From both personal and professional experience the belief that ‘one bad day ruins it all’ is such a common one.
But it’s also such a harmful one as it results in a downward emotional spiral that derails any progress that has already been made, and any progress that could be made.
Realistically life will always present trials and tribulations, and you must learn to accept that it is inevitable that at times there may be unexpected and avoidable circumstances that contradict your goal process.
Your loved ones may stress you out, work may upset and frustrate you, a bereavement may sadly occur, something might break, or you may get invited last minute to an unexpected event that disrupts your weekly schedule.
Life happens, and it will ALWAYS happen and if you derail for long periods everytime it does, you will never succeed.
Tips to stop derailing after one bad day-
1- Understand that lifelong weight loss success requires persistence not perfection. Instead of trying to constantly achieve perfect results, focus instead on persistence, so that no matter what comes your way (even when it does take you out of alignment with your goal), you ALWAYS reset and get straight back to your goal process and remain committed to that. If there are times that you are struggling with the motivation to do so, refer back to your commitment document that you wrote at the start of this process and remind yourself of why you started. If in the time since then other reasons have surfaced, add them into the document too and use the commitment priming tool once you have read through it all.
2- If you find your ‘bad days’ are frequent then you need to work on managing the stress in your life, and try to eliminate the controllables that aren’t helping you. (See manage your stress section for more guidance).
3- Disrupt the sabotaging ways that follow a stressful/unexpected period. The ability to disrupt an intrusive thought or detrimental habit can initially be hard, but never impossible and as you travel further along in this process you will find this practice becomes easier and more manageable due to the other supporting practices that have been implemented along the way.
One particularly powerful practice that I found during overcoming my frequent habit of derailing every time something went wrong was to reframe it in a way that helped me to think more rationally (and kept me from launching headfirst into drawn out binges because something had gone wrong).
And I did this by associating the “bad thing” to a flat tyre on my car (if you don’t have a car just imagine that you do). And if you had one flat tyre on your car you wouldn’t then slash all the other tyres because of it would you?! Because let’s be honest, that would be senseless and foolish.
So everytime I encountered an unexpected ‘bad day’, I would say to myself- “okay my tyre is flat and it’s going to take some time and money to fix it, but it would cost far more, and take far longer if I destroyed the rest’, and so I would make the decision to not do that.
And by taking that small amount of time to alter my perception, it allowed me to emotionally stabilise again and prevented self-sabotage due to an irrational emotional state. And although disassociating from the actual problem can sometimes be problematic when it involves avoidance, in this sense it is a helpful response as it is accompanied with reframing an unhealthy belief/habit.
Also try to remember that there are 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. This means that one bad day still leaves you with 144 hours to reset, recover and progress with the rest of your week.