Your Mood and Your Work – Part 2

While emotions come and go, moods come without reason, last longer and linger in the background.

They therefore have the ability to cloud and affect your thoughts and behaviour at work.

It is therefore in the best interests of us all to have an accurate understanding of what changes, impacts and moves our mood.

The first thing to do is to establish which is your innate mood.

Your innate mood is your inborn temperament, which is a predisposition to a certain emotional state that is present from birth or after certain significant life experiences.

To be emotionally intelligent is to understand your innate mood very well, and not to blindly play into the aspects of it that do not serve you or those you interact with.

After your innate mood, studies show that the following factors are the largest contributors to your secondary mood: your body (sleep, nutrition and hormones), your environment, and remarkably, your facial expressions.

Interestingly, on the last point, a quick way to improve your mood is by altering your own facial expression.

Each basic emotion is associated with a distinctive facial expression, so when you smile, your body speedily replicates that emotion.

While these factors affect your mood, ultimately, your mood is determined by one thing: Your subjective view on how these factors affect your personal well-being.

This is such a crucial point. In other words, you determine your mood by assessing an event or incident in light of how you think it will affect your well-being.

Simply put, the best way to stabilise your mood is not to try manipulate external factors, but rather to develop control over how you interpret events that cause your emotion and mood to fluctuate.

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