Mood: What to do about your mood?

Having a temper often means something negative, when the meaning of the word is actually neutral. In fact, your mood is about your emotional mood, and usually people who are in a bad, or cranky, mood are called moody. So what about your mood and what can you do to actually have a good mood most of the time?

Find out in this blog.

What does mood mean?

Humor, according to the Van Dale, means what your mood is. You can have several types of moods, namely a happy mood or a bad mood. The happy mood involves emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm and the like. While with a bad mood you can think of being grumpy, irritable or angry.

Someone who is moody is someone in a bad mood.

Changing mood

It's somewhere very normal to not always have the same mood, but it can be annoying if your mood alternates very quickly from good to bad. There are all kinds of reasons why your mood can change.

With women, for example, think about hormones. Everyone is familiar with the fact that around the time of menstruation, women can be a little more moody than usual. Because women have more hormone changes than men, women are also twice as likely as men to experience mood swings in their lives. This can begin at puberty or right during menopause when hormone fluctuations just stop[1].

In addition, events in your environment can affect your mood. For example, nobody really gets happy about being stuck in a traffic jam, unless you think your job is terrible. Then such a traffic jam can feel more like a stay of execution.

Also, your mood can change your view of your surroundings again. So suppose you got up with a very good mood, this can make you not mind being in a traffic jam at all[2].

Also, your thoughts and beliefs have a lot of influence on your mood (source 2). As you can see, how you think about a traffic jam, or about your work, can already give a lot of influence to how good you feel. For example, if you have negative thoughts, this can contribute to a bad mood. Whereas if you have positive thoughts, you can have a positive mood.

So it is helpful to have helpful beliefs about life and the world, so you can easily generate positive thoughts.

There may also be more physical or psychological reasons why your mood is the way it is. For example, people with a morning mood may be moody because they don't wake up refreshed. You can then often talk to those nicely only after they have had their first coffee (or even energy drink).

Anxiety and depression can also cause a bad mood, and loneliness is also a feeling that doesn't usually make you happier.

Prednisone mood

Also, some medications can affect your mood. Prednisone, for example, is a medication where you may experience mood swings at first, but over time this stabilizes.

However, depressive symptoms can get worse. So if you suffer from a depressed mood, keep an eye out to make sure it doesn't get worse when using prednisone[3].

Morning mood

If you suffer from a morning mood, there could be several reasons for it. For example, research shows that the dreams you have can greatly affect your morning mood. Do you have a nice dream in which you are socially engaged? Then chances are that you will wake up cheerful in the morning.

On the contrary, are you having a less than pleasant dream, or even dreaming about dying? Then you are more likely to suffer from a morning mood[4].

Good mood getting tips

There are a number of things you can do to get a better mood. One of the ways to improve your mood is procrastination, but that is one way that will not make you happier in the long run. So as a result, you may suffer more from a bad mood in the long run[5]. Therefore, here are some tips that will help you improve your mood in both the short and long term.

Tip 1: Look to nature

For example, research shows that spending more time in nature, or an environment with lots of greenery, is good for your mood[6].

So are you suffering from a morning mood? Just look out the window at a tree or something else natural near you. Then you'll already feel at least a little better.

Tip 2: Eat breakfast

Do you suffer from a morning mood? Then eating breakfast, and then lunch, can already do much to improve your mood.

Give your body and mind fuel to function on.

Tip 3: Drink something with caffeine

In the research showing that eating breakfast helps keep your mood good in the morning, it also showed that drinking coffee -- or anything else with caffeine -- helps improve your mood in the morning and even early afternoon[7].

Tip 4: Read a happy poem

Poems can have a great impact on people, and research shows that reading poems can cause you to adopt the mood, or temper, of the poem[8].

So start your day with a beautiful, positive and upbeat poem to lift your mood.

Tip 5: Get moving

No matter whether you exercise in the morning or at night, exercise can help you get rid of depressed feelings and bad moods. In a study of athletes who suffered from depressive feelings, it was found that no matter what time of day you exercise, exercise in itself helps to improve your mood and to suffer less from depressive feelings[9].

Tip #6: Sleep on your back

This may be a really crazy tip, but research shows that the more your face makes contact with the pillow when you sleep the worse your mood may be in the morning. One way to make sure your face makes less contact with the pillow is to sleep on your back[10].

Tip 7: Vitamin D and your mood

Vitamin D can also have a lot of impact on your mood. You may have noticed that you are moodier at the end of winter than at the beginning. This is true, because in the Netherlands we live too northern to be able to make vitamin D from sunlight in the winter. It is a vitamin that your body stores and uses up in winter.

Research shows that taking vitamin D supplements at the end of winter can cause your mood to improve again.

But does it bother you in the summer, too? Then take a moment to check for yourself if you are getting outside enough and letting sunlight shine on your skin.

Tip 8: Visualize your best possible self

A study of what works best now to improve your mood examined two techniques. Namely: visualizing your best possible version of yourself or, on the contrary, a gratitude exercise in which you express your gratitude for all that you have. This found that for instantly improving your mood, visualizing the best possible version of yourself works best to quickly improve your mood[11].

Visualizing these types of scenarios is also important in hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis. So great fun to start your day with or to cheer yourself up when you're in a less than perfect mood for a while.

If you find this difficult to do, a hypnotherapist can help you with this. With advanced hypnotherapists, this may even be a goal to work toward and the hypnotherapist can help you formulate a plan on how to then achieve this goal, your best possible self.

Tip 9: Find out your triggers for a bad mood

Do you notice a certain pattern in moments or certain stimuli that cause you to have a bad mood? If so, a hypnotherapist can help you figure out what beliefs cause certain events to directly cause a bad mood in you.

Then you can use hypnosis to change those beliefs, so that those stimuli no longer put you in a bad mood, but allow you to look at those events in a neutral way. You may even have to laugh a little at the person you were before you used hypnosis to change your beliefs, so that they actually help you have a good mood.

For example, research shows that cognitive behavioral therapy combined with hypnosis works better against depressive symptoms than cognitive behavioral therapy alone[12].

Learn hypnosis

As mentioned, many techniques can also be applied with hypnosis. By improving your knowledge of hypnosis, you can do much to improve your own mood and the mood of others.

Want to learn more? Come to the free online master class for an introduction to hypnosis.

Or enroll directly in one of Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' training courses.

Just need help for your mood? Then go to bestetherapeut.co.uk

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