The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life

by Lauren Martin

There’s light in the words I feel the same way.

Even though whatever triggered the emotion is gone, the mood is still there. Moods weren’t just about understanding my emotions, but the triggers that prompted them.

The only things I could control were my perceptions and reactions to the random, unpleasant circumstances. Because I can’t always stop what happens to me. The events of life are too unpredictable, indeterminable, and unchangeable. My triggers were lessons. Reminders. A buzzer that went off when I hit something in myself that needed attention. A sharp corner that would keep cutting me until I learned my way around it.

Anxiety is defined by the American Psychological Association as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes.” Feelings about things that could happen. Things that will happen. “It’s funny,” Simone de Beauvoir said once, “how she’s scared of things in advance—quite frantically so.” Research shows that women worry twice as much as men, making us twice as likely to suffer from anxiety. Women are also more likely to make connections between bad events in the past and possible negative events in the future,

When we’re anxious, we’re not really living. We’re surviving. We’re holding on, waiting for the anxiety to pass, losing out on minutes, hours, and days of our lives.

The answer was so clear, so obvious. Stop thinking about the future and fretting over the past. Anxiety was nothing more than thinking. Rapid, untrained thinking.

How the future was none of my business and the past was no longer my problem. Instead of getting stuck in that memory, the anxious thought, I began to see it as just another thought to be whacked.

“Worry,” Rebecca Solnit believes, “is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don’t.” The degree to which this uncertainty bothers us is the degree of our anxiety. And the degree to which we try to control the uncertainty of our lives is the way so many of us waste our lives.

When you accept the inevitability of the pain and discomfort that the future holds, you can let go of the fear of uncertainty.

We’ve got to start reminding ourselves that our embarrassing experiences, our uncomfortable memories, aren’t bad, but are nonthreatening parts of us that make up our colorful history. We have to remind ourselves that things can be awful, but that we survive and can come through them stronger, smarter, or at the very least, funnier.

And for the really bad memories, the ones that can’t be turned into an anecdote or funny story, the ones we carry around like poison, well, those are the ones that connect us most deeply with others. Those, when we have the courage to share them, are what make us human. In the words of Grace Paley, “Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.”

So many times our moods are dictated by our inability to accept the moment for what it is.

You’re not pretty like her. You’re pretty like you.

event is really just our thoughts about the event. If we can learn to think differently, to change our automatic thoughts, we can change not just the way we see the world around us but the way we move through it.

We don’t know what’s going on in people’s lives. Not really. We can think we know, and they may share one or two details, but we don’t actually know. And we can’t ever know what someone is dealing with silently. What flaws and stresses and preoccupations are overtaking them, causing them to act the way they do.

In every moment of loss there’s a moment of appreciation. When we mourn the dead, we appreciate life. When we lament the state of the world, we take a moment to appreciate our neighbors. When the worst happens, we cling to the good still around. The good becomes that much more important. You need this moment of crisis to slow you down and make you appreciate all you do have in this moment of loss.