Try a little exercise with me.
Imagine waking up. You’ve had a good night sleep, the sheets feel good on your skin. You look out the window and the weather is nice. Your coffee tastes great this morning. You check a couple of messages on your phone and there’s a really funny exchange between your friends. You get ready for work and are actually looking forward to the day. As you leave your home, you see a neighbor you’re friendly with and call out “Good morning!”. They don’t reply. What’s your first reaction?
Now let’s imagine another scenario. It’s raining outside, you’re really groggy and don’t feel like you slept enough. Getting out of bed you stub our toe on the bed and something tastes off about the coffee. You check your mail and have received some sort of fine from…like a parking ticket or a garbage fine. You get ready for work and spill toothpaste on your jacket but you’re late because you have a meeting your dreading first thing in the morning. As you leave your home, you see a neighbor you’re friendly with and call out “Good morning!”. They don’t reply. What’s your reaction this time?
It’s likely that in the first example you simply thought that your neighbor didn’t hear you and it probably wouldn’t bother you. In the second example you probably thought that either you had done something wrong or that the neighbor is a jerk. You might even start to look for examples of all the other times that neighbor was rude. Now you like them a little less.
MOOD RULES
This is an example that Dan Siegel M.D., from the Mindsight Institute, uses frequently to illustrate a basic premise of life that we may not be always aware of: our mood adds an interpretive filter to everything that happens to us. We can have the exact same event occur but how we process it will depend on the mood we’re in.
Let me throw a little neuroscience at you for a second. First off, our brain’s primary objective is to keep us alive. It spends its day attentive to anything that could be a threat to our existence. To do this even better, our brain automates as much of our behavior as possible. This frees up energy to focus on survival. Imagine if we had to learn how to re-tie our shoes every day. We wouldn’t be very efficient beings.
The brain doesn’t just automate actions, it also automates emotional responses. It does this based on passed experiences and the frequency with which you have that response. The brain even builds little localized electrochemical “factories” to speed up responses that we repeat regularly. This means that if we’re always getting into bad moods, our brain is going to make it easier for us to be in a bad mood the next time…and easier the next time…and easier the next time. Think of it like an overzealous intern.
PERFECT STORMS
Like the examples above, we know we can’t control what happens in our day. Sometimes we wake up and things just have a way of all going wrong. It’s usually those bad days where it seems like everything is going wrong. But that’s the thing; it SEEMS that way. When we’re in bad moods, we pay more attention to the bad stuff. There’s two scientific terms to define these; mood congruent bias and non-attentional blindness. Basically we pay attention to things that reflect the mood we’re in and we’re blind to other things that can be right in front of us. If we’re in a bad mood, we don’t see the good.
It’s easy to see how one of our simple bad moods can easily hijack our entire day. But here’s one more thing; we know this on an intuitive level, but now there’s science to back it up; moods are contagious. We don’t have to be aware of just our moods, we also have to watch out for that colleague that seems to have a dark cloud they bring with them everywhere. Once we’ve got their mood, we can also bring it home with us. Bad moods pretty much operate like viruses.
And (last piece of the bad news, promise!) when we’re in a bad mood it’s more than likely that we’ve activated our fight or flight system. To protect itself, the body puts itself into hyperprotective mode. This setting makes us attentive and alert but suspicious of everything around us. When we’re in this mode, the part of our brain that does its best thinking is deactivated. We’re more reactive than reflective. Staying in this state, over time, can lead to problems with digestion, weight gain, sleep, and can develop into more chronic physical problems.
THINK DIFFERENT
So how do we protect ourselves from bad moods? Believe it or not the answer is simpler than we might think. Everything starts with our thoughts. That may sound “woo-woo” but it’s actually science. Our body has a physiological reaction to the thoughts we think. Ever wake up in the middle of the night and think you heard something and your entire body froze? When you realize it was just the cat knocking something over your body begins to relax. Our thoughts control our nervous system. If you think about things that are stressful, worry you, or make you angry…your body responds. If you shift your thoughts to something more neutral or more positive, your body responds as well.
Sometimes it’s not easy for us to shift our thoughts. Things that worry us or make us mad tend to be “stickier” mostly because they don’t have an immediate solution. So we think about them more. We’re trying to solve problems that may not be solvable and this is where we get stuck. We’ll often go talk to someone else when we’re mad or worried. But remember…moods are contagious. We may feel a little bit better, but that’s because we passed it on someone else. We need something where we can manage that mood alone. But how?
Think about a child with a bad dream in the middle of the night. We instinctively know how to help them. We don’t sit with them and ask them to tell us every detail of what scared them. We may comfort them first, make them feel safe, and then we might distract them. We actively try to change what they’re thinking about. We might talk about happier things, or read them a story, or sing them a song. Welcome to the world of mood induction.
SCIENCE FOR THE WIN.
Mood induction is where we use creative stimulus, like music, videos, or new information, to help us change our thoughts in the moment. By changing our thoughts and shifting our attention, our mood follows. Science has been successfully using mood induction in clinical research to shift moods for over 50 years. It’s always been used as a technique and not a solution because science doesn’t have the creative or production know-how to be able to execute it on a mass scale.
This is why I created Moodally. I saw an opportunity to bring this scientific knowledge to the professional world. I spent over 20 years in a corporate environment and I know the daily stressors that we live with. I’ve also won over 60 award for creative excellence on some of the biggest brands in the world. I applied my work experience with my post-graduate education in the Neuroscience & Psychology of Mental Health and Organizational Psychology to bring a mood solution to the people who need it the most.
I call it Moodal Health because by improving our mood we can reduce stress, improve our productivity, increase our sense of well-being and — most of all — stop letting our bad moods hijack our entire day. Think about it, your next great day is just one mood away.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
To learn more about Moodally or to find out more about the science behind it, feel free to drop me a line at erika@moodally.com or check us out at www.moodally.com
