Episode 206: Your Bad Day Isn’t the Problem — The Mindset Shift That Stops the Spiral

Hello balance bestie, it’s Leah. Welcome back to the Balancing Busy podcast.

I need to tell you about yesterday because yesterday was one of those days—the kind where everything that could go wrong literally just lines up and takes turns punching you in the face.

I want to tell you about it not because I need you to feel sorry for me, but because of something that happened throughout the day and how it got me thinking about this lesson that every single one of us needs to remember. You need to remember it on your next hard day, your next launch that flops, your next season that feels like it’s just falling apart.

By the end of this episode, I’m going to give you a practice—something really simple that you can use the very next time life decides to test you. And as we all know, it will.

THE DAY EVERYTHING WENT WRONG

Here’s what happened. Some of you might remember I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but I teach an early morning religion class for high school juniors and seniors called seminary. I’ve been teaching it for six years, and I absolutely love it. It just makes my soul happy.

In all those years, this has never happened to me before. Not ever. But I completely forgot to set my alarm.

I wake up and immediately realize it. Oh, that feeling. You know what I’m talking about when you wake up and you’re like, “Oh no.”

So I rush to get ready. I get to class, go to turn my laptop on, and it is completely dead. Not almost dead. Not “Oh, I can make this work” kind of dead. Dead dead. No charger. All of my slides, my lesson plan, everything’s on the laptop, and I’m just standing there thinking, “Okay, now what?”

I get through that class. Next up is a doctor’s appointment—one of those where paperwork actually matters. I’m doing this with my son so he can submit to serve a mission for our church.

We pull out the forms, and I’m looking through them thinking, “This is weird. Why is there nowhere for the doctor’s signature?” So he pulls it up on his phone, and we realize we are missing the most important paper—the one the doctor actually signs.

My brain starts spinning. You know this feeling—it’s mom mode. We immediately start trying to problem-solve. Do I drive home? Do I reschedule? Do I just accept that today is trying to take me down?

Then I finally get home from all of that, and I’m like, “Okay, I am going to go do my workout, so help me. I will do this workout.”

I get to the very end of the workout—literally, I’m talking 60 seconds or less. That’s it. I’m over there doing my jump squats, feeling all powerful, thinking, “Look at me, can’t hold me down,” and I jump up. I feel this pinch. One second I am in the air, and the next second I am on the ground, writhing in excruciating pain.

I can’t move. I buckled. I had to lay there—I don’t even know how long, maybe ten minutes—before I could even roll to my side. That’s how bad it was. After you do that to your back, you are out. You are absolutely out.

Yeah, that was my yesterday.

THE STORIES WE BUILD

Now, if I stopped the story right there, you would probably agree with me: yeah, bad day, everything went wrong.

But here’s what I want you to notice. While I was telling you that story, something was happening in your brain too. You were already categorizing it. You were already labeling it.

I want to call something out because I think we all do this. In fact, I know you do this because I do it, and every woman that I coach does it. When things go wrong in a day, in a launch, in a season, we don’t just notice what happened—we build a story around it, and then we move into that story like it’s a house.

We decorate it, we furnish it, we start living there. We’re unpacking and getting settled.

The alarm not going off becomes a story that says, “I can’t even manage the basics.”
The laptop dying becomes, “Of course, this would happen to me.”
The missing paperwork becomes, “Why can’t I get it together?”
And the injury becomes, “This is a sign I should not even try.”

Does that sound familiar?

Here’s the thing: that story? It’s not THE truth. It’s A truth. It’s one version, but it’s the one we default to. And it’s the one that steals our energy, our momentum, and our joy.

But it doesn’t have to be our story.

INTRODUCING THE PERSPECTIVE SWITCH

Here’s what I want to teach you today. I call it the perspective switch, and it is so simple it might even feel too simple. But do not underestimate it, because this is how you retrain your brain.

Here’s the analogy I want you to picture: You walk into a room and the lights are off. Same room, same furniture, same walls, same everything. But in the dark, it feels different—heavier, smaller, a little chaotic. Then you flip the switch. Nothing in the room changed, but suddenly you can see clearly.

That’s what we’re doing. The perspective switch is the conscious decision to flip from the lights-off interpretation—the breaking news, worst-case spiral version—to the lights-on interpretation. Same room, different story. Same day, same facts, different light.

THE SAME DAY, DIFFERENT LIGHT

Let me show you how this works with my yesterday. Exact same day, same exact events I already told you about, but different light.

I woke up at 5 AM. No alarm. I just woke up. Yes, when I woke up, I immediately panicked because I knew instantly the second my eyes flipped open that I had forgotten to set my alarm. All I could think was, “What time is it? I forgot to set my alarm!”

But when I looked at the clock and saw that it was 5 AM, I knew I was okay, because had I remembered to set my alarm, it wouldn’t have gone off for ten more minutes.

There I am in absolute panic—fight or flight—and then I realize everything is okay. All I’m thinking now is, “Thank you, thank you, thank you for waking me up.” I felt like Heavenly Father gave me this gift and was my alarm that morning. Lights on.

Yes, I did get to class and my laptop was totally dead. Lights-off version: “Of course this would happen. I’m unprepared. This is a disaster.”

But lights-on version: I put the students into groups. I made up an activity on the spot. I thought, “Thank goodness I’ve been doing this for so long.” Was it my most epic lesson ever? No, of course not. But they engaged, they learned, and it was okay.

Nothing about the dead laptop changed. I just flipped the switch.

At the doctor’s office, we did not have the right forms, and my brain absolutely went into that most complicated solution. Why do we do that? Why did my brain go to “drive home, print them, race back, reschedule” spiral? That was the dark room.

But then I stopped and thought, “Wait, they have a printer. I could probably ask them to print them for me.” So I emailed the forms to the front desk. It worked. Completely solved. Same missing paper, different light.

Yes, the workout ended in the last 60 seconds with me on the ground in excruciating pain. There was a moment—a very dramatic moment—where I was like, “This is it. This is how I die. I am going to have to live in these workout clothes forever. This is the end.” That was definitely the lights-off version.

But here’s the lights-on version: I finally did get to my feet immediately, got ice on it, told myself, “Okay, you can do this.” I alternated between heat and ice all day. I took more Advil than I should admit, and today I am moving. I can sit again. I could lay down. I slept last night, and I’m recording this episode instead of being laid up in bed like I honestly thought I would be when it first happened.

Same back spasm, different light.

HOW YOUR BRAIN WORKS

Here’s what’s powerful about this: Your brain is wired for survival, not for success. It is constantly scanning for danger, for problems, for what’s wrong. We’ve all heard that. That’s normal. It’s how our brains are structured to protect us.

But here’s what’s also true: Your brain is trainable. Neuroplasticity is real. And the more that you flip the switch up, the easier it becomes to keep it flipped up.

At first, you’ll have to catch yourself. You’ll notice you’re sitting in the dark. You’ll notice that breaking news ticker running along your brain—this constant feed of catastrophizing, of problems, of cruelty to yourself. And you’ll have to say, “Wait, wait, I don’t want this. No.” And you flip that switch.

“What else is true? What’s the full picture here?”

If you practice this over and over and over, something really does shift. Your brain starts reaching for that switch faster. You don’t stay in the dark so long. It’s the same room. None of the furniture was moved. You just learn how to turn on the switch.

Eventually, you start living with the lights on more often than off. That doesn’t mean that the room is perfect. It just means you can see clearly enough to move forward.

YOUR CHALLENGE

Do this for me this week: Use the perspective switch for the next seven days. I want you to mentally see yourself each time you come into a moment where you start to create a story with the thing that is happening, and flip the switch. Look broader, look bigger. Let the lights be on so that you can see it all, and look for the good.

Because I am telling you, there is good there. But we have to train ourselves to see it, to find it, to recognize it. And when we do, it changes everything.

If the perspective switch helps you this week, please come and tell me. I would love to hear. You can reply to any of my emails, send me a DM, or in these episodes under the show notes, the very first thing says “drop me a note,” and I see all of those.

This is something that I hope will spread, so share this with your kids. Please help them understand and see and train themselves to have this perspective switch in their little toolbox. Share it with your friends so that you can all live with the lights on more often.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s the same details, same facts, same room, different story. When you go into a room and the lights are off, you’re very hesitant. It’s hard to move forward because you don’t know what obstacles are in your way, and it just feels intimidating.

It’s the same thing in our lives when we let the dark thoughts win. It’s hard to move forward. It’s hard to believe that we can get to the other side.

I told you at the very beginning of this episode this was going to be so simple. The concept is so simple, and yet execution—that’s where it takes work. It takes intention.

But the difference between your day, your week, the season that you’re in, what you’re going through—the difference between you feeling like you are surrounded and encompassed in the dark versus feeling like you have hope, you have a plan, that you can step forward—really can be about the flip of a switch.

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