What to Do When We Feel Anxious and Low

The Sky Inside Us

There are days when the sky is completely clear, without a single cloud. When we look up, it feels calm and vast, like that blue has always been there for us. Sometimes our inner world feels like that too. Clear, open, spacious, like our heart has room to breathe.

But there are also days when our inner world is not clear or at ease. It becomes like a sky filled with clouds. We feel worried, sad, and our heart resembles a sky covered with dark clouds. Often this is not anger or despair. It is simply a very ordinary state, the absence of happiness.

It is a subtle feeling of uneasiness or quiet sadness, something so mild that we sometimes wonder whether it even counts as suffering. We can only be sure of one thing: it is not happiness. But we are not certain it is suffering either. Our inner state feels neutral, dull, somewhat heavy, nothing especially bright, nothing especially joyful.

When a Low Mood Feels Like a Wasted Day

When our heart is not light or clear, when it feels dim and weighed down, we may realize that a day lived this way feels wasted. And we want to find a way out of that quiet sadness, to step out of this state of low, lingering unease. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and it brought me back to a part of my childhood that I don’t talk about often.

When I was little, I spent countless days alone. No books. No TV. No friends. Nothing entertaining. The neighborhood wasn’t the kind of place where a child could just wander freely, so I stayed inside. A lot. I remember many nights lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, and in that silence my mind would start creating another world. I would picture wonders in life the way Beth practiced chess in The Queen’s Gambit, playing entire scenes in her mind like it was real. And I even created an imaginary friend as a talking sunflower, my favorite flower. She was warm and bright, like a small piece of sunshine I could talk to when everything else felt empty.

Looking back, those years taught me something. When you are alone long enough, you learned that you survived from those difficult feelings. You learn how to sit with what is inside you. You learn that quiet does not have to be dangerous. And this is why I believe so deeply that fear, sadness, and low moods do not need to be pushed away. They need to be met.

Because when we feel anxious and low, our first instinct is usually to run. We scroll. We had a snack. We shop. We fill our day with noise. We try to chase happiness like it’s something outside of us that we just haven’t found yet. And then we blame ourselves. We think, “Why am I still not happy?” We think we’re failing at happiness. But the truth is, happiness was never meant to exist without any suffering. It’s not a sign you’re doing life wrong. It’s just life. The art of happiness is also the art of suffering well.

When we learn to acknowledge our low mood, to gently embrace it, to understand it instead of judging it, something shifts. We suffer less. And not only that, but we also start turning suffering into something useful: understanding, softness, compassion, even quiet joy. One of the hardest things to accept is that there is no place anywhere that is all happiness and no suffering. But that doesn’t mean we should despair. It means we can stop fighting reality. Suffering can be transformed.

I love the image of the lotus for this. A lotus doesn’t grow in clean marble. It grows in mud. The mud doesn’t smell good, but the lotus is beautiful. And somehow, that is such a perfect truth about us. No mud, no lotus. If you look deeply, you start to see that suffering and happiness aren’t two separate worlds. They touch each other. They become each other. Even in your happiest moments, fear might sit quietly underneath like a shadow you don’t name. And even in a painful moment, something else is still there: your breath, your body. The fact that you’re still alive. The fact that you can still begin again at this very moment.

So, what do we do when we feel anxious and low?

We stopped running. We come back to the body because the body always tells the truth. A low mood is not just a thought. It lives on the shoulders, the chest, the belly. It becomes tension. It becomes heaviness. And we can’t release tension; we refuse to admit it is there. So, we started simply. Breathing in, I know this feeling is here. Breathing out, I don’t push it away. Just that is a turning point.

And this is the gentlest part: we don’t have to fear the “cloudy sky” days. Even those days are part of human experience. Even those days can teach us something. When we stop and look deeply, we start to see what the low mood is asking for. Rest. Presence. A slower pace. A little tender.

Sometimes the most healing thing isn’t to force yourself to “be positive.” It’s to sit beside yourself like you would sit beside a friend. No fixing. No judging. Just staying. I think that’s what my childhood taught me in its own quiet way. When there was nothing to distract me, I found a strange kind of strength. I learned how to be with myself. I learned how to meet the dim days without collapsing into them.

And that’s the practice, over and over. To return. To breathe. To soften. To remember that even when happiness feels far away, it is not gone. It’s simply waiting for us to stop running long enough to touch what is still here.

If you’re on a cloudy day right now, I want to ask you gently:

What are you trying to run from? And what might change if you simply sat down, took one slow breath, and let yourself be here?