5 Things that can Affect your Mood

Being in a good mood is something we all love, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be happy and excited? But I’ve come to realise that your moods aren’t just affected by your thoughts. Sometimes, external factors can make you feel down, and it’s important to recognise what may be the things that can affect your mood.

Lack of Sleep

They don’t say “not sleeping enough makes you grumpy” for no reason! You may realise that when you don’t sleep enough, you just feel stressed, grumpy and easily agitated. You can always tell that you’re grumpy from having lack of sleep when you also feel tired and find it hard to think or concentrate and have that desire to go to sleep again. If that’s the case, I do recommend doing what you can do improve sleep, because it can make a huge difference to how you feel. You may instantly feel alive, full of energy and happy when you’ve had 7 hours of sleep.

Dull Environment

Are you always in the house, and never really getting exposed to sunlight? There’s a condition called “Winter Blues” which is kind of like that, where you feel gloomy because winter whether is always so dull and cold, and you never really get much exposure to the sunlight. Sometimes, people get treated by light therapy or have windows which allow more sunlight in.

PMS

(I’ve actually heard that males can be affected by something similar too!) PMS stands for premenstrual syndrome and affects many women. The hormones in your body loves to wreck havoc about a week or 15 days before the period starts, and makes you feel extremely angry, annoyed, frustrated, teary and sad easily. This seems to be the time when you want the most attention and feel upset if people ignore you. You may also feel that hope is lost, or that the tiniest things piss you off. What I recommend for that is take magnesium and calcium, as well as try and stay away from as many people or frustrating situations as you can.

Chemical Imbalance

This has happened to a few people I knew, sometimes we may feel depressed for absolutely no reason we could find and that sometimes can be caused by chemical imbalance, such as you’re lacking that “feel good” chemical that usually make people happy. Though I personally wouldn’t resort to taking antidepressants, but I do know there are certain foods that can help bring up your mood.

Loss

This may not even be directly losing someone you love, but sometimes hearing a story or watching a show or even hearing about someone may trigger bad feelings. I’ll give you an example: A friend of mine told me some time ago that one of his friends only recently got married but lost her husband one day suddenly because he got hit by a car or something, just like that. The idea of that caused such a shock to me that it literally affected me for some time, because I kept thinking about how horrible that experience would’ve been. Also, sometimes bad things on the news may cause the same feeling.

I hope this helps you realise that sometimes, a down mood may not just be caused by negative thinking. I hope if you have any of these troubles, you can pinpoint exactly what the cause is, and try to take it from there.