These 12 self care ideas help if you’re having a bad day in a tiny house – organize your home, adjust perspective, and be kind.
These Self Care Ideas Can Cushion Your Mood
Highlights
- Look around for something to organize, clean, or donate
- Try healthy distraction – even escape methods – of self care
- Adjust perspective on your problems’ duration and intensity
- Share your problems or lighten someone else’s with kindness
An unexpected problem, an unkind, demeaning word, or a discovered mistake can snowball and threaten to ruin your whole day. Maybe you can’t fix the seeming cause, at least right now. If you’re having a bad day, try one of these 12 self care ideas to shore up your internal resources. Improving your outlook, or the things you’re looking out at, can give you a fresh start and help you better problem-solve.
Tiny houses come with their own challenges and upsides, but when you have a bad day you might forget about the positives. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, try one of these:
1. Find something to organize.
When your brain feels disorganized, it can help to organize something outside of yourself.
Tame some tiny home chaos by using more of your vertical space. Consider putting more shelves on a wall. Look into a vertical planter. Try a door-hung shoe rack so that your dog can’t chew them. Find flat, horizontal storage boxes that fit underneath a couch or table. Some small space veterans place their bed on the main floor, using the loft as storage space.
If you can’t get out to buy what you need to start a project today, write a simple list for another day. Things might still suck, but at least you’ll have something to look forward to.
Organize something simple, like cleaning up the silverware drawer or using your oven to store some of your kitchen clutter. Re-order your bookshelf, or go through your closet and find a new outfit idea for tomorrow.
When a tiny place in your tiny house looks, feels, and is calmer, it will help your brain calm down, too.
2. Do the dishes.
Since little messes take up a bigger proportion of a tiny place, they quickly overwhelm the space. A low mood might nudge you into lumping everything negative together.
If you’re having a bad day, do your dishes. It may not change the issue that seems to be causing your feelings, but your kitchen will look better. You will feel a bit more control over your life. And anyone you live with will thank you.
3. Donate something you don’t like.
Consider a little object, seemingly not important enough to need your focus. But every time you come across it, it makes you feel a bit bad.
Look around your tiny house and find something that makes you feel down. Maybe it is the sweater you last wore when your boyfriend broke up with you. Perhaps it’s the box of pens you grabbed to take with you when you were told to pack up your stuff by your last boss. Or it could be a mug that you got on sale, at an amazing price, but never really liked. Because “I’m With Stupid,” is no longer as funny as it was when you first saw it.
Take your thing, put it in a bag, set it in your car, and drive it to the local thrift store. Someone else will end up with a warm new sweater, incredibly cheap pens, or a mug that makes them laugh every time they see it.
You will have one less thing that makes you feel a little bit bad every time you see it. In a tiny dwelling, you may see most things that you have every single day. So that’s 365 fewer bad feelings over the next year.
4. Buy noise-canceling headphones.
Sometimes we just need the world to go away and leave us alone for a time. In a tiny house that can be harder to accomplish. Open up another browser tab and search, “best cheap noise canceling headphones”. Order them today and next time you’re feeling this way, you’ll be all set.
Or invest in your self care day. Go to your local electronics store or the nearest Best Buy or Walmart, and splurge on the best pair you can find. Then go back home, crawl into your favorite spot, and watch something on your computer that either matches your mood or lifts it. An Affair to Remember may have you crying with the romance and heartbreak of it all. Mrs. Doubtfire gives you the chance to embrace Robin Williams’ brilliance. Watching The Breakfast Club will help you relive high school (and be relieved that you’re no longer 17.)
When you take your headphones off, you may be ready to face your life again.
5. Prove to your brain that today isn’t forever.
When our emotions tell us that something is wrong, our brains filter everything we see through that lens, searching for what’s off. This urgent, short-term response helped humans survive through history.
It’s important to remind your brain today that the feelings you’re having are temporary. Stories are good for this because you know that the narrative will resolve in some way. The hero may look completely stuck, but it won’t end there. So pick up a book and immerse yourself. Can’t get to a bookstore? Your local library has e-books for free online.
Another approach: put an ice cube on your hand. Feel the cold and wait. It will hurt your hand at first, and it may get colder from there. Can’t stand it? Keep waiting and watch the ice melt on your hand.
So it is with emotions. They start, and you may not know why you feel the way you feel. Sit with the emotions. Think back to when they started and what happened right before then. Do what you can to process your feelings — write, talk, run, walk, or swim. Eventually, like the ice cube, your emotions will change.
6. Do it anyway.
When you were a teen, did you ever have a conversation that went something like this?
Parent: “Do your chore.”
You: “No. I don’t feel like it.”
Parent: “I don’t care. Do it anyway.”
It’s time to be your own parent. First of all, yes, I agree that your Dad was being unreasonable and your Mom shouldn’t have said that she didn’t care.
But the beauty of the advice — do it anyway — is that we can’t always wait for our feelings to catch up with our intentions. Trying to develop a daily exercise habit? Have an article you need to write for your client? Instead of waiting to feel like exercising, or writing, just do it.
After you’re done — running two miles or writing 500 words — endorphins will reward you with better feelings. Even if you still feel a bit crummy, at least you will have gotten yourself closer to your goals.
7. Compare your life with the past.
My grandfather was born in the year 1900. He did not get past the eighth grade. In Thomas Pikkety’s A Brief History of Equality, I learned that my grandfather attended an average amount of school for the time. Our country then, like most, spent little on education. Low, temporary taxes paid for wars and little else.
While you may hunger for lower taxes today, keep in mind that a country with very little spent on police, fire suppression, safe food, or compulsory education translates to one where people are more likely to be the victim of a crime, watch their house burn down, die of poisons in their food, and simply know less.
Not to mention working conditions. Only a hundred years ago, many young children still worked in unsafe factories for little money. Workplace accidents fell 95% over the 20th Century. Until 1938, there was no federal minimum wage in the US.
Thought exercise: place your day 100-200 years ago. Feel a surge of gratitude for electricity, the Internet, and your ability to read.
8. Find a shiny object to distract yourself.
Not feeling philosophical? Don’t wanna “Do it anyways”? Thinking I should leave you be and just go f&*$ myself?
Calm down. If you’ve ever spent time with a toddler, you’ll be familiar with this next idea. Distraction.
Download a simple game on your phone. If the first one’s too hard try an easier one.
Go on Instagram. Look up pictures of puppies hugging kittens.
Pretend that you won $100,000 in the lottery on your way home. Online shop for what you’d buy with it. Abandon your shopping cart. Watch your ad feeds improve!
Go to expatsi.com and take their quiz to find out the foreign country that would suit you best if you were to move. Research the country. Make yourself a presentation. Amuse yourself, or someone else, with it on another day.
9. Eat something healthy.
Please don’t swear at me again, but you may need some nutrition. Perhaps you’re hungry. Perhaps you need some protein. Get some nuts, a piece of jerky, a glass of soy milk, or a cheeseburger. Add on a nice apple. These foods will help your blood sugar stabilize, your brain relax, and your body feel better.
You may be tempted to eat a quart of ice cream, drink a fifth of vodka, or finish off the family size portion of chips. Those will just pile onto your bad mood. Trust me.
10. Text or call a friend.
Think of someone you know who’s kind, and reach out. Ask them how they are first. You may find that listening to their problems takes your mind off your own.
Whether or not this is the case, when they reciprocate and ask about you, you can then tell them what’s going on. Make sure to let them know whether you want self care ideas or just want to vent.
11. Be kind to someone else.
Smile at the cashier when you’re buying your almonds at the gas station. Write a nice email to your aunt. Pet your cat. Give five bucks to the homeless guy on the corner. Look on Project Helping for a volunteer opportunity and sign up.
You might end up improving someone else’s bad day. You’ll definitely help yourself. Your actions prove that you don’t suck, you aren’t always wrong, and you do deserve happiness. Because, look — you’re a kind person who does kind things for others.
12. Write kind words on a sticky note.
You may have words jangling around in your brain that aren’t terribly helpful. Even if you’ve forgotten who first said them, when you have a bad day, these may come out as self blame, criticism of others, or an assumption that things aren’t going to turn out OK.
You can’t go back in time, find whoever told you those things, and explain to them how they don’t really apply to your current situation. So you’ll need a different approach to counter the arguments. Grab a pad of sticky notes. Open the notes app on your phone.
Write down the counter-argument to what’s in your head.
Feel like you messed up and things will never be right? Write down “I am doing my best. I will try again next time.”
You get the idea. “Tomorrow is another day.” “This too shall pass.” “I am kind.” “I will respect my feelings, but I will work toward my goals anyways.” “I am grateful for my tiny house.” “I am creative.” “I am resourceful.” “Self care is not selfish.”
One great thing about writing these messages down? They will be there the next time you need them.
These self care ideas don’t apply only to today. Be kind to your future self by setting them up in advance. Put together a kit with a few face masks, a small book of daily meditations, a list of movies to watch, and a reminder of the people who always help you feel better.
Next time someone you care about texts you and mentions their own bad day, you can share it with them, too.
NOTE: If you’re having a truly bad day and worry about getting through it, call or chat to the phone number 988 in the US to be connected to the national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
See Our Other Wellness Posts
- 5 Ways to Live With Intention
- 8 Relationship Tips: How to Live in a Tiny House Together
- Raising a Family in a Tiny House
- Preparing to Move Into a Tiny House
