It was a good joke
First he coughed, then spluttered, then he erupted into a staccato ‘yuk,yuk,yuk’ that sounded like a machine gun firing. At one point, he was doubled over and gasping for breath.
I love it when I get this kind of response to a joke!
Naturally, a few minutes later he stopped laughing, and we continued our conversation. If he hadn’t stopped laughing, events might have taken a slightly different turn!
The point is, it’s natural to stop laughing at some point.
Laughter is the result of our state of mind
Other states of mind include sadness, confidence, calm and Texas (no, sorry — that’s a different type of state!).
States don’t usually sustain themselves for long.
To keep laughing, you’d have to keep replaying the joke.
To stay irritated, you replay the irritation.
To stay grateful, you keep noticing reasons to feel grateful.
This is the process needed to keep your mood alive — regardless of whether you’re aware of it.
While we can’t always control what we initially feel, we do influence whether we keep feeding the mood.
In other words, our moods are often far more self-maintained than we realise.
The fundamental causes of moodiness are:
1. A lack of self-awareness, or recognition that your mood is often under your control.
If you’re a moody person, it probably appears that bad moods seem to descend on you like a fog or rain. And that’s part of the problem. Without self-awareness, you won’t understand how you ‘do’ your rotten mood or the thought processes that contribute to it.
Unlike the weather, we often have control over our moods.
People who are frequently moody blame something, someone or an event/situation for how they feel.
It’s important to realise it’s our own reasoning — or lack of reasoning — that’s keeping us stuck in a rotten mood.
How To Build A Rotten Mood From Scratch
Moodiness often begins with a negative judgement
One negative judgement suddenly recruits a whole support crew of gloomy little thoughts. Pretty soon there’s a whole gang of negative, poisonous thoughts just lying in wait ready to hijack the next person who dares make conversation!
Here’s an example:
Jenny’s boyfriend said he’d call her at 4.00pm to talk about where they would go for dinner that evening.
He didn’t call at 4.00 pm, so Jenny thought “I bet he’s forgotten that we’re even supposed to be going out tonight.”
Followed by, “He’s done this to me before.”
Then, “I bet he doesn’t want to go out anyway.”
“I don’t know why I bother with him”
“No-one else would put up with this sh*t!”
Jenny finds many judgements to support her original theory. When her boyfriend calls at 4.45pm, apologising for being caught up in an important meeting, Jenny is seething and sulky.
The Instant Rotten Mood Makeover Trick
Because people have control over their moods, they can turn them on and off.
Here’s another illustration
I was working on a project with a colleague who was in a foul mood. He met my questions and suggestions with blunt one or two-word responses or grunts.
He responded to my attempts to lighten his mood with drop-dead glares.
The situation was tedious, childish, and unprofessional.
At one point, his boss came into the room. She had such an instantaneous and magical effect on his mood, I thought she must have been his fairy godmother.
For the ten minutes the boss was with us, he took on a whole new persona. He was lively, fun, confident — even flirty.
The minute the boss left, so did his good mood.
The darkness returned.
The black cloud came back, along with the rotten mood, one-word responses and dirty looks!
If you’ve ever been around someone who’s moody, you’ve no doubt experienced something similar. The fact that someone can interrupt a mood that quickly shows how much influence we actually have over our state.
To maintain a rotten mood, you have to keep feeding it.
I know this pattern well because I grew up around extreme moodiness and copied more of it than I’d like to admit.
2. An inability to express oneself clearly and appropriately
As you saw from my example, a person can target a mood towards one or more people.
This is because the moody person doesn’t communicate effectively. Sometimes they don’t know how to say what they wish to say, or are fearful of saying it. They don’t know how to express their emotions without blaming someone else for those feelings.
Being moody becomes a way of punishing everyone the moody person holds responsible for their feelings — plus a few others. This is a great confusion tactic, because no-one knows who is guilty of upsetting the moping being!
So if you’re a moody person, how can you change?
There are several ways:
Take responsibility for your mood
Moodiness often feels automatic, but we usually play a much bigger role in maintaining it than we realise. No-one can make you feel unhappy unless you let them. Other people may trigger feelings, but they don’t manually operate your emotional system. When you allow others to control your responses, you give away your personal power. Learn how to stop people pushing your buttons.
If you don’t blame others when you’re happy, why would you blame others when you’re unhappy?
If they genuinely upset you:
Talk to them clearly and directly. Tell whoever upset you exactly what they did, and the impact their behaviour has had on you, but without blaming them. If you think you can’t tell them, learn how — or write them a letter. It’s much better to get the issue off your chest than keep it inside eating away at you.
If it probably wasn’t intentional:
Ask yourself whether you want to keep feeding the upset.
Forgive the person and move on!
Remember, others can’t read your mind — they may genuinely have no clue why you’re in a snot! So if you don’t tell them what’s upsetting you, they might do whatever upset you — again.
Develop more self-awareness and emotional intelligence
Become aware of your own thinking processes. How are you contributing to your mood? Observe the negative — often spiralling thoughts. Change them, one-by-one, to support a better mood.
Use the same ‘Instant Rotten Mood Makeover Trick’ to experience happiness and gratitude.
Yes, you use the same strategy you used to create a rotten mood — but use different words and tone. To make yourself moody, you need to keep reliving something upsetting, and search for other things that justify and confirm your upset.
Instead, remember something you’re grateful for.
Replay it over and over in your mind. Notice the pictures you make in your mind and words that show you’re grateful. Now remember another thing you’re thankful for, then another. Continue until you’re feeling blessed, lucky, happy and joyful!
Don’t hold back! Look at some jokes, recall funny situations from your past, look at cartoons or watch a humorous video.
Now, about that bad mood…
Remember, self-awareness and understanding yourself, are the first steps to understanding your emotional states and mood.
Then you’ll be in a position to take control of your emotions — and your life. Ultimately, you have far more influence over your emotional state, and your life, than most people realise.
Realising I could interrupt the rotten mood pattern instead of automatically replaying it was a huge shift for me.
Not overnight. Not perfectly.
But enough to stop handing my moods the car keys.
If you’d like to see what developing emotional intelligence looks like in real life, I think you’ll find 5 Powerful and Proven Ways Emotional Intelligence Fuels Spiritual Growt useful.
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Tags: Communication skills, Conflict, Managing mood and emotions, Self-awareness, Thinking and mindset
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