By the end of 2023, I was in a rough patch. Not falling apart, just dim. The kind of low where you don't realize how far you've drifted until you look at something small.
For me, that was my Slack emojis.
I looked at my most-used reactions and it hit me. Sighs, facepalms, skulls. Not because I was being dramatic. They just became my default. The muscle memory of someone who'd been pessimistic for too long.
It's just emojis. But defaults reveal what's underneath.
So I changed them. Deliberately. Swapped to the lighter ones. Set a recurring reminder. Started screenshotting my reactions every few months.
The visual journal
What surprised me wasn't the emoji changes. It was how choosing positive reactions started bleeding into everything else. Encouraging teammates instead of being sarcastic. Reading threads for what went right before what went wrong. Small nudges that compounded.
Why it worked
It was absurdly low-effort. No habit to build, no app to open. I was already reacting to messages all day. I just changed which reaction I reached for.
A lot has happened since. I've grown out of that gloomy place. Did changing emojis fix everything? No. But it was the first domino. The smallest proof that I could choose differently.
Sometimes the tiniest shift is the one that sticks.