Have you ever wondered why your mood is so gloomy even when nothing happens?
Our mood is always influenced by many factors. Have you ever felt like you can’t control your emotions? Have you ever wondered if your ” natural sadness ” is really “natural” or is it influenced by certain external factors? The things mentioned below will give you a different perspective on your mood.
1. Weather
In one study, scientists found a link between weather and negative moods. Specifically, sunlight has a direct effect on fatigue. Vitamin D3 produced when skin is exposed to natural light has been shown to help change levels of serotonin – the hormone that regulates mood. Seasonal depression often occurs during the less sunny months of the year because serotonin levels are low at this time.
How to handle: You cannot control the weather, but you can learn to recognize the deficiency of nutrients to supplement promptly by eating or using functional foods. For example, if you work in an office that lacks natural light and rarely leaves before dark, you likely need a vitamin D3 supplement.
2. Social networks
Using social media activates the brain’s reward system by releasing dopamine – a feel-good chemical associated with pleasurable activities such as eating or sex. However, this is the factor that leads to addiction to social networks.
A study in the UK in 2018 showed that overuse of social networks can reduce, disrupt, and delay sleep. This leads to anxiety, depression, reduced memory ability, and academic performance.
How to handle: In addition to social networks, you can learn how to activate dopamine based on healthy methods by understanding the mechanism of this hormone. Completing simple goals like cleaning your room, watering the plants, and reading a page of a book will help increase your dopamine levels naturally without being too dependent on electronic devices.
3. What you eat
Certain foods and nutrients can help the brain secrete chemicals that are beneficial for improving emotions. For example, complex carbohydrates from sweet potatoes, oats, and quinoa increase serotonin availability. Protein from fish, meat, beans, eggs, and dairy helps increase levels of dopamine and norepinephrine – chemicals that influence motivation and concentration.
How to handle: However, being healthy does not mean eating as much as possible. A healthy meal should be balanced in nutrients and contain all the essential food groups.
You can refer to the “Just fit the mainstream nutrition” method. This is a diet that helps you keep a balance of 3 main groups of substances including protein, starch, and fat, ensuring health maintenance without having to change your previous diet too much.
4. Sleep Quality
Studies have shown that lack of sleep has a significant effect on mood. Subjects who slept only 4.5 hours per night reported feeling stressed, angry, sad, and mentally exhausted after a week.
Difficulty sleeping is sometimes the first symptom of depression. Studies have found that 15% to 20% of people diagnosed with insomnia will develop major depression.
How to handle it: Sleep always needs to be a priority even if you are running on deadlines. A deep sleep will help you consolidate memory and eliminate “redundant” connections in the brain, thereby improving work performance.
To sleep and wake up in a good mood, you can refer to how to fall asleep in 120 seconds or use the autosuggestion method to wake up without being startled by the alarm. In addition, you can also calculate a reasonable sleep time based on your sleep cycle.
5. Frequency of exercise
Regular exercise helps increase blood circulation to the brain and affects the HPA axis, also known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. The HPA axis has an impact on many brain areas, including:
- Limbic system: controls motivation and mood.
- Amygdala: related to feelings of fear in response to stress.
- Hippocampus: plays an important part in memory formation as well as mood and motivation.
For people with borderline personality disorder, cortisol production (stress hormone) will be boosted, causing abnormalities in the HPA axis. This explains why their mood often fluctuates at high amplitudes.
How to handle it: Exercise is not about how hard you exercise, but how long you can maintain it. To avoid feeling discouraged or arduous, you should start with small habits, like doing bodyweight exercises at home with mats and instructional videos. In addition, fitness apps also help you design exercises, and track achievements, and energy expenditure – thereby maintaining motivation.
6. Ability to organize thoughts
Today, an abundance of information and options combined with a brain fixated on the negative can send you into a meltdown. Overthinking in the long run will cause mental exhaustion because the prefrontal cortex is overloaded.
How to handle it: Of course, optimistic thinking is not the solution because excessive positivity is ultimately negative. What you need is to recognize when you are distracted by your thoughts and reorganize them. Writing a diary is old, but it is a way for you to look at, and contemplate problems from the inside and learn how to solve them.
