4 Ways Bad News Can Make Your Day Better

I know what you’re thinking. There’s no way bad news can make anyone’s day better! Just like there’s no way adding olives to your black coffee will make it better.

I thought so too. But as I found out a few days ago, life is ironic.

Getting a rejection made me happy

I was having one of those “would-you-please-just-end” kind of days, which to be honest I feel like I have more often than I would like. You know, just like if you hate One Direction, you’re going to hear them on every single radio station in the world. But anyway that day, I was just hopeless and once again asking myself, “What in the world are you doing with your life.”

And then I got a little notification on my phone, you know just a little bzzz and a pop-up. It was an email from the editor of a blog I was trying to guest post for. He had just flat-out rejected the blog post that I had spent days working on.

Mind you, this was after he had told me, “Your post has potential. Just edit it this way and it should be better.” And I spent hours making the edits he suggested. And then he just goes, “Umh… you know what? It’s not good enough for our blog. Yeah, we can’t post it.”

I had reason to be upset by that email. But for some reason, I wasn’t. For some reason, I added olives to my sugarless coffee and it tasted great!

See, that’s because getting that rejection got me out of my slump. It made me quit moping around, get to my laptop and start working on pitching the post to a different blog. And I wasn’t hopelessly wishing for my day to end anymore.

There are many ways in which bad news can make your day better:

1. It takes you out of the “I kinda have a problem” middle state

Don’t you get annoyed when you’re in pain but it’s not that bad, but then it’s also not like you’re pain-free so you’re just stuck in that annoying middle state of being in pain but then not really?

Colleen Ballinger put it perfectly the other time. She has a problem shoulder and ever so often it starts hurting. But whenever she goes to the doctors, because she’s not screaming in pain, the doctors just tell her, “Oh yeah, just stretch it out and you’ll be fine.” They do nothing about it. But then her shoulder keeps hurting. It’s not bad enough for her to be screaming in pain, but it’s still painful. Annoyingly painful. And in one of her vlogs, she says she wished she was in excruciating pain because then maybe the doctors would finally listen to her and do something.

Bad news can give you the blessing of that excruciating pain. Bad news to an already bad day can take you out of that annoying middle state.

On the one hand, people will finally listen to you when you say, “Hey. I’m having a bad day.” And maybe they might finally help you. On the other hand, you yourself might finally be convinced that your situation is bad enough for you to start doing something about it.

2. Dealing with the bad news can boost your confidence

Say you’ve just had a bad day at work. Maybe you had one job to do and for some reason, you messed up and your boss shouted at you in front of all your coworkers – it happens. Then you go home, your bad Chipotle bowl of a day gets a side of guac added to it: your 5-year-old managed to get his head stuck in the window railings.

Now if you manage to get your boy out of the window, to discipline him properly, get him fed and to bed on time, and have him say, “I love you mummy” just as he’s falling asleep, your day might just get better.

Messing up at work might have left you with zero self-confidence, but being able to deal with your home problems so well, might give you that confidence boost that you need. It might make you feel like you’re back in control, that you’re competent at something at least.

3. It distracts you from other problems

Sometimes you will not be able to deal with your new problem better to get that confidence boost. But at least it might distract you from your other problems.

Maybe instead of getting stuck in the window, you kid managed to flood the entire house because he was messing around with the pipes in the laundry room and he forgot to put them back. And now your house could be the set location for Titanic.

Having to spend the entire night mopping water off your floors and turning all the sofas upside-down might not exactly give you that confidence boost, but momentarily, it might distract you from your blunders at work. That practical hands-on task that you have to focus on for the night might be your escape.

4. More bad news on a bad day can make you laugh

Or is that just me? Does anyone else start laughing whenever they have a long list of issues to deal with and then one more thing gets added to the pile?

There comes a point where it just gets so ridiculous, you can’t help but laugh. “You mean to tell me, I’m broke, lost, hopeless, and now you want to add killer cramps to the list? Hahaha! That’s a good one.”

Just me? Okay.

Hey, don’t judge. We all have our coping mechanisms. I just like to laugh at things. I mean, what good is comedy if you can use it to help you through difficult times? In fact, I would suggest that we should all do it. If you find yourself in a tough situation, find the comedy in it. And if your tough situation gets tougher, then there’s even more comedy to find, isn’t it?

So maybe the power is off at your house and you have to use candles. But look at how big your head looks in the candlelight shadows. Lol, you could actually be from Mars!

When you get some bad news, change the channel

The least you can do is flip over to the sports channel and watch Federer win the Wimbledon one more time. You don’t have to keep following the trend of your bad day. You don’t have to get sucked into it and let yourself get completely hopeless when you get some bad news. Find a way to colour outside the lines. Find a way to let the bad news make you happy.

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