My top tips for dealing with a grumpy mood
Do you ever find there are days (weeks?) when you're more than a little irritable, angy, or downright grumpy?
I know I do.
These are the times when the complaints and grumbles in my head can get loud and very insistent.
Then I begin to notice all the thoughtless examples of how I’m being taken advantage of, ignored or not seen as important - my daughter leaves a trail of devastation behind her in the kitchen, my husband forgot to put out the overflowing bin. And all of a sudden, these irritations can become huge problems.
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We all have our preferred way of dealing with our Mrs Grumpy moods - muttering under our breath, the banging of pots or a touch of satisfying shouting.
Sometimes that does the trick to move us out of anger towards another type of feeling that feels more acceptable to us. Yet we’ve all had times when it seems whatever we do, our internal complaining esculates and we’re stuck ever deeper in the mire of irritation.
But let’s return for a moment to the very situations that seem to be the cause of our irritation in the first place.
The truth is that those events are always happening but in a more balanced mood, they are hardly noticed.
We simply respond, whether that’s asking someone to clear up their mess or taking action ourselves and we resist the temptation to turn the whole thing into a drama in our mind.
This is an important clue for my biggest tips in dealing with these types of moods.
And this is what they are.
Don't spend time analysing or trying to change these moods. Resist the temptation to agonise over where they came from or try and negotiate with them. Don’t overthink them.
Allow yourself to feel your emotions. Really feel them. Most of us are masters at pushing away any emotion we feel we “shouldn’t” have. We distract ourselves, lose ourselves in tv, comfort eat, or attempt to rationalise them away, And yet, we do ourselves far more harm by not feeling that emotion, taking a moment to find where that emotion sits in the body and giving it our full attention.
Because as any small child will show you, if we feel an emotion, it doesn’t tend to hang along for too long and another feeling will soon be on it’s way.
Once you’ve done this you can notice what it occurs to you to do and then just get on and do it.
And notice how your mood eventually changes.
Because that's what moods do.
Just think about your own experience for a moment. Even the most deep-seated of moods, the ups and downs of life, all come and eventually pass. We all know that we have an immune system that will heal a cut without us ever having to do anything conscious about it. And the same principle is true for our moods and emotions because we have a psychological immune system as well that’s always working behind the scenes to return us to balance.
Whether we know about it or not or try and intervene and hurry up the process in any way.
So simply allow your mood to just “be”, knowing that however uncomfortable or unpleasant it is, a lighter, brighter mood will at some point follow. The more we can accept our moods for what they are, the less we resist them or wish we felt differently, the easier they seem to pass.
Allow yourself to feel the emotion without distraction or pushing it away and see what you notice.
In my own experience, the funny thing is that I’ve noticed that grumpy moods don’t seem to stay around for as long as they used to. They’re not being whipped up and fuelled by more grumpy thoughts any longer.
And as far as my husband and daughter are concerned, that’s very good news.
If you would like to learn a little more about dealing with low moods, please read this blog post .