One shitty morning doesn’t get the whole day

I saw this thing online about splitting your day into quarters and honestly I think it’s such a good way to look at a shitty day.

Morning (5am - 9am), late morning (10am - 1pm), afternoon (2pm - 7pm), and evening (7pm onwards).

Basically, one quarter goes to shit? Cool. You have 3 more. You don’t need to write off the whole day as “bad.”

Because think about how often we actually do this. You sleep through your alarm, forget your lunch at home, traffic is awful and you miss the workout class you booked. OR you get one of those weird texts that immediately makes you anxious and now your brain is replaying it for the next 4 hours. Something happened, you’re thrown off, and now we’ve decided the entire day is fucked????????????

This literally happened with my friend the other day. She called me Tuesday morning on the verge of tears because something happened that completely threw her off, and she said, “My day is messed up. I may as well stay home.”

And I was like, OKAYY, feel it. Be upset. Cry in the car. I’m never going to tell you to pretend something didn’t affect you. But once you get home, what are you going to DO? Because old her probably would have gone home, ordered Uber Eats, avoided her schoolwork, skipped the gym and then felt even worse later because now the original shitty thing happened AND she abandoned all the other things that mattered to her that day.

She has a race coming up and training matters to her, so I told her to go home, eat something and choose one hard thing. The first quarter sucked, but good thing there are still three more. And that’s literally what she did. She made breakfast and went to the gym.

I think THIS is the skill that matters way more than trying to have a perfect day: how quickly are you able to course correct when something throws you off?

Because you’re a human being. Shit is going to happen. Some days you’re going to wake up at 90%. Some days 70%. Some days we’re rocking a solid 40% and we’re like okayyyy, this is apparently what we have to work with today.

And if you’re ADHD, I think this can get especially messy because one thing really does start bleeding into everything else. You slept like shit, so you wake up late. Now you’re rushing, so you don’t eat. You forget something at home. You get to work already annoyed. Someone says something that normally wouldn’t bother you THAT much, but today it does. Now it’s 4 pm, you’ve had an iced coffee and approximately three sips of water, and everything feels fucking AWFULL.

This is where my behaviour analyst brain gets interested because I want to know what was happening BEFORE the behaviour. Did you sleep? Have you eaten? Are your thoughts racing? What happened right before you decided, “fuck it, I’m not doing this anymore?” Understanding that stuff is important because behaviour doesn’t happen for not reason.

But I also think sometimes we understand WHY we’re having a harder day and then... we just stop there. “Ohhhh, I barely slept last night, I’m exhausted and everything feels like WAY more effort today.” Okay, fairrrr. Now what are we doing with that information?

If my brain is out for lunch and figuring out what to eat feels like WAY more work than it should, I’m probably not making some elaborate dinner lol. This is literally why I have default foods that I almost always have in the house:

• Rice

• Ground beef

• Boiled eggs

• Pre-made burger patties

• Cheese strings

• Yogurt cups

• Protein shakes

• Protein prepped in bulk

Basically, things I don’t have to think that hard about. I don’t need every meal to have all the macros and every colour of the fucking rainbow. Sometimes the course correction is literally just PUT FOOD IN YOUR BODY.

And I think that’s really the whole point of the quarters thing for me. You don’t need to rescue the entire day. You need to look at what happened, feel whatever you’re feeling, and then decide what you’re doing next. And make that decision QUICKLY. Because the longer you sit there, the more shit starts stacking on top of the original thing. Now you’re not just pissed off that you missed your workout. You’re hungry because you haven’t eaten, you feel guilty because you’ve been sitting on your phone for two hours, you’re anxious about everything you HAVEN'T done, and now you have a whole new set of thoughts + feelings to work through. Course correct before you give yourself five more things to course correct from lol.

You missed breakfast? Eat at 10:30. You missed the workout class? Figure out another way to move. You got the weird text? Be anxious. FEEL IT. But start noticing when one emotion or one shitty thing becomes the reason you abandon everything else that mattered to you that day.

You’re still going to have shitty quarters. You’re a human being!!!!

Just get reallyyyyy fucking good at coming back.