What Is A Bad Mood Actually?
It’s a shitty feeling that potentially makes you lash out at those around you. Or perhaps you prefer to suppress that tendency and build up more frustration instead. That’s what it feels like unless you have the awareness to ‘take a step back’ and look at it.
When you do this it’s still happening but you’re not stuck in it. You still feel it but your mind is not thinking about it. Instead of the emotions being all consuming it is as if they are somewhat removed and importantly you are not thinking about them or the thoughts and images they bring up.
So a bad mood is when you entertain emotions and are played by them. That’s why people do things that they later regret when they are emotional.
In the interests of candor and transparency I am not a psychologist or qualified in any way to tell you about yourself or any changes that you can make. I am observing what is happening in me and expressing that here. So I am speaking from my own experience. If this is true in your experience then this knowledge could be beneficial to you as it has been to me. All you have to do to know if its true is to watch your emotions and see if what I have said is true, but actually do it don’t just think about it as a concept. Your thoughts and concepts are based on your beliefs. I'm not asking you to believe anything I’m asking you to see for yourself…
By removing your focus from the center of the emotion and watching it you put it in perspective. The perspective being that you are not the emotion because you are clearly separate from it when you look at it from this difference perspective . As you feel it but without your focus being inside it, it starts to loose intensity and dissipate. Which can take quiet a long time. Or if it is not compleatly dissipated it can fade away until it is triggered and becomes active again. In which case keep dissolving it.
The thing is to feel emotions and smoldering stinking dirty moods but don’t let them get into your head. If you dwell on them they will infuse your thought process making the emotions stronger, tighter and more and more consuming. Just watch it or let it be in the background while you relax from the intense focus that you had when centered in the emotion.
The sensation is very fine and more expansive than the intense constricted heavy sensation in an emotion. This relaxed, expansive sense of awareness can be there at the same time as an emotion and as your attention stays in awareness the tight, constricted, heavy emotions dissipate and infuse with awareness. Keep doing this every time you feel an emotion and you will empty the emotion out of you and retain a relaxed field of finer sensation. This process takes a long time years and years in my experience but long before you are clear of emotions you start functioning from awareness instead of from your emotional state or even from your concepts and beliefs. You start to relax into your natural state which has the sensation of arriving home in it.
It is true, but it is also important to remember that mood disorders exist and are real. Some people are stuck in "the bad mood" more than others and they require significantly more effort to make progress in what you describe.
Often trying distanced thinking won't be enough. This is a good "apple a day to keep the doctor away", but it does not make you immune, especially if you are already suffering from a mood disorder (or a related personality disorder, or a lot of other mental problems actually).
I'm not saying, however, that this isn't a good, often necessary, foundation for many (if not all) treatments.
Hello, I agree that some people have significantly worse moods which are also more frequent than compared to other people. I have noticed that when I’m in a really bad mood the tendency is to dwell on it, which makes it stronger, feeds it actually. It is not always possible to distance yourself in this situation because it is all consuming. At this point it may have to play out until perspective is regained. So what I am describing is better practiced before emotions become intense, nip it in the bud as it were. Bring the focus internally every so often and scan for painful or negative emotion and watch it or them without falling into them and they will dissolve.
This process will start to empty out negative emotion and moody episodes. I do agree that trying to do it whilst in an intense emotional state has a low chance, if any of success. Practicing regularly builds up the ability to do it more effectively when the emotions do reach an intensity, or at least to know that it's a mood rather than being totally reactive. Knowing that its a mood when your'er in it gives a little perspective. Really though the best is just to be aware of any negativity or pain as it is noticed. Start dissolving everything as it appears rather than entertain it and literally feeding it, then deciding to dissolve it.
Exactly. And I feel this is a pretty "vulnerable" topic (I'm not a mental health professional, but I do know a lot of people with mental health problems), so it is important to always mention that more "radical" ways of dealing with depression, dysthymia and similar are possible. My guess is that easily at least 1 in 10 people stumbling upon this post will have something more serious going on while possibly being ashamed of it, disoriented, misinformed and with judgement clouded by their condition.
Or to put it in different words, telling someone with depression to deal with it by introspection/meditation while not giving at least a hint about other options is not exactly doing them a favour.
Thanks for sharing your opinion!
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