I always find when I’m feeling negative that if I physically create something positive it shifts my mindset. Over-thinking can leave you feeling incapacitated, but if you can take some sort of small, positive action it helps you to quiet your worries.
Here are a few ideas of things to do to feel more positive:
- Clear things out. Throwing things out makes you feel like you’re getting rid of the crap that’s in your head too. Having less visible clutter makes you feel more at peace (which is why mine is mostly shoved into cupboards. Out of sight, out of mind, at least until it falls on my head.) Bagging up items to give to charity is a good form of distraction too.
- Buy a notebook with a cheerful cover or caption on it. Get a new pen and start a journal with a huge to-do list of only pleasant things. (No boring or dreaded reminders allowed.)
- Plan a nearby holiday. It could be camping, staying in a cheap B&B in a town you don’t know well or visiting a friend. Give yourself a budget and plan for a few months away. It feels more attainable than a big summer holiday overseas.
- Get supplies for a new project. Learn how to make jewellery, learn a new language, start painting. Get supplies in the pound shop or discount book shops.
- Make a calendar just to pencil in books you want to read each month/week, or in my case, year.
- Make fudge and when you’re finished eat all of it 🙂
- Make a gift basket or hamper for someone you know.
- Empty your wardrobe and put everything back in new outfit combinations.
- Buy writing icing, sparkly sprinkles and confetti and decorate buns or a cake in a really extravagant way.
- Make mood playlists. “Hyped up mood/chilled out mood/happy mood/get me out of this grumpy mood bloody quickly” music.
- Write someone you usually text a handwritten letter.
- Change a room around. Add small decorations or move furniture around to give it a new feel.
- Sit in a dark room filled with candles and enjoy silence. If you don’t have a fireplace listen to videos online of the sound of fire crackling.
- Have a hot shower with your favourite scent of shower gel. It’s good to have one to wake you up and one to put you to sleep. At the minute, mine are a lemon and chilli one and a marshmallow one.
- Put up fairy lights for no reason.
- Make cocktails and appetisers just for yourself.
- Go back to paper reading. Have a magazine-reading marathon.
- Have a picnic somewhere tranquil where all you can hear is water, leaves rustling or birds.
- I read in one of my kids’ books that if you’re worried you should draw lots of clouds to help your worries float away. I wonder if thirty is too old for this type of thing? I imagine it to be quite relaxing.
- Get new sheets, spray them with lavender and have a restorative sleep (if you have kids, obviously skip step three.)
What do you like to do when you’re having a bad day?
The Funky Thrifter 