The things that make our lives colorful and fun are our emotions and our moods. But, for some people, they can also make life unbearable. Learning how to manage and cope with mood can help improve your quality of life. Some studies have even shown that certain moods are more conducive to learning and memorization.
Excitement and Memory
When you’re excited, your body produces adrenaline. This hormone is responsible for the fight or flight response. But it also boosts your memory. Have you ever noticed that you tend to remember fun events in the past? Like riding a roller coaster? Do you also notice that the details tend to stay much sharper than other events? That’s thanks to adrenaline! In the future, if you want to learn something, try to make the experience fun and exciting for yourself and your brain.
Stress and Getting Sick
When you’re chronically stressed, your body produces a hormone called cortisol. This hormone increases your appetite, leading to weight gain. It also disrupts your sleep and decreases your immune function. Feeling stressed all the time means you’ll get sick more often, which in turn can cause you to stress out even more. The key to fighting stress is to find the true reason for it. Is it your job? Your relationship? Or is the cause something that requires professional help?
Relaxation and Looking Younger
We make poor lifestyle choices when we’re stressed. But when we’re relaxed, we have the clarity to think through our decisions. Good lifestyle choices are reflected in our health and specifically, our skin. If you want to look younger, then try to find ways to live a more stress-free life. Those wrinkles on your face come from tense muscles. All that alcohol dehydrates you and prematurely ages your skin cells. So does smoking. But choosing to exercise or meditate instead of going out for happy hour or smoking can do wonders for both your mental health and your skin!
Anxiety, Procrastination, Stress
Sometimes, you’re not necessarily stressed, but you create stressful situations for yourself in your head. This may lead to procrastinating on a project because you’re not sure if you are on the right track. As you fall more and more behind, stress builds up. And as you just learned, stress can cause all sorts of health problems. Sometimes, the cause of stress isn’t anything exterior, but your own anxieties and worries.
Boredom and Creativity
Some people think that in order to be creative, you need to be happy. But, blues music, and all its offshoots like jazz and rock & roll, wouldn’t exist without some unhappiness. Meanwhile, science has shown that what really gets our creative juices flowing is boredom. People who are tired of the same, repetitive way of doing something often get creative and come up with brilliant alternatives. Boredom is uncomfortable at first, but the trick is to not fight it. Give it time to set in and eventually, your brain figures out a way to make life more interesting. To really tap into this creativity, put away the phone, the tablet, and turn off the TV. It’s natural to gravitate toward sources of entertainment as a distraction, but they will only put a damper on your creativity.
