Do you ever have those mornings when you wake up just feeling miserable and fed up and you don’t really know why.

You wouldn’t be human if that didn’t happen from time to time, but then the questions is, what do you then do about it?

Do you go through the day feeling miserable and everyone you come across who asks you how you are, you repeat you are feeling fed up and miserable. They might reply ‘why is that then’ and you say, you don’t know why and you search your mind for reasons why you’re feeling miserable.

What you perhaps don’t realize is the effect you have on your brain by repeating and searching for reasons why you’re feeling miserable.

Of course we all sometimes wake up feeling miserable and in fact what prompted me to record this vlog this morning was myself waking up feeling miserable. Then I did exact what I’ve just described, I thought ‘why am I feeling miserable?’ and then I became aware of what I was doing and I realized I have a choice.

When you wake up feeling miserable, what are you going to do about it – spend the whole day feeling miserable, will you choose to go through the rest of your day feeling fed up or are you going to change it.

It is your choice. You have the power within you to change how you are feeling.

However, if you go through the day repeating to yourself and to whoever cares to ask that you feel miserable and fed up, then every time you repeat it and search for a reason or understand why you’re feeling like that, you’re reinforcing those feelings. You bring back those bad feelings time and time again.

Your choice is, do you want to reinforce throughout the day how miserable you’re feeling or do you want to go through the day feeling happy instead.

Seems like a stupid question really doesn’t it – the answer is a bit of a no brainer – who is going to choose to go through he day feeling miserable.

The reality is we can change it, but many people don’t know they can change it. Once you realise you can change it, realise and accept that it is your choice and you can change how you’re feeling just by deciding how you’re going to feel you can stop the misery in its tracks and feel whatever you want to feel instead.

You see, your feelings come from your thoughts and every time you replay the though of feeling miserable or fed up, you’re replaying a video that’s not only visual it’s the whole recording and memory and, in trying to discover why you’re feeling that way, you might inadvertently be making associations with other memories or situations and strengthening the neural connections of that unhappiness.

So change it.

This is part of the exercise I do every morning – I’m not going to go though this whole exercise right now, but these are the first two questions I ask myself in the morning:-

1. What am I most grateful for today? and I list three things I’m grateful for.

Then the second questions I ask myself is:-

2. What is my dominant feeling today and I decide what that is, so I might write

Today, my dominant feeling is happy, content, creative, or inspired, enthusiastic, sociable etc. Of course I choose a nice positive feeling – I don’t choose something that’s going to make me negative, unhappy and unmotivated for the day – you’re not going to say “today my dominant feeling is grumpy”.

But what you perhaps don’t appreciate is, if you wake up in the morning with a negative feeling and then go through the day replaying ‘I feel anxious’, ‘I feel miserable’, ‘I feel fed up’, ‘I can’t be bothered today’ – you are reinforcing those feelings throughout the day.

The simple fact is, you have a choice, so think what you want to be, decide and choose how your day is going to go.

How you think determines how you feel

How you feel determines how you behave

How you behave influences the whole world around you.

It is your life to direct any way you want it to go, so take control and start directing it.

Don’t be the victim in your life – Own it