small survival tactics for emotionally expensive days

some days just cost more than others. not in money, but in energy, patience, presence—the currencies that don’t show up in your bank account but leave you depleted all the same. it’s rarely one big thing. it’s usually a quiet accumulation of small losses: the email you didn’t want to answer, the conversation that drained you more than you expected, the tension you’ve been ignoring in your chest all week. even joy, on the wrong day, can be heavy to carry. you wake up meaning to do better, to be softer, to hold the day lightly—and by noon, you’re dragging yourself through invisible mud, negotiating basic tasks like they’re uphill marathons.

i used to believe that the answer to these days was simply more effort. power through. show up harder. discipline yourself into feeling better. emotional exhaustion, i thought, could be outworked the same way you outwork a bad grade or a missed deadline. if i could just move faster, act sharper, be stronger, surely i could outrun the sense of emotional bankruptcy. it took longer than i’d like to admit to realize that this isn’t how emotional life works. you can’t sprint your way out of depletion. you can’t fix exhaustion by pretending you’re not tired.

so these days, when the hours feel too expensive for the energy i have available, i don’t try to outwork them. i try to out-care them. not through some grand act of self-love or a neatly staged “rest day” with the right candles and serums. but through small, stubborn acts of survival that remind me that feeling wrecked isn’t a personal failure. it’s part of being alive.

there’s a strange kind of dignity in surviving bad days without needing to turn them into something noble or aesthetic. not every struggle needs to be transformed into a teachable moment. not every bad mood needs to be interrogated for root causes. some days are just heavier than others, and the work is to get through them without turning against yourself in the process. it’s astonishing how radical that feels when you’ve been trained your whole life to equate your mood with your moral worth.