How to get out of a bad mood

Photo by Levi Elizaga on Unsplash

A lot of us prepare for inevitable inconveniences in most areas of our lives; we keep spare tires, we have flashlights for when the electricity goes out, and the most accident-prone (or just prepared) among us tend to own first aid kits. But most of us don’t prepare for the inevitable emotional inconveniences of life: “bad moods,” including sadness, anxiety, and anger.

But it turns out, preparing for those difficult emotions can help in a number of different ways. Just acknowledging the inevitability of those feelings by preparing for them can reduce the shame that often accompanies a bad mood. If you already expect to experience those feelings at some points in your life, it’s easier to remember that having unpleasant feelings is a totally normal experience.

Preparing to feel those emotions and having a plan for what happens when you feel crappy can also help you because when you’re in a bad mood, the parts of your brain responsible for planning and good decision-making tend to be less easily activated. So if you can compensate for that deficit in advance, you’re way ahead of the game.

That’s why it can be a great idea to create a “bad mood menu.”

A bad mood menu is a written list of the activities that can help you feel closer to your emotional baseline. When you’re not feeling your best, all you have to do is look at that list and choose one thing at a time that you’d like to try to help you feel better until you’re feeling more like yourself.

So, what do you put on a bad mood menu?

You can include anything that’s worked to help you feel better in the past, and anything you’d like to try out in the future that you think might make you feel better. If you want some ideas, here are some things that tend to work for anxiety, anger, any big feeling, loneliness/ general bad moods, and grief. And if you want some mindfulness tips that work even if you’ve been burned by mindfulness in the past, you can check some of those out here.

You don’t need any one item to completely turn your mood around, so don’t put too much pressure on any item to work 100% perfectly every time. Just like you probably won’t feel full from eating just one appetizer, you’re likely to need to enact at least a few of these bad mood menu items to feel better.

You can design your menu in any way you think will be helpful for you. For instance, you can have different sections for menu items that you can try when you have plenty of time (I call these “sit-down meals”), and things you can use on the go (I call these “to-go orders”). Or, you can split menu items up into categories that illustrate which items you prefer for which emotions— you can have a menu section for “angry,” a menu section for “sad,” a menu section for “bored,” etc.

Like that famous JFK quote reminds us, the best time to fix a roof is when the sun is shining, which means that the best time to make a bad mood menu is when you’re feeling pretty okay. So if you have a few minutes now and if you’re not in the middle of an emotional crisis, this could be a great time to just get a bad mood menu started. It can always be evolving, so it definitely doesn’t need to be perfect or comprehensive before you start using it.

And once you have a few items on your bad mood menu, try to be as diligent as possible at using it whenever you’re feeling a little “off.” You may not remember to do it every time, but it’ll get easier the more your practice. As always, do your best to have self-compassion when you forget to use your menu or when things don’t go perfectly.

If you end up trying it out, let us know how it goes in the comments!