Thursday blues

I’m starting to notice a pattern. Thursday evenings are often spent nursing a major mood dip. Often my working shifts coupled with trying to dovetail with others means that I have my most intense day of meetings on Thursdays. I usually work a couple of hours wash-up wise on a Friday morning however often things ruminate over and over in my mind from Thursdays for a couple of days, perhaps because I work in a hybrid fashion meaning it can be weeks between seeing people in person.

I feel like there’s something that happens on a Thursday that causes me to feel more sensitive than usual about things people say, I try hard not to take things personally, but as an empath working in human rights advocacy, setting emotional boundaries can be hard as the nature of it all is so person centric. Particularly in a highly charged area like mental health where new stories of human rights breaches flow in daily and so a seamless switching from bolshiness to caring for others is the top trait needed on tap, even if I’m not in the mood.

There are benefits not readily doled out in other potentially stressful sectors to help with this though. We are looking at bringing in some resilience and reflective values based training for the team to help us stay sparkie, well and help us better navigate and learn from our experiences of delivering workshops to mental health and social care workers, peer practitioners and stakeholders who are often very anti human rights for sometimes understandable reasons like personal safety etc.

I no longer drink alcohol (545 days – yay!), which is massively beneficial because in days gone by I would have poured myself a large wine at the end of the week and probably emptied the bottle. Perhaps not a huge volume in the grand scheme, but more than enough to dodge my emotions and ignore them as they start piling up. Plus hangovers are just so pre-CoVid!

The downside of no booze is obviously having to sit with all my niggling depleted failure feelings that everyone hates me, or that I’m being too proficient or anal about process and progress or not enough or not worthy of the role. This can be pretty tiresome! A good night sleep is a help but it can take a day or two for the bad weather to pass and for me to recognise all of it is trivial really and that I do make a positive difference to the cause.

With time and age and experience comes wisdom and so I’m sure settling into my new routine will mean that the day to day crud soon becomes water off a duck’s back. I’m not yet cynical enough to expect the worst in people and when I am it will be time to cast the net out again for the next thing to focus on. So I am ok with everyday still being a school day as it keeps things interesting.

I just need something physical that I can do from home to vent off the Thursday blues I think. Quite like the look of clubbersize! Seeing as I’m tee-total in ticks a couple of boxes!

Anyway, just needed to share!

How are you today? Do you have a routinely bad day? How do you help yourself on these days?