What Do Your Mood Swings Mean?
3 things to know about moods (to be productive).
If you’ve ever asked someone or yourself, “what are you feeling?” and the answer is met with silence or an uncertain response, maybe that’s because the thoughts-deeper feelings haven’t yet formed and settled in yet.
There can be an internal communication delay that can have mood interference. A new mood can pop up anytime, and live subtly and obscure below the skin surface.
Conversely, a tear or burst of laughter is an obvious sign of happy or sad feelings or even a concrete thought that can be articulated in words.
If instead, you asked someone, “what are you in the mood to do or eat?” or “what are you in the mood for?” then that’s clear as we’re used to thinking about what we’ll do next.
From the time we’re young, we’ve trained ourselves to go from activity to activity, but not tap into our heart’s desires. Re-training ourselves in the moods department can be the difference between ordinary living and living out our best lives.
Moods can help guide us into a meaningful life if we lean into deciphering uncertain moods.
Moods are powerful indicators telling us more than what the weather is like outside.
For example, if you don’t feel like doing something and this occurs day after day, then maybe you’re meant to do something else.
A lazy mood can be a sign to pause especially if you’re motivated to do other activities other than the one you’re tasked to do.
Your purpose isn’t revealed to you in black and white and moods can help guide you.
Your life resides in the gray which unfolds in the process, and that’s why it’s good not to talk too much about what you’ll be doing to others before anything happens. Let the past actions speak louder than words.
You can look back and see all that you did and experienced, and that can be with so little you had. You proved you didn’t need to be fully equipped to make things happen.
And that can make your story even more impressive to yourself and everyone who knows.
So listening to your inner self can positively impact your life.
Here are *3 things to know* to get the most out of your moods:
1. Anything can affect our moods and we want to restore quickly our sour moods.
Whether the source is an internal or external circumstance, our mind-body influences us, and what happens next moment by moment.
We’re better to restore our less-than moods, to at least neutral (in your self-awareness). Find your even-keel.
We don’t need to show our internal moods to the external world. That doesn’t make us any more or less authentic or inauthentic. No one prefers to be around moody people (except moody people who empathize, as misery loves company).
Containing your sour moods shows self-control and consistency, traits that admired leaders or role models possess (or else they know to temporarily close their door).
A highly-appointed person can be happily remembered for their vulnerable sensitivity and their ability to share emotions.
But, they don’t want to be remembered for their off-putting moods.
And that’s why we want to readjust our temporary bad moods and investigate what they are trying to tell us, so we can keep them from growing.
2. We can affect our moods by our productive actions.
If you’re in a sluggish mood and you don’t feel like working or working out, and you push through with the little energy you have, you can surprisingly get more accomplished.
Since you have to exert more effort, the extra pendulum-swing drive in you can send you to your deepest and greatest hidden reservoir strengths.
Much like when a woman is in labor, that last-ditch effort push is the one that tips the effort over into the goal. The baby arrives and the mood suddenly changes from exhaustion to relief and joy. Most mood changes aren’t so obvious, but we can learn from that dramatic imagery.
What we do and produce can move the needle to a better mood.
3. We should listen to what our seasonal moods are trying to tell us.
We can use the mood changes in us to our benefit by leaning into seasonal moods instead of avoiding some inevitable change that our internal bodies already intuitively knew would happen (but couldn’t communicate in words).
Temporary or daily moods are different than seasonal moods. A daily mood is usually triggered by a time of day or activity.
A seasonal mood is felt all the time for a season that can last weeks or months and become louder as time goes on.
We can look at the excitement we once felt for something that gradually or suddenly disappeared as a part of life or we can use what we learned and apply to our next growing season.
We don’t know why there’s a change, and we don’t need to. We productively run with or agree with the idea that the change got us to where we are now operating from.
We can have sadness for moving on, while we know there’s a better future ahead.
An example of this is when we’ve outgrown what we’re doing, and we don’t always want to move on right away or admit to ourselves that something else is stirring in us.
These stirrings can start off as obscure moods, gut-knowing feelings, or deeper intuitions, and they can become more apparent and frequent in our mind’s thoughts and body symptoms.
So if you try to restore your mind-body, they can still keep coming back trying to help you make a change.
If we’re smart, we’ll take the clue, investigate, and keep going and growing.
We may not take action until we know our next step but we won’t continue to invest in a past idea we know will change soon or is no longer relevant to us as wiser creatures.
We can help ourselves in the meanwhile by staying open to new opportunities.
And maybe that’s what we are meant to do if we want to help ourselves out. We can drop an old idea and run with a better aligned, and fitted one for who we are today.
We can turn off the critic’s thoughts (maybe that’s the Impostor in our brains) and change the perspective to the one that says, “you got this!”
No one is living your life for you. Only you know what your inner wisdom is telling you to go after this season.
If you let go of the past and start from a blank canvas that every day can be, you can productively adopt a “living in the now” attitude. You got this!
