Last Updated on March 16, 2023 by Mike Robinson
How to Improve Mood Naturally mood is an emotional state that can have a positive or negative valence. In other words; people talk about having a positive or negative mood. They differ from emotions, feelings or affection in that they are less specific, less intense and less likely to be triggered by a stimulus or event.
In this article I explain to you 11 ways to improve your mood that I hope will help you. Are you in a period where you are feeling down? Do you just want to be OK but do not know how to do it?
How to Improve Mood Naturally
According to a study by ABC news, a part of our individual happiness is pre-determined by genetic and circumstantial factors, but 40% can control it depending on the thoughts and actions we carry out during the day.
11 Tips to Improve Your Mood
1- Train your mind to focus on the good things that happen to you
If you are going through a complicated time and you feel depressed, you may have entered a seemingly dead-end vicious circle.
You probably think, most of the time, the negative things you have in your life, what you would like to have and you do not have, thinking over and over again about the happy ones that are the others and how unhappy you are.
When you feel depressed, a phenomenon that feeds the vicious circle in which you find yourself – cognitive dissonance – acts in your mind.
This theory, devised by Leon Fastener, explains that people, when we have beliefs or thoughts, we seek to confirm and corroborate these thoughts and beliefs.
In order to confirm them, what we do is to focus our attention on those things that confirm them, ignoring everything that would refute them.
For example, if your belief is “people misbehave with me, “you start looking in your memories and experiences situations in which people have misbehaved with you, and only focus on these situations that feed your belief.
Under this phenomenon, if during the day, for example at work, a partner has looked at you poorly and later another partner has given you a hug, your focus of attention will only register the partner who has looked bad because it is the one confirms and nourishes your belief that “people behave badly with me “.
This is how the mind works. Fortunately, however, the mind is very trainable.
If you tend to feel depressed, you can train your mind to reverse this phenomenon. And instead of focusing on the negatives, you can do it on the positive side.
For this, I propose that every night, at the end of your day, remember all the pleasant and beautiful moments that have happened to you during the day and write them down in a journal.
If you do it every day, you will see for yourself how your mind tends more and more to focus on positive things by ignoring the negative things that happen to you.
2- Your own spiritual encounter
There is an extensive list of literature that demonstrates the positive effects of spiritual practice on mental health.
Make a new version of your life. A new version that includes a routine of spiritual practice that exercises your body and your mind. Spiritual practice has many forms and all valid. It’s about you being able to create yours.
It can be from prayer for the most devout to meditation, yoga, sport or walking through a forest or a park. The goal of all of them is the same: to be with yourself, to listen to your interior, to feel.
The important thing is that you adopt it as a habit. It has to be a regular practice that you incorporate into your lifestyle.
3- Cultivate gratitude
Being grateful is a great source of happiness. Surely, if you stop to think, the happiest people you know are those who are most grateful.
Practice being grateful.
Thank all you have, thank the people with whom you share your life, thank you for your existence in this world, thank you for being able to observe a field of poppies, thank you for being on the sofa watching a movie, appreciate the gestures that other people have with you…
Try to make it a regular practice. Try to incorporate it as a way of life. You will be surprised how something so simple can bring you so many fulfillments.
4- Feel the connection with someone
In a survey about happiness, participants were asked what things made them feel happier in their lives. Most people responded that one of the things that brought them the most happiness was to feel connected with another person. And how right.
Remember how you felt the last time you had a connection with someone. Did not you feel alive?
Actually what brings us the most happiness to people is the relationship with other people? Everything else: work, money, quality of life, etc. is an addition that adds or subtracts to happiness.
Therefore, it is fundamental to be in a good mood and feel full, cultivate and care for social relationships. It goes without saying that the quantity but the quality of these relationships is not important.
If you want to boost your mood, try to reconnect with a person. Stay with that friend or family member with whom you feel a special chemistry.
That person with whom you understand with a look, that person who has the same sense of humor that you have, that person with whom you talk and change the world.
5- Unzip your photo albums
If you find yourself in a period of depression and melancholy accompanied by a tunnel vision in which you only see everything negative in your life, unearthing and browsing your photographs of when you were a child, your vacations, and the fiestas of your town can be more effective at improving your mood than eating chocolate.
This is what a group of researchers from the United Kingdom’s Open University (UK) has studied.
These researchers studied how mood improves after eating chocolate, drinking alcohol, watching TV, listening to music, and viewing a personal photo album.
This study reveals that listening to music and eating chocolate is what has the least effect on mood swings; drinking alcohol and watching television has a minimum increase of 1%; and the top winner was seeing a personal photo album as people increased their mood by 11%.
After browsing your photo albums, choose those photos that you like and place them in a visible site so you can watch them frequently.
6- Go to the light
After three weeks of light therapy, more than 50% of participants in a study on depression showed a substantial improvement in mood.
One hour a day exposed to the brightness of light, had the same effect as antidepressants and without side effects. Even the mood continued to improve weeks after the end of the light therapy.
Find moments to be in contact with the brightness of light. Going out for a while and sitting on a terrace that gives you the sun can be a very therapeutic thing to improve your mood.
In case it is winter and there is no sun or the light is low intensity you can do it with artificial light.
A lamp with fluorescent light that emits luminosity similar to the solar, but that filters the ultraviolet light placed to a meter of distance, can be used for these effects.
Give it a try and tell us about your experience.
7- Dedicate a day to order your thoughts
Sometimes your mind is in a chaos of confused and unordered thoughts and ideas, and you need to clear your mind to regain balance. Take a day to clear up your ideas.
It may be helpful to write them down on paper to help you define and order your thoughts. So as to get out of your head all that noise of thoughts that is now on paper.
After having that moment with yourself to clear up your thoughts, relax your mind by doing some activity that helps clear your mind.
8- Plan a fun activity
Curiously people live a lot of the illusion and the imagination. The simple fact of planning a fun activity and count the days that are missing for that activity is something that brings us much enthusiasm and joy.
It is therefore a good strategy to improve your mood to have fun activities planned.
If, for example, you know that in a month you go away from the weekend with friends to a rural house or you have planned a nice excursion, you bring a great dynamism, enthusiasm and motivation simply knowing that you have something planned.
Once you have done that activity, schedule a new activity on your agenda, you will once again feel the enthusiasm and dynamism that will make you feels alive.
In addition, making fun activities and feeling that you do not lead a flat and routine life, is a great source of motivation that will bring you happiness in your life.
Do it and you will see how your mood gets better and better?
9- Do something spontaneous
In addition to planning fun activities, he also bets on spontaneity. Get out of the routine, the established, the line that you had marked, is very fun. It makes you feel young, passionate and that everything flows.
Maybe today you planned to go to work, make the purchase and then do the monthly bills.
Less go to work, everything else is breakable, so go after work to that wine fair that has organized your city or take the car and go to a lookout to see the stars, whatever, but do it.
“But what will I eat tomorrow if I am not going to buy it today?”
Ask yourself another question: Is it really that important? After doing something spontaneously @nalyze how you wake up the next day.
Remember this state every time you feel again with a low mood, and dare to throw yourself back to spontaneity.
10- Smell a lemon
It has been proven that citrus aromas improve mood by its anti-stress properties.
The sense of smell is a much more powerful sense than we think and with which we can change our mood.
You can either smell the fruit directly or apply lemon essential oils on the elbows and wrists to give off its aroma.
11- Live here and now
The most important formula to be in a good mood is to learn to live the present. And it is not a utopia, it is reality.
We tend to focus our attention on reaching goals: having a job, getting promoted, saving money, having a partner, having a home, having children, etc.
Also Read: Mental Hygiene: What it is and 10 tips to have it
And focused on achieving goals, we forget to live the present, the moment in which we are. The path we draw to reach those goals.
It is important to improve your mood and feel happy that you learn to connect with the sensations that the present moment is offering you.
If, for example, you are with friends having something in a bar, you may feel that you are not at all with them but that your mind is rambling on what concerns you or everything you have to do the next day.
At that moment you are missing out on a great gift.
When you see your head begin to wander, let your thoughts go and try to connect with the here and now.
Feel the warmth of your friends next to you; see how you feel when you are with them, being together, being able to laugh, being able to have interesting conversations…
These little things of the day to day are the ones that will make you feel good, and that you come home with a smile.
