The BOLD (Mood Indigo..or chartreuse, or royal blue)
“I’m in a mood.”
What is a mood, really? How do we differentiate a mood from an emotion? A mood is an emotional state and an emotion is a response. And both moods and emotions influence our actions–they are our action engines.
If we are to take responsibility for our emotions, as the authors of the excellent book, The Unopened Gift: A Primer in Emotional Literacy urge us to do, we must understand the role of moods in prompting our actions in a given direction.
Let’s put on a mood of open curiosity and see what we can discover about the potent lens of moods.
The Whisper (Vroooom)
The day dawned bright with possibilities but I woke with a chip on my shoulder. The evening before I’d spent several hours on the phone with a service provider trying to untangle a messy snarl to repair our connection to the utility for which we were paying.
Despite the beautiful sunrise and the smile on my husband’s face, I was in a mood for a fight. I was angry. The injustice of the previous evening in which I had to devote my time and energy in a frustrating, wasteful process to reconnect to an important service had installed a particular story for me.
The story is, “That is not fair. Someone should pay.” That story is the basic operating system for anger. And that story persisted well past the stimulus of the moment, only to root itself as a mood that I maintained its hold on me despite a good night’s sleep.
Responsible for Mood
If we are to take responsibility for our emotions, we must understand the difference between a mood and an emotion.
Emotion: A response to the stimulus of our experiences. An emotion is a direct response to what is happening—around us, to us or even in our thoughts.
Mood: An emotional state that persists long past the stimulating evening and which creates a lens that influences the actions that we see as possible and appropriate.
Emotions come after and moods are in place before.
How, then, do we navigate through the messages a mood is delivering to make a clearer choice? We must be aware of the mood to determine if it is the frame that best serves us at any given time.
Focusing, Guiding and Determining Action
Our moods are the engines that drive our actions, whether we are aware of them or not.
Take my example above. The only reason I can recount the mood I was in is that my morning routine included meditation. It is the work of meditation to pop out of the mood and to notice it as though from afar. And that is just what happened. By giving myself space and by investing in my awareness, I recognized that I was operating inside a story that may have been relevant the night before but that had no place in a bright, new day.
A practice of check-ins can help you discover the moods that are traveling along with you. One simple practice would look something like this:
- Take a deep breath and tell yourself that you are going to check in with your mood. This action allows your prefrontal cortex to understand that you want higher-order thinking to kick in. The shot of oxygen is welcome and the feeling can help to trigger the state of awareness.
- Notice your physical state. Scan quickly and notice the weight of your feet on the floor, the support of the chair. Discover any tension or other little feelings that may be hiding in your muscles.
- Ask yourself, “How am I feeling?” Direct, right? Give yourself time to see to take your emotional temperature. What do you notice?
- Now make a choice. Is the mood that you identified beneficial in your current situation? Is there something else you’d like to feel? What is a good story you can prompt with a happy memory or a new focus?
Moods happen without our direction but they can shift with our attention. How will you focus your emotional state to travel in the direction in which you want to go?
Leave a Reply