good friendships do this right? When we are good friends with somebody. And we tell them we’re having a bad day. They don’t immediately talk us out of it. They sit down with us in the trench. And they say, yeah, I see. That does sound hard.

I want you to do that with yourself too. We just have this idea that we’re not allowed to have any bad days. I was just talking to somebody who was feeling behind in her homeschooling journey and was saying, I think the kids had been sick and then the house was kind of a mess. And so she used one of the homeschooling days, they didn’t do any schooling and they just cleaned the house. And her brain was like, oh no, he didn’t do any schooling today. And I asked, I said, do you think that you’re supposed to do homeschooling a hundred percent of the days that you intended to do homeschooling? Like if you set out in your school year starting in September and all the way from September through may, I’m totally gonna make this up.

There are like 150 days of schooling. Do you think you’re really going to school for 150 days? And when I asked that our answer is always, well, of course not. We know that’s not reasonable and yet every time we come up to one of those days, we’re like, oh, this shouldn’t be happening. This shouldn’t be one of the bad days. This shouldn’t be one of the days that we’re not doing our school plan. Something is wrong with me. We should be worried. We should be afraid. That’s how your brain works. It’s designed to look for danger. And it’s dangerous to your brain to think. We had a plan and we didn’t follow the plan and that is a problem.

So one, I think we just need to make better plans or we go, hey, there are 150 days that we think that we’re going to school. We will probably only school 120 of them. And 30 of the days we will probably pivot because we are sick or out of town or cleaning, or just feel like doing something else. And then when you have one of those days, you can tell yourself, oh, this is one of the 30. Doesn’t that sound so much nicer when I sit down with you and reasonably ask, you know. Do you think you’re going to make a home cooked meal every day? For 30 days in the month, you will probably acknowledge that you won’t. And yet you might be beating yourselves up. Every time you’re throwing together whatever meal is not what it is in your mind, whatever is not ideal to you. I don’t even like to give options because I don’t want to feed into just how much information we have about what’s good and what’s bad and it’s just maddening these days. I found myself saying that about Quesadillas, by the way I was like, you know, and then you just, and then you just feed them Quesadillas. And I caught myself and I was like, whoa. We can not send the message to the world. That Quesadillas is the compromised option, but listen, you like me are on the internet and the internet has lots of thoughts about gluten and packaged food and it’s come goals.

And it’s just an insane time to live. That it would occur to my brain that was the compromised meal. And so give yourself some grace. And right now, if you’ve been beating yourself up for something, I want you to pull back and go, well, how often am I allowed to do that? How often is a reasonable amount? And if you are in a mostly healthy adjusted state, you will still have three to five, maybe 10 bad days a month. And I want you to just be okay with that. Your kids are going to get sick, three to six times over the winter. And then you’re not going to get as much school done or they’re not going to go to school. Are you going to need childcare?

We don’t need to be surprised by this and we don’t need to meet to make it mean that we’re so bad at life. And we’re so bad at being moms. So for this more frequent day-to-day stuff, I just really want you to ask your brain. Well, how often do you think it’s okay brain? Because we know reasonably right now that a 100% success rate is unlikely. Not even sure we should be shooting for that. And so if we’re shooting for an 80% success rate or a 70% success rate, do the math and tell yourself, yeah, that means this many days I’m not going to go for my walk. Whatever it is. We have got to stop telling ourselves that we’re blowing it all week long.

So that’s for the more common day-to-day things, but let’s talk about being in a really painful season that’s been months or years. Because it’s harder to use some of these tricks when you’re in a season. A really painful season for months or years or a season where it is. It’s just going to be that way for the foreseeable future. We don’t know how long it’s going to be.

Okay. I think we require a different pep talk for those seasons. I think I did an entire podcast episode on survival. Like a survival season. I’ll have to go see. If I can find it, I’ll link it up in the show notes. But if you’re in a more prolonged situation, I think I would ask myself in a similar way. How many days do I want to cope really well with this situation? And how many days am I just not going to cope well with this situation? Right. Like you might be, you might have cancer or you might be taking care of someone who has cancer. And it’s a long battle and it’s messy and there’s pain and there’s appointments. We don’t know how long it’s going to last. And you can tell yourself, okay, every month for 30 days. I’m going to handle it really well for 25 of them. And five of them, I’m not going to handle it as well. I’m going to be upset and I’m going to cry or I’m going to buffer and watch a bunch of television or eat a bunch of chocolate.

You can ask yourself what is a reasonable amount of I’m going to cope really well with these days. And I’m not coping really well with it today. But even just beginning to think about it like that. I hope to relieve some pressure off of you. Because when the bar is smile darlin handles it really well every day forever. That is actually the thing that’s making our brains break. And creating a breaking point in us. Instead of you’re going to handle it really well, which by the way, most of you are. Most of you are handling your hard days well, and you’re crosses well.

Just sometimes we have a worst day. And if you just allowed yourself to have those days, you wouldn’t feel so much pressure. You wouldn’t feel like you were failing. You would just say, oh yeah, this was one of those harder days not going to push myself today. I’m going to call it for today, just gonna be sad. Thinking about it like this is different than indulging, complaining, and running on the hamster wheel where it’s, you know, and it’s interesting because you know, in the depressive feelings, those ones are going to feel more like melting into the couch or the bed not getting up and not coping. So they have a slow feeling to them in the anxious side of the coin. You know, it’s going to feel more frenetic, more running on that hamster wheel. But I think sometimes we just indulge in those feelings. We just allow ourselves to keep going and going and going.

And we basically allow ourselves to stay in a stress response without even talking to our brains. And so we don’t want to do that. But I find that that happens when there isn’t a healthy way to express some of these negative emotions or a healthy way to have a bad day. Then often I think brains just fritz out. And then they get stuck in a coping mechanism, in a survival mode. And so all of these things, all of these feelings that we don’t like are rooted in this idea that your brain doesn’t feel safe, it doesn’t feel safe. And so it’s on hyper alert trying to keep you safe. Either by yelling at you or distracting you in coping with pain. And we want to be somewhere in the middle. We want to say, yup there’s some stuff going on and it’s painful. But I can handle it. I’m coping with it. I gave two talks recently to moms groups. One was an hour and a half and one was three hours. And they were both really powerful. They were really great and the women loved them. And as I left, I asked myself like, why, why is it great? What did I tell them? And I realized that so much of what I do is just explain. And normalize what they’re going through. So they don’t feel so alone. And then I give them permission to be themselves.

So I explained that we live in this crazy modern world. You’re not crazy. We shouldn’t be raising kids in this environment with so little help and so much information and noise, so much conflicting information by the way. More responsibility than we’ve ever had and less buying power than we’ve had in a very long time. And we’re all just smiling and taking pictures and being like, it’s fine. That’s just totally crazy. So I think our baseline should be, we are living all of us in an insane, crazy environment. And then how are we going to show up and cope better? But we’ve got to cope. It cannot be. I’m just going to be happy every day. Every day is going to be fine. We have got to pause and feel our feelings. And did you say, you know, what. I’m feeling sad right now. I feel grief. Some of it, you just need to grieve the life you thought you were going to have. Or even just a season. I mean, it should be like, we just had a big six season and we didn’t have the season. I thought we were going to have.

I think this is what it looks like to carry our crosses well, we’re not denying the cross. We’re not sitting down on the ground. We’re carrying it, but sometimes we pause and we go, yeah, this is hard. And we feel our feelings and we connect with the Lord. And then we move forward. Again, you are allowed to have bad days. If you allow yourself to have bad days. You would burn out less. It is just this and no one tells us to do this, by the way, nobody says you should be happy all the time. It’s just weird, like vague external pressure. And then when real life happens, we’re just so convinced that we’re doing everything wrong because brains are very dramatic.

I want you to just ask yourself, are you allowed to have a bad day? How do you want to live through a bad day? How can you just have a bad day? And not go off the cliff and sink into or indulge in either kind of the sad side of a stressor, the response, or an anxious fast, angry version of a stress response. Because we want to be in control. That is a holy desire, as a holy desire to be in control of our response. But the goal is then not to be in control of our response and then be happy all the time. I will say, I do think that our goal to be saints is to have peace all the time. But when I share that with you guys in no way, do I expect you to do that? Like for 20 years. So that’s our north star and we’re working that way, but I’m not checking in with you next week and being like, hey, so did you have 10 hours of feeling at peace in your own life about everything? No.

So I do believe that is our ultimate calling, just like, I believe that we should not sin. But the church in her goodness, even in the act in confession, we say, so that I may sin no more. But nobody, not one person. Thinks they’re going to leave the confessional and not send anymore. It’s a north star concept. And then we use tools for when we do sin. And so you’re not going to be healthy all the time. Your kids are not going to have only positive things and successes in their life. They’re going to have difficult seasons, too. You’re gonna have bad days. You’re going to have hormones that shift in your body.

How are you going to deal with that? And just even acknowledging that that will happen and allowing yourself to have that experience, I think it already a huge win. Because I think a lot of moms are just resisting that that ever happens. We’re doing so much better than you think my friends. Every time I talk to a mom or coach a mom, or meet a new mom. I just, I see such goodness in her. I see how talented she is. I see how much she cares. I do not think that she is a failure. I fully know that she has bad days and makes mistakes sometimes. But I just think it’s incredibly heroic to be a Catholic mom in 2024. I think it’s amazing.

I want you to start telling yourself that I want you to stop telling yourself that you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re screwing it up and your bad mom and your house is on fire. And that you’re supposed to have good days all the time. I want us all to start telling ourselves the truth more. And it is okay if your truth is I feel a little down today. I feel a little sad. Or if I’m feeling kind of anxious. I want to control some things that I don’t have control over. I’m feeling angry. And all of these things, we want to bring them to the Lord.

I want to invite him in. And let him Sue their hearts. But if you think that you shouldn’t have a bad day or you shouldn’t be feeling any of those things, then you will feel shame and you will not want to bring it to the Lord. And then we just get kind of trapped in those states or we push them down like a beach ball under the water, and then they come erupting up later, much bigger and much worse. And for those of you that are in prolonged painful seasons. It’s the same thing, except it’s just some days you’re going to cope really well, and some days you won’t cope as well. And that’s okay.

And I like to tell myself that all things change, nothing stays the same. So this, this will pass. Whatever is painful today will be different. It does not mean that there won’t be pain. Three months from now, two years from now, but it will be different than today’s pain. And I am handling it, but I am also allowed to have bad days. And when I say that, I hope that you feel some relaxation in your body that we’re letting some of the pressure go. I’m just like, it’s going to be okay. God is with you. And this will help your brain to not Fritz out. Give it some space to just be human. Have human experiences in the world.

All right. My friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.