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In this episode Joel and Antonia talk about strategies for getting yourself out of a bad mood.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- We get caught in mood loops, and we don’t know what to do to pull ourselves out of the bad mood.
- Podcast How To Get Out of a Funk
- Sometimes bad moods occur when we feel we are out of control.
- Bad moods seem unpredictable and random.
- We struggle to get ourselves out of a bad mood because we can’t predict them and prepare for them.
- We tend to blame others for our moods in an attempt to relieve the feeling.
- We may act out in hopes that someone will relieve our pain somehow.
- Thinkers may struggle to recognize when they’re in a bad mood.
- Thinking dominants may need feedback from others to know they are having a bad day.
- Once you recognize you are in a bad mood, take full responsibility for your attitude.
- “I am responsible for how I feel and how I show up to the world.”
- Podcast: Can you control your emotions?
- You are the person who gets to decide what emotion you want to be feeling.
- Even if you don’t have the skill/talent to deal with your emotional state you are still responsible for your emotions.
- Sometimes when we are in a bad mood, we are too zoomed in on a specific situation.
- Try zooming out and get a meta-perspective on the situation.
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Come from a framework of gratitude:
- What am I grateful for?
- What am I thankful for?
- Be grateful for the thing that is putting you in a bad mood.
- It may be pointing to something that you need to deal with.
- You can feel grateful for literally anything
- Gratitude is as abundant as love
- Sometimes we can be grateful to be alive
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Objectify your mood:
- Laugh at yourself
- Call out the mood directly – articulate the specifics of the mood
- We tend to want to harbor our lousy mood and protect it.
- Objectifying the mood allows us to see the absurdity of our emotions.
- “We’re going to laugh about this later.”
- Accelerate the process and get to the funny story part.
- Some people use substance to get out of a bad mood, and that isn’t necessarily a good way to train your body.
- Choose healthier options
- Why we are reluctant to let go of bad moods is because it is a strategy to deal with something.
- If we stop the bad mood, we create a vacuum.
- Try replacing the bad mood with gratitude, empowerment, action.
- Emotion follows motion
- Take control of the messaging
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20 comments
Thank you for your podcast (inspirational, as always). I just got myself out of a bad mood/funk that lasted for two months (a very dysfunctional workplace). I find that for me (possibly INTJ), the best way is to go out and find things to do. In the past my tendency was to ruminate over the bad feeling/situation/people, but that only made me feel worse and more unhealthy.
I got laid off two days ago, and felt very reactive and vulnerable. So I decided to try this new strategy. Although I was not “in the mood”, I asked myself to go out yesterday to watch people on the streets and had dinner with my family to celebrate getting out of that place. I also did a lot of housework and tried to help my family more. As I was doing these things, my mood did not get significantly better. But today when I woke up, I immediately felt lighter and more balanced. It’s like magic!
(Also, watching people focusing on their tasks and solving problems with little emotional distraction calms me down. My choice was watching the Murdoch Mysteries :)
Hey, I subscribe to your podcast and just listened to a few episodes. The bad mood one resonated with me for two reasons. First, I am an enfp and feel strong emotions that regularly require my attention. You also mentioned mood management in relation to the hardship of having a child with special needs. I have a child with multiple special needs. I am grateful for the beautiful lessons learned, but it has never been easy and fighting a depressive state while keeping my child alive has always felt like the biggest hurdle. Often what is needed is getting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs met. Sleep is hard to achieve with the many rounds of illness, hospitalizations, doctor appointments and stress related to insurance coverage, job performance and financial struggles. Many times I advocated for my son from a place of justifiable urgency that also causes a great deal of anxiety.
I learned to survive by delegating some vital tasks to others so I could sleep and so I could establish basic daily routines. It was at that point that I could focus on gratitude and quality time in relationships, my health and job performance. The grief over the lost dream of my child being typical is a constant companion, but when I’m practicing positively and have the support system in place, it no longer governs my mood.
This is a great podcast, but I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with Antonia’s closing comment about finding ways to get out of a bad mood indicating some serious ego transcendence work! It might be for some people. But for me, I’m an Enneagram One and one of the many ways in which my ego shows up is in seeing a bad mood as a personal moral failure and therefore trying to get out of it as soon as possible :)
I love the ideas of gratitude for what you have and for what you don’t have. For example, not having children had been an upsetting idea for me, but I’m actually very happy that I don’t have children. Not having children allows me to be open to other people. I have been a mentor to several young adults, and now I count their children as my “fairy grandchildren”.
This was a life-changing podcast for me. I am a harmony driver, and I’m currently studying for the bar and in a highly competitive trial advocacy program. As someone who uses extroverted feeling, approval from other people is incredibly important to me, but is unfortunately not something that I get a lot of in this context. This podcast really helped me to not feel down all the time, which was the case before it.