How to let go of a bad day

Short answer: you don’t have to forget a bad day to set it down. Tonight, take ten minutes and a piece of paper. Write what happened in a few plain sentences, name what you felt as exactly as you can, add a line to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend, and finish with one thing that went okay. Then close the notebook.

A bad day tends to follow you home. You replay the meeting, the comment, the thing you wish you’d said. Telling yourself to just stop thinking about it is easier said than done.

Letting go, in the sense this page means, is smaller than forgetting. You get the day out of your head and onto a page, in a set order, so it has an ending. You don’t need to feel fine about it afterward. You just need to have put it somewhere.

A 10-minute way to close out the day

You’ll need paper or a notes app and somewhere quiet. Each step takes a couple of minutes.

1. Write what happened, plainly

Two or three sentences, as if you were telling someone who wasn’t there. Stick to what happened, then say how it felt.

Keeping the event and the feeling together matters. In the first expressive writing study, described in a 2005 review, writing only about emotions wasn’t as helpful as writing about both. If one event keeps coming back for days, the longer, structured version is in expressive writing.

2. Name the feeling

“Bad” covers a lot. Try to find the closer word: embarrassed, let down, worn out, irritated, lonely. Two words are fine if both are true.

There’s lab research behind this step. In four studies led by researchers at UCLA, people looking at upsetting pictures reported less distress when they put a word to the feeling than when they just looked. The effect was similar to reappraising the picture or distracting themselves. Participants also expected naming the feeling to make them feel worse, and they still expected that after it had lowered their distress. So if naming it sounds like it’ll stir things up, that’s a common guess. These were short lab tasks with pictures, not real bad days, so take it as a hint.

If you’re short on words, words to describe feelings has a list.

3. Talk to yourself like a friend

Now write one or two lines back to yourself. Use “you,” or your own name, instead of “I.”

That small switch has been studied. A 2014 paper led by Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan ran seven studies with 585 people in total. Referring to yourself with your own name or “you” during introspection, rather than “I,” helped people take a step back from their own situation. In tasks like preparing a speech, the people who used “you” or their name showed less distress than the people who used “I.”

What to say is the other half. A practice guide from UC Berkeley notes that research suggests people are usually harder on themselves than on others. Its exercise is simple: think about what you’d say to a close friend who’d had this day, and in what tone. Then say that to yourself.

4. Write one thing that went okay

It doesn’t have to be big. A decent coffee counts. So does getting out of bed.

This is a short version of a practice called Three Good Things. In the full version, as UC Berkeley describes it, you write down three things that went well each day for at least a week, and why each one happened. The guide says writing them down can be more helpful than going over them in your head, and some people find writing before bed helpful. In the 2005 study it cites, visitors to a website who did the exercise reported more happiness right afterward and at check-ins up to six months later. Most of those participants were white Americans with education beyond high school, and the guide says more research is needed on other groups.

On a bad day, one thing is enough to start with.

5. Close it

Shut the notebook or the app. If something is genuinely unfinished, add one small step for tomorrow (“send the corrected file at 9”) so you don’t have to keep holding it tonight.

An example entry

This is an example, not anyone’s real diary:

What happened: I gave the wrong numbers in the 3 p.m. meeting and got corrected in front of everyone. I barely spoke for the rest of the day.

What I felt: embarrassed, mostly. Some anger at myself. Tired.

To myself: You checked those numbers last week and the file changed after that. You made a mistake in a meeting. That doesn’t make you bad at your job. You can send the right figures in the morning.

One thing that went okay: lunch outside with Dana. It was good because I actually left my desk.

Tomorrow: send the corrected sheet first thing.

It’s short and a little messy. That’s fine.

If you’re still angry

Some days end with more anger than sadness, and the urge is to let it out: yell into a pillow, hit something, go for a hard run.

The research doesn’t back that up. A meta-analysis covering 154 studies, by researchers at Ohio State and Virginia Commonwealth University, found that punching or kicking an object appeared to neither reduce nor inflame anger. Jogging made people angrier. What lowered anger and aggression were activities that calm the body, like meditation and slow-flow yoga.

So if you’re too wound up to write, slow down first. The CDC’s page on managing stress suggests taking deep breaths, stretching or meditating. A few minutes of that, then the five steps.

On nights you have nothing left

Skip the full routine. One sentence will do:

Today was hard because ___. I felt ___.

That keeps the two parts that matter most, what happened and what it felt like, and takes under a minute. If you want to see how days like this add up over a few weeks, a mood journal is the longer-term version.

When writing isn’t enough

Some days are too much for a page. The same CDC page lists talking with people you trust about your concerns and how you’re feeling, spending time outdoors, and taking breaks from news and social media. On those days, the better move might be telling one person “today was rough.”

If things have felt heavy for a while

A diary can't take the place of talking to someone. If hard days keep coming, talk to someone you trust or a professional.

In the US you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time.

Closing the day in a tea house

Bium Tea House: Mood Diary is a mood diary app built around this kind of short daily entry. You pick one of five teacups for how the day felt, add a sticker for what it was about, and write a line, or more if you like. The next time you come by, May has left a short note in your diary, written with AI, and if an upset or irritated entry from the past week has nothing added to it, May asks about it once when you come in.