Why You Should Be Happy About Your Bad Mood
Are you in a bad mood? Then we may congratulate you! Because bad mood certainly has its purpose.
Everybody knows them and yet nobody likes them very much: bad moods. People who are in a bad mood see everything through grumpy glasses, and even from bad-tempered colleagues or friends one usually prefers to stay away. As the writer, Charles Dickens once said: “Nothing in the world is as wonderfully contagious as a bad mood!”
But no one can always be in a good mood and pull themselves together — sometimes we simply have to put up with the bad feeling. And we should even encourage this, experts say.
Bad mood: A result of evolution?
With a positive attitude, life is better: you are more flexible, more creative, and more popular. And if you always think positively, you will recover more quickly after a serious illness. With arguments like these, the “Think positive” wave has penetrated our minds in recent years.
No question — a good mood is a great thing! So why should the nature of all things allow such an unpleasant feeling as grumpiness, when it only seems to harm us? In fact, behind the bad mood hides a value that can only be recognized at second glance.
Australian psychologist Joseph Paul Forgas explains this using a model by American anthropologist and psychologist Paul Ekman. This assumes six basic emotions: joy, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness.
It is striking: The majority of emotions are negative: anger, disgust, fear, and sadness are of great evolutionary importance. Emotions such as disgust and fear protect us from danger, anger strengthens our assertiveness — but sadness? What function should this feeling have?
Who is in a bad mood is more productive
For his study, the results of which he published in the “Journal of Experimental Social Psychology”, Joseph Paul Forgas tested the effects of sadness. The psychologist found that people with a negative mood were much better at thinking analytically and were also much more successful at convincing others of their opinion. Thus, the bad-tempered test persons had more influence than the good-tempered test persons.
Behavioral scientist and evolutionary biologist Gregor Fauma is also of the opinion that bad-tempered people are more productive at work: People who are in a bad mood make fewer mistakes, are more concentrated at work, and are more critical in their evaluation than people who are in a good mood, he writes.
The conclusion: bad moods make people adapt more quickly to new situations. So it helps to become active in order to find a way out of the unsatisfactory situation — an evolutionary advantage.
This is also the conclusion reached by researchers at University College London who studied the moodiness of humans. In the journal “Trends in Cognitive Sciences”, the team around the psychologist Eran Eldar argues that mood can help people adapt quickly to new environmental conditions.
For example, if an investor unexpectedly benefits from the fact that the price of his shares is rising, this fact will lift his mood. His mood will make him more willing to take risks and more optimistic — and he will immediately pursue an investment strategy that appears to fit in well with the current situation on the stock market. If the share price then falls again, his mood will change, and he will become less willing to take risks, i.e. more pessimistic.
According to British researchers, the mood therefore reflects the extent to which disappointed expectations in the environment are more likely at this one moment. The moods of humans may therefore have led to the decisive advantage in the course of evolution of being able to adapt more quickly to changes.
Who accepts the bad mood is more relaxed
If you are in a bad mood, you should let it happen. Because allowing negative emotions has a long-term positive effect on one’s own health, as scientists at the University of California in Berkeley have found out. In three different experiments involving a total of 1,300 adults, a team of scientists led by Iris Mauss investigated the effect of accepting one’s own emotions on mental health.
According to the study, people who accept their bad mood are on average happier than those who do not want to accept their negative feelings. According to psychologists, the latter only leads to more stress that can make people ill. The scientists published the results of the study in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology”.
