Exploring Feelings and Understanding Mood

Feelings make the world go round. They can make mole hills feel like mountains or make the impossible seem possible. Our emotional experiences are integral to being human, and an incredibly powerful motivator of behaviour. Emotions are fluid. They can also be - for the lack of a better word - quite flaky; one moment you might feel on top of the moon and in an instant, you can be down in the dumps. Sometimes you won't even know why. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) delineates a class called mood disorders that are in fact based on how negative emotions can influence and impair physical, social and cognitive functioning. 

I have made a few interesting observations about the nature of my own feelings. 

Feeling empty. This is much more common than it seems. There is an "empty" feeling, where there don't seem to be any real emotions. I find this quite curious, because sometimes the feeling is a general blankness. At other times, when I pay a little more attention, I notice a knot in my stomach or a niggling feeling at the back of my mind or some other sign that I was not attending to earlier that hints at the emotion I might be operating with under my level of awareness. It can be easy to get in the habit of shutting out your feelings. This is where a quick exercise called a feeling check becomes useful.

Try this 1 minute exercise:

"What am I feeling now?" Sit in the moment and identify a feeling word. Don't stop at pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad. Go deeper. If it is not immediately popping up to you, take the help of the feeling words list below and see which feeling you can most connect with.

On a more regular basis, you could set 4 alarms spaced throughout the day, reminding you to ask yourself what you're feeling. You can also do this the next time you are finding it difficult to "feel" what you're feeling or feel empty. This is a very good exercise in self-awareness. It may even explain the source behind cranky behaviour or a bad mood you didn't even register you had. You may be surprised.

Processing feelings. Another curious thing I have found to be true about my own feelings is, it takes time to understand them even if I've been experiencing them for a while. I mean, sometimes I need an incident to actually be over to understand what I am or have been feeling. A psychologist called Daryl Bem has done some research about this. He said that sometimes we might not even know what we feel or believe about something until we see our own behaviour in a particular situation. Isn't that strange? He says sometimes, when we don't already know what we're feeling, we actually infer our attitudes  from our own behaviour. I guess that brings into question which comes first, the attitude or the behaviour. As with most things, I think it's a mixture, but the important point being that yet again there is an indication that there are emotions constantly at play, whether we are aware of them or not. Sometimes by instinct we dislike someone we have just met or feel instantly attracted to someone - it is a feeling thing (experience) and then a thinking thing (interpretation). The experience influences your interpretation and the interpretation shapes the experience. This also brings me to my final point.

Feelings change. This is both a refreshing and scary thought to me. Some things that used to hurt a lot before, don't hurt any more. Once extremely pleasant memories can become a source of deep suffering. Anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one or a bad break-up can vouch for this. New information and new experiences have the power to alter our feelings about people and things. Feelings seem fickle. What if I wake up tomorrow and not love the people I love? It is a truly terrifying thought. But my experience has taught me that when I'm actually in tune with what I'm feeling, they don't seem fickle in the slightest. I am able to trace the thought behind the feeling, see the logic in the emotion. It makes sense. (And for the times it doesn't seem to, I don't sweat it. I can always return later if I need to.)

In conclusion, I'd like to leave behind a list of my personal common mood triggers. They are things I have found in my experience that positively or negatively influence mood, things you may or may not be able to relate to, things that may be overt and obvious or be operating sneakily in the background:

music, weather, hunger, fullness, noise, uncomfortable body posture, uncomfortable shoes, a runny nose, morning walks, painting something, the company of someone who makes you laugh, the company of someone you can't stand, pets/street dogs/stray kittens, someone's baby (can be positive or negative :P), smelly feet at the theatre, pushy waiters, bad Skype connections, funny Harry Potter memes, a kind gesture, exact change for the bus, amount of sleep and vivid dreams.

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