6 Tips for Mastering Your Mood

What’s the biggest obstacle for you to become the version of you that you hope to become?

I’ll give you a hint:

It’s probably not time, even though you feel like you never have enough. And it’s not knowledge— as if there’s some secret trick or life hack that will let you access life in easy mode. But you’re getting much warmer if your answer is motivation.

Most of us have a high-level of motivation, in a general sense, to improve our lives. What we lack is the minute-to-minute emotional energy (a more specific form of motivation) to carry out and implement that vision.

And the reason is simple: we haven’t learned how to master our moods.

In my own life, for example,  it’s not uncommon for me to start my day full of enthusiasm for the work I have to do. I have an ideal plan for how my day will unfold. And in that ideal, my mood throughout the day is positive and high-energy. 

But reality is much more complex.

I get bored, tired, distracted, discouraged, restless, and sometimes just indifferent.

When these moods hit, and the cause doesn’t have to be something big, they can totally destroy the trajectory of my day. Instead of feeling like I want to embrace the day and make the most of it, all I want to do is retreat to something easy that makes me feel good again.

This blog post isn’t a pump up song. I’m not going to tell you to just push through these emotions and pretend they don’t exist. We’re humans after all, and that means taking into full account the emotional desires of our present selves— even if they aren’t the most mature they could become.

The first step on the journey of mastering your moods, is realizing that you can influence how you feel. You may not be able to control that first wave of emotions, but your choices and thoughts after that can definitely influence the course from there.

Here are 6 positive steps you can try taking, starting this very moment:

Go make progress on something else. One of the worst things you can do when you’re in a bad mood is to let it fester. Then, all sorts of other negative emotions can get layered on top of the original bad mood and make it even harder to shake. My go-to tip is to stop what I’m doing and just get something done. It doesn’t matter what. Any sort of progress will do, and begin to lift my spirits.

Have a conversation with yourself. It’s no surprise that emotions don’t come from the most rational parts of our brain. Sometimes the smallest thing can set you off in a negative direction. As silly as it sounds, I have had huge results from simply talking to myself about my mood. Chatting with yourself as if talking to a good friend is often enough to nudge yourself back into a better place.

Do something physical like going for a short walk. Another quick way to break the spell of a negative mood is to do something physical. I’ve often talked myself out of stopping to take a walk break or do some exercise with the logic that it’s a waste of time. But what’s truly a waste of time is wallowing in my bad mood. 

Convince yourself to take 1 small step. This approach is more direct than the others, but sometimes it’s just what you need. If you’re in a bad mood, and it’s causing you not to want to do something (that you know you should do), just do something to make the smallest amount of progress as quickly as possible. Surprisingly, this small behavior is enough to break the seal of resistance, and create a desire to keep going with your new momentum.

Don’t sink your mood even lower with mindless behavior. This may be the most important item on the list. The truth is that almost every negative mood passes eventually as long as you don’t feed it and make it worse. All the other items on this list are pretty much just ways to keep you from doing exactly that— making it worse. Mindless actions  like eating junk food, scrolling on your phone, and procrastinating only feel good for a brief moment in contrast to your original state, but they are sure to sink your mood even lower.

Enjoy some social interaction. By design, we were made for community. Even something as simple as talking with a stranger at the grocery store can lift your mood by taking your thoughts off yourself and connecting you to someone else. Even these brief interactions matter in improving our outlook on life. Use this to your advantage by intentionally putting yourself around others and forcing interactions to occur, especially on days when you need the extra boost.