3 Easy Things to Try to Immediately Improve Your Mood

“Ultimately, our emotional reactions are a part of us, and our goal isn’t to bury or fight every mood that we experience. A change in our mood can give us valuable information into something we need to reflect on, address, or alter in our lives. However, changing our approach to how we handle these shifts in our mood can be an empowering process. These ongoing practices can improve your mood.

Embrace Self-Compassion

When we have a big reaction, we should try to meet that reaction with self-compassion. Self-compassion, as defined by leading researcher Kristin Neff, comprises three things:

1. Self-kindness over self-judgment

2. Mindfulness instead of over-identification with thoughts and feelings

3. Common humanity over isolation and feeling different and alone

4. Self-kindness means meeting ourselves where we are, having compassion for the fact that we’re struggling, and offering ourselves time, space, and patience around our emotions.

Try Mindfulness Exercises

Because self-compassion is more an attitude than an action, it can sometimes seem a little vague or easier said than done. For that reason, I like to dive a little deeper into one of its components. Practicing mindfulness can be a powerful way to not get too attached to each and every fleeting feeling that comes our way. Mindfulness can be practiced through meditation, but it’s also something we can connect with in specific moments throughout our day. While focusing on breathing or predictable, repetitive actions is helpful, the basic idea is to allow our thoughts and feelings to come and go without judgment. We can think of each feeling like a ship passing along the ocean. We can watch it make its way across the horizon but think of ourselves more like an island, allowing the thought to pass. We can calmly ignore the impulse to jump aboard every ship and get carried away, or the opposite, where we try and run away from our feelings and shut them out. This paradoxically keeps them stuck.

Commit to a Daily Gratitude Practice

Reflecting on what we’re thankful for has an amazing way of shifting our outlook from pessimistic to positive. It doesn’t make all the things that we’re upset about go away, but it may transform the way we look at them by softening us, making us feel more ourselves, and even more resilient. With plenty of things that could inspire cynicism being thrown our way on a daily basis, gratitude is a secret tool for any aspiring optimist (or anyone who wants to keep a good balance of lightness in their attitude and strength in their stamina for facing life’s inevitable challenges).”

Read the whole article at Psychology Today

#Mood #Well-being #Gratitude #Compassion #Mindfulness

💬 What do you do when you feel low?