7 practical ways to combat a bad mood
Psychology can help you stop frowning.
Everyday life is made up of many enriching experiences and situations that make us feel good. However, the reality we live in is not made to please us and we often run into some of its sharp edges. The bad mood can be caused by these negative situations, but it can also appear regardless of what is happening around us. Many times, we don't need an excuse to feel angry.
However, the fact that bad mood and what happens to us seem to go their separate ways does not mean that the latter does not have a cause or origin on which we can intervene.
Fighting bad moods from psychology: some tips
Here are seven suggestions to try to fix your day when you are feeling bad and, with calm and a little patience, fix the day and get back to being positive.
1. Take rejection philosophically
Many times, bad moods are caused by events that are events that are interpreted as a form of rejection towards us.. This is especially true since the digital era has invaded the space of our personal relationships with social networks, chat rooms, messages, etc.
The simple fact that someone does not answer the messages you send can feel very bad, even if we do not know the causes of this neglect or delay. That is why we must take into account to what extent face-to-face relationships differ from those we maintain at a distance through new technologies. The use of the latter will always make us seem colder.
2. Stop fixating on the same thing all the time
Long periods of bad moods may be due to the fact that you simply spend too much time thinking about the same thing, you spend a lot of time thinking about the same kind of things.. Specifically, the kinds of things that are unpleasant, make you anxious, or are unwanted. Change that.
Your day-to-day life doesn't have to revolve around the little unpleasant incidentals, and focusing your attention on these things won't solve anything for you, as it will it will act as a burden to your lines of thinking and will even make it difficult for you to come up with creative solutions. Therefore, learning to redirect your attention to other types of stimuli can help.
3. Accept that you are not always in control
What happens with explicit rejections, those that are so clear that we have no choice but to assimilate them? Well, we must do everything possible to make sure that the memory of them does not create problems for us. In the same way, all those situations in which things do not go as we had foreseen require a certain stoic spirit on our part.
Training ourselves so that this does not affect us is in itself a goal, something that motivates us and that can help us to make it disappear.It is something that motivates us and that can help us to make the bad mood disappear and replace it with a desire for personal growth.
4. Go out more
This recommendation is a classic, yes, but that does not make it any less true.. Often, a bad mood can cause us to anchor ourselves in social relationship dynamics that affect us negatively. Thus, someone in a bad mood will tend to isolate themselves more socially, not seek physical contact and shy away from potentially stressful situations. They will tend to forget their social needs and the emotional repercussions this entails.
However, social relationships (where they exist) can improve mood and are also a gateway to all kinds of stimulating activities: going to the theater with others, going for a run, hiking, etc. Doing the opposite of what the body is asking us to do can pay off in the short term and make us leave behind the evenings of television and ice cream tubs.
5. Let yourself be distracted
If you get out of the house more, you will also be exposing yourself to more environments with many potential distractions, and that's a good thing.and that's a good thing. Letting something drag your attention will make you break with the line of thoughts that lead you to that which causes you to be in a bad mood. If these distractions are frequent and more or less lasting, you will break this loop in which you have trapped yourself.
6. Check that hunger is not influencing your mood.
On an empty stomach, a bad mood is almost inevitable.. Hunger is a good source of anxiety and puts the whole organism on alert for evolutionary reasons that you can guess. Thus, having a bad eating schedule that leads you to go through long periods of fasting could be altering the way you look at life.
Any stimulus that has nothing to do with food will seem superfluous and unnecessary. And if the hunger comes from the desire to follow a diet, even the food you feel like eating can lead to a bad mood.
7. ... and get more sleep!
Yes, this is another one of those essential and multipurpose tips. Sleep regulates everything that goes on in our brains (and, by extension, in our body), so monitoring the effectiveness of the schedules we use to sleep can solve many things. In fact, not getting enough sleep can lead to multiple problems for your mental and physical health...
Fighting bad moods is also fighting for health in a general sense, and your whole organism will benefit if you manage to mitigate its harmful effects.
(Updated at Apr 12 / 2024)