As an anti-clickbait measure, I’ll give you the TL;DR upfront: Accepting that you won’t get things your way will dramatically improve your outlook on life.
However, if you’re interested in knowing what I mean when I say I wake up unhappy every day and—more importantly—discovering the ways I try to combat this mindset, then simply read on to find out.
How’s that for double clickbait?
Why am I waking up unhappy?
Waking up is tough business.
Unless you straddle the fine line between sleeping too little and overdoing the snooze button, there’s always the little tug-of-war involved in leaving a warm bed.
You didn’t get enough sleep. You were having such a nice dream. It’s too dark out. Work can wait. Your mind has so many ways of convincing you to spend another five minutes in bed that I refuse to believe everyone wakes up with a pep in their step 100% of the time.
I, for one, involuntarily drag myself out of bed most days, regardless of how exciting my schedule is. It could be Christmas and I’d still have to convince myself not to go back to sleep.
And get this: I hate it when I oversleep too.
Couple that with the fact that most days involve a huge chunk of tending to responsibilities, and you can see how disgruntled I can be to leave the comfort of my… well… comforter.
But therein lies the very fun paradox of this all. Bliss always comes after pain. Or maybe that’s just me lying to myself.
Regardless, I’ve been recording down the myriad ways I’ve used to psych myself up for the day, and I’m going to start things off with the most important lesson I’ve learned from my daily morning pains, and that’s…
1. Creating a tangible enemy
I love writing and exercise because they’ve taught me so many things about myself. The most important lesson? That I can always find a way to honour the promises I’ve made to myself, no matter what challenges life throws my way.
In fact, it’s when I can’t keep my promises that I get the most benefit from making the attempt.
For instance, I once set out to run every day for a few months, and guess what happened after I made that commitment? It rained. Work got in the way. I drank too much.
The easy thing to do would have been to let external circumstances dictate what I could or could not do. But I ran in the rain. I woke up two hours earlier (4 a.m.) to get my run in. I ran through my hangover.
And you know what happened after that? The normal days became heaven in comparison.
I know this may seem somewhat unhinged, but I like to look at obstacles as actual enemies preventing me from living my best life.
If I were to show up at your door and prevent you from going to work, you wouldn’t think twice before clocking me in my head. Yet we’d allow a little rain to stop us from becoming our best selves. Or a ‘busy’ period to waste another day’s worth of writing.
That’s what I do when I wake up now too. The more I feel like I can’t wake up early, the more I will. Not because I’m a sadist at heart, but because I have an invisible enemy that I’d hate to let win.
2. I scare myself into action
This point goes hand in hand with the weird realisation that I work harder when I’m busy. And the busier I get, the more productive I become.
So every morning, when I’m procrastinating on my novel and putting off my running, I tell myself that I’d be busy for the rest of the day, so I better get my morning routine out of the way before my work starts.
By the power of time scarcity alone, I get so many things done before I head out to the office, and that helps me deal with the initial state of fugue I often find myself in after waking up.
I also like using death as a prime motivator. One day, it’s going to be my turn to pass on, and regardless of what I do today, I’ll never escape my true fate.
So I ask myself: Do I want to end this life not having created what I was meant to? Or do I want to feel comfortable today and regret all the things I never did with all the time I had?
3. I wallow in self-pity
There are days when I just wake up feeling like I’ll never get things done. My deadlines are too tight, there are too many bills to pay, and I’ll have fourteen hours of work ahead of me.
And on those days, I don’t fight it. I just sit on my sofa, try to shake the cobwebs from just waking up, and accept defeat. I tell myself I’ll never attain anything major through my writing, and that I might never, ever reach my life goals.
After about ten minutes of that, I ask myself: Now what?
I have a whole day of doing a task I don’t really want to do. Okay, now what? Do I quit my job so I don’t need to do the things I don’t want to? Or do I try to make the best of it?
I look at the pittance that is my salary (especially after 10 years of being in the industry) and I ask myself the same question. Now what? Do I keep earning this pay well into my late forties? Or do I find ways to upgrade myself?
It’s like that quote ‘Make pain your friend and you’ll never be alone’. Once in a while, I like being with the pain.
But unlike past me, I don’t let the pain become my truth. Instead, I find ways to work with it.
Lastly, if you can do something when things aren’t going your way, then you can probably do it anytime
We’ve already covered this in point #1, but I figured it’s worth repeating. Pushing yourself beyond a ‘balanced lifestyle’ can be worth it sometimes, not because hustle culture is in, but because it helps you appreciate the normal days that much more.
And it’s so easy to see normal days as mundane or boring.
But try running the day after binge drinking, and even the longest runs on a normal day will seem like the easiest thing in the world.
I guess that’s the secret to dealing with a negative outlook. You bully yourself first, so that others can’t.
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Stuart Danker 
I’d love to hear your thoughts!