Every individual has their bad days. One can feel sad, irritated, or not in the mood to do anything, and it can be challenging to get through these emotions. Having a bad mood can be debilitating to your day-to-day life since it can affect your job, study, and relationships with other people.
This being said, it’s important to take the initiative to enhance your mood and prevent your mental and emotional health from spiraling down. To help you out, consider doing these five things to naturally lift your mood:
- Consult Mental Health Professionals
Boosting one’s mood isn’t easy for many individuals, particularly those experiencing difficult moments in life. Whether it’s a death of a loved one, a major failure in one’s passion, or the end of a relationship, it’s essential to know that help is always available as long as you know where to seek it.
Sadness and lack of motivation are normal responses to life’s struggles. However, if you’re experiencing far more than one day of bad mood and irritability, you should consider finding help from medical professionals to assess your symptoms for depression and receive treatment immediately.
To make your search convenient and accessible, it’ll be advantageous to look for medical help within your location. There are many local places, like this one in San Diego, that can help with depression treatment.
- Obtain Adequate and Good Quality Sleep
Sleep is paramount to achieving an optimal body function. Without having a sound sleep every night, you’re compromising all aspects of your health, including your mental and emotional health.
Due to lack of sleep, you’re more likely to experience mood swings and irritability, which can impair your cognitive thinking, emotional resilience, and judgment. Your stress and anxiety episodes also tend to get triggered easily due to bad sleep.
Therefore, make sure to have seven to nine hours of sleep every night. Getting sufficient sleep can supercharge your energy, mood, and focus for the day. If you find it challenging to stick to a sleeping schedule, here are some tips to help you out:
- Keep devices such as your smartphone, laptop, and TV away from your bedroom.
- Avoid taking a long nap midday.
- Avoid caffeine, alcohol, and heavy meals near your sleeping hours.
- Take a warm shower before sleep.
- Consider sleep-inducing supplements like melatonin.
- Take A Look At Your Diet
Along with sleep, your diet and eating habits highly affect your mental and emotional health. In fact, there’s a specific branch of science that tackles the link between what you eat and how you feel and behave: nutritional psychiatry.
Having a look at your diet and its potential effects on your emotional health is vital in lifting your mood. As reported by this discussion, eating ‘traditional diets,’ like the traditional Japanese diet and the Mediterranean diet, may lower your risks of depression by 25% to 35%. Traditional diets have better effects on one’s mental and emotional health because they contain high amounts of fruits, vegetables, seafood, fish, and unprocessed grains. Also, they’re almost void of dairy, lean meat, processed foods, and refined sugars.
Additionally, you may find yourself having a quick mood boost with these:
- Omega-3 fatty acids, found in sardines, mackerel, anchovy, walnuts, flaxseeds, and chia seeds
- Whole grains, including brown rice, quinoa, amaranth, and steel-cut oatmeal
- Probiotics, from yogurt, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, and tempeh
- Folate-rich foods, like spinach, broccoli, avocado, artichokes, and edamame
- Caffeine, in moderate amounts
- Go on Frequent Morning Walks or Jogs
How your day will go, whether it’ll be a good or a bad one, will be significantly influenced by your movement as soon as you wake up. Thus, you might as well fill your morning with energy-boosting and mood-enhancing activities, such as taking a morning walk or jog. Having a morning walk while the surroundings are still peaceful keeps you away from stress and gives you enough time to think.
Additionally, sunlight exposure in the morning may also help boost your mood. This is because exposure to light and darkness sends messages in your brain and releases specific hormones. When you’re exposed to sunlight, your brain releases serotonin, which is responsible for regulating your mood and happiness, making you feel energized, calm, and focused.
Meanwhile, dark lighting at night encourages your brain to produce melatonin, a hormone that reinforces the circadian rhythm and helps you sleep better during bedtime.
Walking or jogging in the morning also offers other health benefits, which can help improve your mood in indirect ways:
- Strengthens muscles in the legs
- Helps promote a good night’s sleep
- Improves blood circulation
- Lowers blood pressure
- Helps reduce risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes
- Spend Time With Family And Friends
Unhealthy relationships can take a massive toll on your mental and emotional health, but happy and healthy connections are what pushes you into an improved mood, energy, peace of mind, and overall mental and emotional well-being. It turns out that mental health professionals aren’t only the people who care about you; you just have to look around and spend time with your loved ones.
With the current situation brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s, without question, difficult to stay in touch with your loved ones. If you have immediate family members and relatives living with you, don’t forget to check up on them and spend physical time together.
Since meeting up publicly is still risky in most places, you can spend some quality time with your friends, colleagues, and other valuable people online via video and voice calls. With today’s technology, you and your friends won’t get bored with the wide selection of entertainment, such as movie and TV series streaming, online games, and the like.
- Don’t Be Too Hard On Yourself
If you’ve paid attention to the first sentence of this article, you’ll realize that people can be made of imperfections and mistakes, even you. If you’re feeling under the weather today, always take note of this reminder: it’s okay not to be okay sometimes as you’re only human. With this said, try not to be too hard on yourself and give room to loosen up during stressful times. Make sure to find proactive ways in dealing with your problems instead of hiding from them.
After all, putting too much stress on yourself will only burden and discourage you from doing your best, which continuously pulls you into more risks of failure and rejection.
Summary
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to boosting your mood since people have their own personalities, behavior, emotional capacities, and countless more factors that could hasten or hinder their mood improvement. Hopefully, these tips and ways in lifting your mood can offer great results.