What if the difference between a bad day and a bad life is simply how early you notice your mood shifting?
“Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood” Daniel Goleman
There are many good suggestions around moods and mood monitoring. One is that it is OK to sit with a bad or sad mood. If the mood suits your setting, then run with it, however, if it is going to bring others down with you, then shift it. I call this changing the channel.
I’ve often said, “Hey, listen, it looks like your mood doesn’t really want my company right now, so I’ll be off.” Up to this point, I will have made a few efforts to help lift the mood, but my carefully chosen words always generate an immediate positive response and an improvement in a person’s mindset.
The immediate change also shows me that it is possible to change the channel. The choice is yours as to whether you return to the way you were feeling after we have parted company.
I once witnessed a waiter scald herself in a café and quickly put her arm under cold running water. She felt the pain and applied her known remedy. We experience mental pain, and rather than apply known remedies, one of which is to change the channel, we continue to watch the bad movie play out.
There are times when I have woken up and felt that the mood I was in was far less than ideal, so I changed it. Easier said than done, you might think, but just as a bad mood maintained too long runs the risk of turning into a bad personality, so it is with a good mood.
Given that I have been purposefully practising being in a good mood for many years, I would like to think I now have a good personality. What do I mean by good? A happy personality or a sunny disposition that makes me and those around me happy.
Abraham Lincoln said he believed: “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
One of my first responsibilities of a morning is to receive clients from my mastery program. The aim of the program is to create a superstar mindset and body in 12 weeks, so I can’t afford to let clients waste a second (or a dollar) being distracted by a bad mood. If my client is cranky or miserable, I gradually increase the intensity of what they are doing while asking a few questions.
In most cases, their mood becomes positive within about 10 minutes. I love the idea that people leave my sessions in a better frame of mind. I’m convinced it is because they have moved their body, which moves their minds. Physiology is psychology. How you feel very much affects how you think. We can control how we feel by what we allow into our thoughts.
The real trick with moods is to catch the mood before it catches you.
When you choose as one of your enlightenment practices to monitor your moods, think about the things that are likely to change your moods or have an immediate effect on them.
When my children were toddlers, I adopted a time-management hack: I stopped listening to, watching, or reading the news. If the news were newsworthy, I would research it in my own time and go beyond the “Henny Penny, the sky is falling” version that sensationalist media tend to spread. I have saved an enormous amount of time, and importantly, my moods were not affected by the vagaries of the news cycle.
It’s the best way I have learned to maintain control over the thoughts I allow into my mind.
But the onus is always on us to create our good news and search for the good news stories in our lives.
For example, choose a music playlist that uplifts your spirits. If a song reminds you of an ex-partner, delete it. If you want to monitor your mood, then set it with music, scented candles, your favourite perfume, or aftershave. Eat mood-enhancing foods. Get eight hours of sleep and practice positive thinking.
One of the first behaviours in my morning routine is to have a three-minute cold shower; the very next habit, most usually during my cold shower, is to smile at myself in the mirror for one minute. I heard an Esther “Abraham” Hicks talk once where she said it takes less than 15 seconds for a negative thought to turn into a negative mood, but five times as long for a positive thought to become a positive mood. I usually laugh at myself much earlier than one minute, but I am priming myself to be happy, and it works.
For an immediate mood-calming experience, physiological sighing, a “do anywhere” breathing technique discovered by doctors in the 1930s, requires you to take one deep breath through your nose with your mouth closed, and immediately upon filling your lungs, one last quick nasal breath to ensure all alveoli (air sacs) are opened, then to exhale slowly through your mouth for as long as you can.
Stress has the effect of collapsing air sacs in our lungs, creating shortness of breath and making us more anxious. By purposefully reopening your alveoli, you are calming both mind and body. It can take as few as one round to experience the immediate benefits of a calmer mood, yet you will enjoy doing up to eight rounds.
As a last resort, consider purchasing a mood ring. The idea is that stress or a bad mood lowers body temperature and takes blood away from the extremities, darkening the ring’s colour. If you are happy, your body temperature rises, and the ring turns pink or purple. The jury is still out on whether there is any scientific truth behind it, but in the very least, a mood ring reminds you of this important step in achieving enlightenment.
I lost my mood ring years ago, and I am still not sure how I feel about that …
Be well,
DL
“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”
Groucho Marx
THE 8 E’S OF EQUILIBRIUM: ENLIGHTENMENT - Chapter 2: Mood Monitoring