Do you ever have one of those days where everything seems to be against you?

I certainly do.

In fact I had one a few days ago.

It started with the internet.

I was halfway through writing this very newsletter… totally in the flow… words cascading out of me…

When suddenly the little Wi-Fi symbol blinked out.

Gone.

I was left staring at the spinning wheel of doom.

So I did what everyone does.

I unplugged the router. Counted to thirty. Then plugged it back in.

The router lights did their little blinking dance…but nothing.

So I rang the provider.

“We’re experiencing higher than usual call volumes” said a robotic voice.

Right. Fine. I’ll work offline, I thought.

Except when the connection finally crawled back twenty minutes later, the draft email I’d been writing – the good one, the one that was actually working – had vanished.

Not saved. Not in drafts.

Just… gone.

Forty minutes of writing swallowed into the void.

“Deep breath, Nick,” I thought. Don’t think about it. Start something new.”

So I turned to a report I was using AI to help me research.

But Claude was NOT in a good mood either. It wilfully ignored my prompts and refused to stick to the brief.

I love AI, but sometimes it produces rubbish – and the more you try to correct it, the more rubbish it churns out.

Thankfully, this is rare. But when it happens I take a break and come back to it later – then it’s usually fine again.

However, it had to happen on this day of all days!

“Deep breath,” I repeated to myself. “Don’t think about it. Start something new.”

At that point I realised I had no cash in the house, and I’d promised to pay the window cleaner.

So I walked down to the cashpoint at my local M&S, popped my card in…

…and the machine ate it!

No “incorrect PIN.” No “insufficient funds.”

It just took my card, paused, and swallowed it whole.

When I went into the store to get help, they told me that it had been happening for the last hour.

“Why didn’t you put a sign on it to say it was out of service?” I asked.

A burly, intimidating M&S Manager (what happened to the friendly M&S customer service of old?) said to me:

“With due respect Sir, the ATM is a 3rd party and we don’t have anything to do with it!”

Ugh! Jobsworth!

So there I was…. no internet… no email newsletter draft.. no bank card.

I tried my mantra again….

“Deep breath, Nick. Don’t think about it. Start something new.”

But this time it didn’t work.

I could feel that hot, tight feeling of “right-that’s-IT!”

It was like I was turning into the Incredible Hulk.

I had an overwhelming urge to smash the machine then ring M&S head office and scream blue murder at whoever picked up.

Worse, I start to think about all the things that are annoying me in work… in life… and in the world..

I started to connect these completely unrelated events. into a tale of personal woe.

All the things that had been dissatisfying me came together suddenly in a surge of white hot emotion.

I started to doubt my abilities… my goals… even my entire existence!

This collision of minor calamities had sent me into a spiral of despair.

I know…

Writing this down now, it seems ridiculous…

But it happens to all of us… to a lesser or greater degree.

And that’s what I want to talk to you about today.

Because it can have a serious impact on your goals.

The Catastrophe Effect

Whatever you do in life, things will go wrong from time to time.

There will always be hiccups and setbacks.

But sometimes these can spiral out of control in damaging ways.

Usually, it starts with a minor irritation – a snag or niggle.

Then another irritation happens…

Perhaps even a series of them!

Rather than seeing them as separate mishaps that HAPPENED TO COINCIDE your mind connects them together into a story.

It’s like a chain reaction of small events that turns into a nuclear meltdown.

You’re having a bad day… the world is against you… this sort of thing always happens to you and not to other people… everything is going to hell in a handcart…

Suddenly, it’s no longer the case that you’ve experienced a few hitches.

It’s now a CATASTROPHE!

When this happens, you feel a sense of despair… anger… persecution…. and crippling self-doubt.

It totally drains your motivation.

You feel like there’s no point, because you’re doomed and nothing is going to work out for the best.

If you look at your current home business project while you’re in this mood, you will judge it harshly, seeing only the mistakes and unfinished bits…

You might even feel like tearing it all up or deleting it.

Or you fire off angry emails to anyone you think might be to blame!

This really does happen – and for some people it can mean the end of a big, ambitious project that could have transformed their lives.

All because of a few unconnected setbacks that their minds turned into a disaster narrative.

Here are 4 symptoms to watch for.

• RUMINATION – Replaying, analysing, and chewing over negative events, often in a way that makes them feel worse rather than solving anything.
• NEGATIVE CHAINING – Linking separate small annoyances into a single gloomy story: “This is one of those days… nothing is going right… everything is against me.”
• CATASTROPHISING – Mentally escalating something small into something much larger: “This delay has ruined everything.”
• COGNITIVE FUSION – This is where you become fused with your thoughts, treating them as reality rather than as passing mental events.

So how can you avoid these… or at least stop them from affecting your motivation and productivity?

The Parable Of The Two Arrows

In Buddhist teaching there’s a parable about two arrows.

Sometimes, a painful event will strike you out of nowhere, like an arrow.

It could be a computer glitch… a disappointing result… a criticism from a friend.

You cannot avoid that.

These things happen.

However, when we inflict further emotional suffering on ourselves after the first arrow strikes, that becomes a SECOND arrow!

Effectively, we become wounded twice.

But the second arrow is entirely optional.

We can choose for it NOT to strike us by not taking it personally, and not making a painful story out of it.

This is how you can achieve ‘equanimity’.

That means staying mentally steady and emotionally balanced when bad things happen, without being dragged into a downward spiral.

It doesn’t mean pretending the internet didn’t crash… or that the cashpoint didn’t eat your card… or that Claude didn’t write utter drivel.

It just means you don’t let unrelated annoyances merge into a doomy referendum on your entire life.

So when you’re experiencing multiple frustrations in any given day, take a brief pause from your work while you try to reframe them as SEPARATE incidents.

Tell yourself that while they might feel connected, they actually aren’t.

And if you DO go into a spiral of despair, learn to observe this as a chain reaction that YOU are creating… not one that’s coming from a malevolent universe.

In these situations, don’t make rash decisions…

Don’t delete the draft… don’t fire off angry emails… don’t refund the course… don’t abandon the business idea.

Instead, give it a day – or ‘sleep on it’, as they say.

After you calm down, things can look very different.

Sometimes, you might even laugh at how wound up you got!

Which is what happened to me after I got home from M&S.

So next time you feel the Hulk rising… stop… separate the events… and give yourself a break before you decide that the world is ending.