An Appreciation Equation
Why the tough times will make the good times even sweeter
At the end of January this year I embarked on an unprecedented amount of time off work – 5 weeks straight of annual leave – the type of holiday that you can’t even consider in the NHS.
Given that this is the main piece of time off that we will get during this year of work, Hannah and I had big plans – and they didn’t disappoint. We spent a long weekend in Melbourne hanging out with family and close friends. We travelled to North Queensland, visited the Daintree Rainforest and learned to scuba dive in the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, discovering a whole new world under the surface of the ocean in the most famous of diving locations. We then took a boat tour around the Whitsunday Islands – some of the most naturally beautiful surrounds I am ever likely to experience, enjoying sunsets on the front of the catamaran and watching as dolphins played with one another around the blue lights projecting into the water from the underside of our boat. Finally, we took a trip the whole way over to Western Australia, where we started to appreciate the vastness of this great country, watching beautiful sunsets over the ocean while sipping vintage wine from the vineyards that surrounded us.
I am summarising the trip not just because it is good blog content, but because there where many days throughout it where I thought back to the harder days that I have had since being in Australia. The days where I wished I could be back home, or the days that for no good reason I just felt a bit low. Somehow these days were making this trip and the amazing moments I was finding myself in even more special. The bad days were somehow making the good days even better.
Despite the rather idyllic surrounds that Mermaid Beach affords; I, like everyone, have tough days. Days where your thoughts are so loud in your head that you can’t fully hear what others are saying, and even if you do, their words are quickly forgotten and drowned out by the chorus of negativity that is rudely interrupting your appreciation of the given moment.
While very different to mood disorders, everyone will have days like these. This eb and flow of mood is something that I have always tried to prevent, as if bad moods are to be avoided like the plague. Certainly, if you are finding that your mood is low for a prolonged period of time – say, longer than a week - then you should try to find help, as this is not normal physiology. But are occasional low moods caused by greater than normal external stressors really a bad thing?
As I sat on the top deck of the dive boat watching the sunrise over the reef, I thought back to the tougher days in university and the effort that I put in to achieve my degree. I now felt so thankful for those tough times of trying to juggle university with working part-time, and the stress and sleep deprivation that it often resulted in. There were many negative days where the exams didn’t seem possible. But they were, and I felt thankful for the life that the pursuit of my goals was now affording me. I was unlocking an appreciative range that wouldn't have been possible without adversity.
It was in this moment that I realised that was can only have positive emotions to an equal level to the opposite negative emotions that we have experienced. Without bad days, we can’t have good days. Without negative emotions, we would have no appreciation for positive emotions. We would be left with mere ambivalence.
Take two fictional people: Sam and John. Both are 30. Sam comes from a wealthy background, has a great education and now a good job in accounting where he can just cruise along without really trying. He socialises a lot and doesn’t really push himself physically or mentally. Sam is single and spends a lot of his free time that he isn’t out drinking with friends in front of the TV enjoying takeaways most evenings to avoid the faff of cooking. Sam is NOT unhappy – his mental health is actually really stable. He rarely has difficult days and is happy with where he is in life. Today, Sam had a salary review and found out that his salary is increasing by a few thousand to a respectable £65k per year. He’s happy with this and spends the evening celebrating with friends.
John on the other hand is a ‘grafter’. He has his own business that he started from scratch five years ago in internet marketing. He has a young family that he works to provide for. John puts everything he has into his work and his family; he holds nothing back. He had many dark days in the beginning of entrepreneurship where his company wasn’t making money and he had many doubts about whether he would make it. This caused him a lot of stress. His self-worth – which he attached largely to the success of his business – was in the doldrums and his mood was up and down like a yoyo. But he trusted instincts, had faith in his processes and kept chipping away at his business. Slowly, after a couple of years of real struggle, John started seeing growth in his business. Things continued to improve and today John has signed an advertising deal for his website that will see his salary significantly improve to roughly £65k per year.
Despite their different paths, Sam and John are now at basically the same stage in life in terms of ages and income, but who is going to feel happier today?
While good emotional control is an attribute for dealing with difficult situations. There will still be times for everyone where difficulties and challenges in our lives cause us to feel low.
This example shows us that having low moments isn’t necessarily bad. They are an essential part of life for anyone with ambition to be their best. We will all face obstacles and failures from time to time, but it is how we deal with them and the practical strategies we use to overcome them that defines us and separate us over time. They will unlock a range of appreciation for the good times that you will be thankful for when they arrive.
In this example we can see how John’s up and down path to ‘success’ has led to him experiencing a much wider and diverse range of emotions than Sam. Sam chose the comfortable path, but the shallow range of emotions he encountered will leave him poor in life experience and in appreciation of the good things in his life. John, on the other hand, embraced the bad days and they made the good days even sweeter.
Tough days will continue to happen for us all, they are an inevitable part of life. But the emotional range that they unlock will allow you to appreciate the good times even more when it is their time to return.