You woke up one day feeling a bit down. You took your morning coffee and felt a lot better. One hour later, you found yourself feeling irritated. You had a cigarette and felt a lot better. A few hours later, you felt stressed, but after you had lunch, you felt better.

By night, you felt terrible without understanding why, but you felt perfect when you had a couple of beers. You went to bed feeling fine only to wake up the next day feeling down.

Does this day sound familiar to you?
How many of your days are marked by ups and downs in your mood without a possible reason?

Why does my mood go up and down

Did you notice anything about the previous description of that typical day?

You do certain things throughout the day that improve your mood and make you feel better, such as drinking coffee or smoking.

As soon as you stop using those things or as soon as their effect runs out, you start feeling down again. But why does this happen?

The setpoint is something called your everyday mood on a given day without any external influences. Now the problem, in this case, is not with the frequency of use of mood enhancers, but it’s with your set point!

The problem is that your mood is already wrecked, and that’s why you keep trying to improve it throughout the day using different bad habits.

Smoking, drinking, compulsive Facebook checking, masturbation, nail-biting, and many of your daily bad habits are there only because your mood setpoint is already shallow.

Now, as soon as the effect of any of these habits runs out, you return to your set point and feel bad.

How to prevent your mood fluctuations?

There is only one way to fix these mood fluctuations: to make sure that your set point is already high so that you don’t need to make extra effort to push your mood up.

So how can you change your mood’s set point? The answer is: By fixing your long-term problems!

Short-term changes such as work stress, small events that happen throughout the day, or bad news negatively affect your mood but what affects your mood more is your long-term problems.

• Are you satisfied with your life?
• Are there critical long-term problems that you are ignoring?
• Do you know that those long-term problems are responsible for your current setpoint?

Why do Bad Moods Occur in the First Place

By working on your long-term problems and improving your life, you won’t only become more resistant to mood swings, but you will also give up on many of the bad habits you do to stabilize your mood.

So many people think that bad moods happen for no reason, while emotions are messages that your mind uses to help you reach critical individual goals in its plan. The main reason so many people fail to deal with their bad moods is that they don’t have enough self-understanding.

 

If emotions are there to serve a particular purpose and help you live a better life, you will only get rid of them if you understood that purpose well.

A few days ago, I got an email from a reader who told me that she has a shyness problem. Because she was looking at shyness as a mysterious emotion, she never managed to get over it, but after we talked, she discovered that her shyness was her mind’s way of hiding her flaws from others.

Because her self-esteem wasn’t high, she believed that something was wrong with her, and as a result, her mind didn’t want anybody to find that thing, so it always made her feel shy around strangers.

How to get out of a bad mood

The first thing you need to put in mind when trying to understand a bad mood is that your bad mood results from so many factors that interacted together and not just one aspect.

If, for example, you got bad grades then felt terrible, then you won’t have any problem understanding why you are feeling bad. Still, because bad moods result from the combination of more than one event, people lose track and believe they are getting bad attitudes for no reason.

 

Any unsolved problem, even one around for years, might contribute to your bad mood right now. If, for example, you wanted to lose weight three months ago, then you gave up on the idea, then your current mood would contain some guilt and disappointment even if you are not aware of their presence.

Imagine how you would feel when you add ten problems from the past, three unpleasant events from today, and five worries from the future. The result would be a bad mood that can’t be understood.

How to get Over Bad Moods for Good

So how can you get over bad moods?

 

First of all, you need to list the problems you are currently facing, including the ones you are ignoring. Next, you need to start solving the ones you could solve or work on a solution.

The good news is that once you believe that any of your problems are solved because of your plans, then ill feel better even if you still have other ones.