Your Daily Butterfly Effect

Admittedly, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning... Or was it that I need my cup of coffee? Or I'm having a case of 'The Mondays' on a Tuesday?

Something happened this morning that is setting my backdrop for the rest of my day and it's pretty negative. What was it? I forgot something I had to mail and I didn't realize it until I got to the post office. Of course there are a multitude of other things that could have happened that are equally (or greater) annoying. It's easy to say that attitude is everything but in practice it's much harder to do. The reality is that very few of us are capable of just pressing an internal button and just letting go.

There's a bigger problem with this scenario: Most people are NOT morning people. Most people start their day with a negative disposition; they don't mean to - it's a prominent side effect of being forced to do something (i.e., get up and re-enter the daily grind) that you really don't want to. If anything - however slight - disrupts your morning process you find that you're hypersensitive to its effects.

The downside to these disruptions is that you won't be yourself until you can decompress and if something else negative happens you have a compounding effect. Your negative attitude will inevitably spread to others who, just like you, may have had a stressful morning. Finding a way to remove these stressful mornings will mean that you will be able to listen to your other senses, like intuition, more clearly - you won't have a phantom negative emotional attachment to it.

Try this: Have a plan as to how you can generically cope with negative stress in the morning. For example, if you get stuck in traffic unexpectedly have your favorite songs ready to go OR make it a plan to take a longer lunch to have some alone time OR make it a plan to find some funny videos on YouTube. You know yourself best. You know that stressful mornings will hit. Find your own way to cope with them before they hit, before it is a crisis.