What I Do to Keep Bad “Moods” Away

These 3 things will seem simple and intuitive, but have you actually tried them?

I had a talk with a friend this morning. He’s not exactly depressed, but more like not seeing the little light at the end of the long tunnel.

I know that this is something that is prone to happen to most of us at the change of season: the natural adjustment of our body to a new context is generating a bit of fuss in there and might trigger some older issues. Like the feeling of not having accomplished what we aimed for or maybe we don’t feel enough friends or family around us, so we get lonely.

My practices below won’t change the bigger context or that deeper stuff that has been bothering me. They help me, however, to get more resilient and get through stuff easier, whenever I’m having a hard time.

Maintain 40 seconds of morning discipline

It’s about the simple ritual of making your bed immediately after you wake up. Constantly, every morning, no matter what.

You can find a motivational video here; if you want to check it out, it’s really good (I have just re-watched it) - but I will stick to what it’s doing for me: it gives me a feeling of a safe place, normality and control when I come back home in the evening.

As for all of us, some days go better than others; so if I’m coming home after a long or annoying day and I see my bed fresh and nicely done, I get two thoughts at the same time: the first one is that I’m proud I took care of myself this morning; the second is that I’m taking stuff in baby steps, which might be steadily, but they are in control.

Probably control is an important thing for me, but I believe, for all of us, actually what a “bad” day is doing is to make us feel helpless. So when I see that I prepared my night from that very morning, by the simple gesture of making my bed, it takes away part of that “helpless” mood that the day’s events might have brought.

Embrace light and the natural colors

I wrote here more details related to how we can benefit from the power of colors, but I will go through the main idea again and again: we were “designed” to live in the nature.

To work and do things during the daytime and to rest our body during the night; to breathe fresh air and to live in the middle of the nature, which means in a colorful environment: the blue of the sky, the green of everything, the flowers, the animals and so on.

Whenever we are not giving our bodies this sequence of day, night, sun, colors, we bring tiny pieces of distress on our heads. After I understood this, I have always made sure I live and work in an environment that is giving me enough natural light. I surround myself with colors, as light and happy as possible, always avoiding red, black or dark grey, but also any strong, unnatural colors that might trigger my body’s distress of being out of the nature.

“Light is mandatory,” somebody told me years ago and in the beginning I didn’t take it seriously. I was DJing back then, so because of my clubbing schedule, I would generally sleep all day long and almost completely live my life during the night.

After a couple of years, I was already starting to get depressed, moody, unsettled, tired all the time, wrong boyfriend, wrong friends, wrong everything. Luckily, I left the scene before anything worse happened and it was because I decided to follow that advice: “Light is mandatory.”

Don’t get me wrong: once a clubber, always a clubber: I’m still in love with the nights spent with friends; I still feel smarter, more creative and even invincible during the night. Night clearly has its charm, I vouch for that. But I would never again have a night job more than one or two nights per week and I for sure avoid any un-sunny places to live.

Be true to yourself

I believe lies are cluttering our minds. I don’t know how it is for you, but for me it’s like I would have to remember all the lies I ever said, in order to be able to later keep up with my own invented stories.

What the hell? I mean it sounds crazy: instead of agglomerating my mind with new ideas, books, something new to learn, a loved one to focus on and be present for, would I keep my own mind full of half-true or totally not-true stuff I have said to people?

I’m a great believer that everything is easier when our heads are clear, so I’m really thinking now that the most happy people I know are the ones that are always true mainly to themselves, but also to others.

Let me know in your comments if any of the three thoughts seems reasonable to you. :-) I’m also curious about the practices you usually do to take care of your mind.

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