Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?

by Julie Smith

Not all low mood is unidentified dehydration, but when dealing with mood it is essential to remember that it’s not all in your head. It’s also in your body state, your relationships, your past and present, your living conditions and lifestyle. It’s in everything you do and don’t do, in your diet and your thoughts, your movements and memories. How you feel is not simply a product of your brain.

So when it comes to changing your mood, the ingredients that go in will determine what comes out.

The way you feel also influences the types of thoughts that can pop into your head, making you more vulnerable to experiencing thoughts that are negative and self-critical.

Let’s say you have been too busy to exercise for a few weeks. You feel tired and low in mood, so exercising is the last thing you want to do. The longer you avoid the exercise, the more you feel lethargic and low on energy. When you are low on energy, the chance of exercising goes down, along with your mood. Low mood gives you the urge to do the things that make mood worse.

When I am feeling this, what am I thinking about? When I am feeling this, what state is my body in? How was I looking after myself in the days or hours leading up to this feeling? Is this an emotion or just physical discomfort from an unmet need?

You might notice that you feel the need for more reassurance from others when your mood is low. If you don’t get that extra reassurance you might automatically assume that they are thinking negatively about you. But that is a bias, and it is quite possible that you are your worst critic.

When it comes to tackling low mood, we have to focus on making good decisions, not perfect decisions. A good decision is one that moves you in the direction you want to go. It doesn’t have to catapult you there.

Avoid caffeine in the late afternoon and evening. The energy drinks that are being promoted to young people often contain high levels of caffeine that disturb sleep and cause symptoms of anxiety.

Another key defence player for mental health and resilience seems to be routine. This may have been the most underestimated influence on our wellbeing until the pandemic turned routine upside down and inside out for so many people. Repetition and predictability help us feel safe, but we also have a need for variety and a sense of adventure. So we like to have routine, and we like to break those routines occasionally – preferably with something pleasurable, meaningful or exciting. When we are not feeling so great, routine can suffer.

While looking after your own body and mind is essential, nurturing good quality relationships is one of the most powerful tools we have in maintaining good mental health throughout the lifespan

When our relationships are not going well, it can have a catastrophic impact on our mood and emotional state.

practice at being able to step back from thoughts and feelings and see them for what they are – just one possible perspective.

We are taught that feelings are the opposite of rationality. Something to be squashed down and hidden, pushed to the back of your mind, unspoken.

As an artist works closely on a small detail of a large painting, she will occasionally take a step back and check that each new action fits in with the vision she has for the whole picture. The metacognition tool of pausing between emotion and action is that same process of stepping back, even just for a moment, to check in with your thoughts and actions to see if they will be in line with the person you want to be. The ability to check in on the bigger picture, even for the smallest of moments, can have a powerful impact on the way we live life.

When painful emotions become intense, it’s very easy to say they will rise, peak and descend, but the reality of that experience can be excruciating, and lead to strong urges to do unhealthy or even dangerous things to make it all disappear sooner.

While some self-help books might tell you that you can just think positive thoughts to change how you feel, I would say that’s going to be a struggle. Trying to change how you think is hard enough when you are feeling fine. Trying to change the thoughts that arrive at the height of distress feels nearly impossible. When we are overwhelmed, the best strategy is to step back and be mindful of that emotion as much as possible, see it as a temporary experience, and to turn down the dial on our threat response by soothing our way through

It’s also important to spend time writing about positive experiences, even small moments that felt positive. This is because every action is a specific pattern of neural activity in the brain. When you repeat an activity over and over, that neural pathway is strengthened and becomes easier for your brain to access. So if you want to be able to more easily cultivate positive feelings, thoughts and memories, put in the practice by keeping a journal. When you get practise at cultivating certain feelings and experiences in this way, it gets easier to access those feelings in the future.

It is easy to underestimate the power of listening with compassion, kindness and curiosity. The problems may not disappear when you do that, but you are helping that person to feel cared for and less alone, which greatly improves their chances of recovery. Social support is a powerful tool and it does not need to come with all the answers, just a big dose of compassion.

Supporting someone does not mean that you have to connect with big, intense conversations. Human connection in the smallest of moments matters. Walking while you are talking can help those who feel uncomfortable with opening up. You can also say nothing at all. Simply spending time together, even in silence, is OK. By being there, you are helping them to feel less alone and more cared for.

We often associate grief with the death of a loved one. But we can grieve at other times too. Endings that feel significant to us can trigger a grief reaction – even if the ending was not caused by death.

Unresolved grief is associated with depression, suicidality and alcohol abuse (Zisook & Lyons, 1990). So denying our grief and pushing it away feels like self-protection but in the longer term can be the opposite.

Living a life of people-pleasing is further complicated by the fact that other people don’t always voice their disapproval with criticism. We can fear and feel disapproval even when the other person never says a word. When we don’t have that information, our mind starts to fill in the blanks for us. The spotlight effect is a term originally coined by Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky (2000) to describe the tendency of humans to overestimate how much others are focused on us. We are each at the centre of our own spotlight of attention and we tend to imagine that others are focused on us too, when in reality, everyone’s spotlights are usually on themselves. So we can often make the assumption that others are judging us negatively or disapproving when they may not be thinking about us at all.

Shame triggers our threat system in such a way that it can feel like someone held a match to all our other emotions. So we get a rush of anger, fear or disgust to go along with it. Then the self-attack comes swarming in like soldiers over a hill, coming at you with self-criticism, self-denigration and blame. With that sort of onslaught the instinct is to block it all out. But shame is not easy to ignore. So we go for the most absorbing, addictive behaviours that offer instant relief.

In order to build and maintain a sense of self-worth, we need to understand that our worthiness as a human being is not dependent on living mistake-free.

Confidence is like a home that you build for yourself. When you go somewhere new, you must build a new one.

That same leap of faith the trapeze artist must take every time she lets go of one bar before grabbing the next one. She is always vulnerable, never completely safe, but each time she tries, she knows she can meet that risk with the courage needed to make it happen.

Courage comes first, confidence comes second.

A review of the research by a group of psychologists showed that high self-esteem is not linked with better relationships or better performance. But it does correlate with arrogance, prejudice and discrimination (Baumeister et al., 2003).

Reassurance seeking – In moments of anxiety and doubt we may ask for reassurance from a loved one that everything will be OK. It is hard to see a loved one in distress, so they are often more than willing to use reassurance to help calm the anxiety. But over time that instant relief can become addictive and we develop a dependency on that other person. We may need almost constant reassurance, or feel unable to leave the house without being accompanied by the person who makes us feel safe, which can weigh heavily on a relationship.

My extra tip here is that exercise is also a powerful prevention tool, so try to exercise even on the days when you don’t feel anxious. This way you are setting yourself up to have a better day tomorrow. Your mental health will thank you for it.

perhaps I choose my identity to be someone who lives with courage, then I can ask myself how I would respond to this situation. What would my next move be if it was based on courage? What response would make me proud to write in my journal tonight and look back on this time next year?

When stress becomes sustained over long periods, our brain tends towards more habitual behaviours that demand less energy. Our ability to control our impulses, remember information and make decisions becomes impaired. Over time, our immune system is affected. In the short term, adrenaline gives our immune function a boost to help fight bacterial and viral infections. But in the longer term, over-production of adrenaline and abnormal patterns of cortisol are linked with shorter life expectancy