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How to keep your cool when it feels like everything is going wrong

Bad days are inevitable. A meltdown doesn’t have to be.

I don’t do well with stress. Even minor inconveniences can throw me off my game, turning a mildly bad day into a complete five-alarm fire. If someone asks a single thing of me during one of these spirals, I’m likely to blow up.

Whether you’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed or an avalanche of calamities happens to descend upon you, it’s easy to get bogged down by negativity, to feel like a black cloud hangs over your head. Anyone who’s had a bad day can attest to how these feelings can ripple out to other aspects of your life: You’re curt with the barista and they’re rude in return, you throw your bag down forcefully at your desk and break your glass Tupperware inside, you snap at your partner and they get annoyed. “When you’re in a bad mood, it shows up in your behavior and it shows up in your facial expressions and it shows up in your tone of voice and you might end up actually eliciting negativity from others unintentionally that way,” Ryan Martin, a psychologist who has studied anger and the author of Emotion Hacks: 50 Ways to Feel Better Fast, tells Vox.

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