Why do some days start out better than others?

Is it just because you sleep better some nights than others? Is it the food you ate the day before? Especially when you have a run-of-the-mill 9-to-5 job, all days – or at least the weekdays – are pretty much the same. But each one has a totally different feeling when you wake up in the morning. For no readily apparent reason, early Wednesday morning might be a downer, and early Thursday morning might be an upper, and early Friday morning might be absolutely stellar, but by midmorning, they all seem pretty much the same. Why is that?

Sometimes what starts out as a great-feeling day ends that way, too. But other times it starts to wane by mid-morning and does not reverse its downward course. Until the next day. I think it has a lot to do with how you sleep. I also think it has to do with the physical pain levels you experience on any given day. It probably also has to do with how you perceive yourself in that first morning-glance in the mirror. And obviously, there are situational factors. For instance, pay day is always a good day – or at least it doesn't normally precipitate a bad day. Big things happen that influence the quality of a day – someone you know gets sick or dies, your washing machine floods the basement, your kid gets in trouble at school. And little things too – you're down another pound when you step on the bathroom scale, you don't get any bills in the mail, the tree you planted last fall starts to leaf out.

But the strange thing is that large or small events which ruin one day will not ruin the another day. My kid might get in trouble in school on Tuesday which might cause rest of the day to spiral downward. But if he gets in trouble on Wednesday instead, it might not have any negative effect at all on the quality of my day. It's also possible that his getting in trouble on the right day will even improve my day – on the right day it might make me smile to know that he will outgrow these things and we'll both look back at them and laugh. On another day it might throw me into a state of quiet anguish where I struggle with the fear that this kid of mine who horses around in his math class is on the fast route to becoming a fully-fledged social menace.

It seems like we should be able control the way a day feels. And I think that on some level we do not fully understand, we do in fact control it. It would be nice to figure it all out, to know exactly how it works, so that I, for instance, could turn the flooding of my basement into an event that improves my day every time it happens. And clearly there are some people who come closer to being able to do this than others. I think there are probably many factors involved and many roads to the same destination when it comes to creating your own reality. I'm not particularly committed to any school of thought of this issue. But I know this much: something about some days makes it easier to turn negative events into non-issues or even positive occurrences. I don't have the patience or dedication to try to figure it out, but I do have a plan. I'm going to focus on finding a way to sleep well at night, because a good night's sleep seems to cast a better light on whatever happens the next day.