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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
Maybe don’t list “having a child with special needs” as the thing you’re relieved not to be dealing with.
I don’t even really know where to begin with this. It’s not like saying “I’m grateful I don’t have cancer / haven’t gone bankrupt / don’t like in abject poverty / am not in an abusive situation / haven’t lost a child.”
Because if it is, your equating my children with these ills. Holy crap, just no. I can just say, I’m glad you don’t have them either. I am thankful for them every day.
I know you didn’t mean to sound like this but now you know.
I was in a bad mood, and these actionable steps helped a lot. It was almost algorithmic. And Joel, I hope you have bad moods more often if it is going to churn out solid content like this. cheers!
As a fellow NTP I understand how difficult it is to navigate the emotional space, and have emotions sneak up on you. Doing a podcast on the basics of emotions sounds like a great idea. I’ll run it by Joel. :)
A
Antonia, at the end you asked if anyone was listening to this episode who was in a bad mood, hoping to find help. I am one of those people! I enjoyed your discussion, as usual, but the actual advice for how to get out of a bad mood left me feeling discouraged because it feels out of reach for me.
I am an INTP, enneagram type 5. Dealing with emotions has always been a huge challenge for me and my main strategy has always been to avoid them (not consciously). Only in the past year have I undertaken the challenge of learning how to get in touch with my feelings. It’s working, and as it turns out I am a much more emotional person than I ever realized. However, it’s been really hard because I’m 41 years old and emotionally it seems like I’m at the level of development of a 3 year old. As an enneagram 5, I am very prone to feeling ashamed when I perceive myself as incompetent, so this has been extremely difficult for me.
You and many other authors, speakers, teachers, therapists all talk about the importance of taking responsibility for your own feelings. I have to admit I really just don’t get it, yet. I don’t understand how I can cultivate gratitude. If I’m not feeling gratitude, then how do I make myself feel it? Laughing at my bad mood as a way to zoom out seems like it would require seeing that my bad mood isn’t something to be taken seriously in the first place. I can’t imagine what that would be like… it sounds so foreign to me!
I love your podcast but this one really left me feeling hopeless. I think I need a very basic lesson in navigation emotions and how to self validate before I can graduate to learning these advanced emotional ninja moves. I don’t suppose you want to do a podcast on “the basics of navigating emotions” for those of us who have “F” in their inferior process?
I was in a grumpy, sad mood and didn’t want to be, then remembered I hadn’t had a chance to listen to this episode yet. Yay! I knew listening to Antonia & Joel would help even if I didn’t get any new ideas. I got about halfway through before I had to move on to something else, but I was really pleased to realized that, while I hadn’t necessarily articulated the steps, they were actually actions I’d figured out myself a while ago. My memory for this stuff tends to go when I’m grumpy, though, so being reminded was definitely helpful. I do have two tweaks to share that have made practicing gratitude and objectifying my mood much more effective for me.
First, I have found that when I make my list of gratitudes, it is very important to go into it consciously reminding myself that I don’t have to lose the grumps any time soon. I have learned that I have to play a lot of mind games with my very persistent (aka stubborn) inner 2 (and/or 13) year old, and if that part of me thinks I’m trying to cheat her out of her bad mood there will be resistance galore. And probably a worse mood: “We’ll show her what she can do with her stupid gratitude!”
Second, I have a ton of resistance to the idea of making fun of myself/my emotional state, but I do have a strategy involving laughter that has worked for me. Several years ago I did an exercise where you start off with whatever’s worrying you or annoying you or whatever, and keep asking yourself, “What then?” until you get to the point where the end result is so unrealistic it just makes you laugh. I can’t remember what my starting point then was, but my end result was that I was going to end up living on a damp couch under a busy freeway overpass in Seattle weighing 900 lbs surviving on cat food and physically unable to move. This is a ridiculous scenario; I would actually have to work really hard to make it happen. Now all I have to do is think about damp couches and cat food and it almost always makes me not only laugh but also feel better, because it reminds me of how many wonderful people I have in my life who wouldn’t let it happen. I’m not laughing at myself or my emotions (that just feels really wrong for me), but I am laughing at the thought that I can even entertain the idea subconsciously that this could happen, given the amazing support system I’ve been blessed with. And I still don’t know how I could weigh 900 lbs by eating cat food.
Anyway, thanks for another great listen, Joel and Antonia. You guys are the best!! (And helped me out of an icky mood once again :-) )
PS – just to be clear, I am not making fun of those who actually are or have been homeless or who have ever had to choose between feeding themselves and feeding their pet. I have had many, many advantages throughout my life that make it unlikely that I will have to deal with those particular challenges, and I am fully conscious of and grateful for being born to a time, place, and family that have made that true for me.