Funny Quotes About Being in a Bad Mood
Why Bad Moods Are Healthy
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Good Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.Homo sapiens is a very moody species. Even though sadness and bad moods have e'er been part of the human experience, we now live in an age that ignores or devalues these feelings.
In our culture, normal homo emotions like temporary sadness are oft treated as disorders. Manipulative advertising, marketing and self-help industries claim happiness should exist ours for the asking. All the same bad moods remain an essential function of the normal range of moods nosotros regularly experience.
Despite the near-universal cult of happiness and unprecedented textile wealth, happiness and life satisfaction in Western societies has non improved for decades.
It's fourth dimension to re-assess the office of bad moods in our lives. We should recognise they are a normal, and even a useful and adaptive part of being human, helping us cope with many everyday situations and challenges.
A brusk history of sadness
In before historical times, short spells of feeling sad or moody (known as mild dysphoria) accept always been accepted equally a normal part of everyday life. In fact, many of the greatest achievements of the human spirit bargain with evoking, rehearsing and even cultivating negative feelings.
Greek tragedies exposed and trained audiences to take and deal with inevitable misfortune as a normal function of homo life. Shakespeare'due south tragedies are classics considering they repeat this theme. And the works of many great artists such equally Beethoven and Chopin in music, or Chekhov and Ibsen in literature explore the landscape of sadness, a theme long recognized as instructive and valuable.
Ancient philosophers take besides believed accepting bad moods is essential to living a total life. Even hedonist philosophers like Epicurus recognized living well involves exercising wise judgement, restraint, self-command and accepting inevitable adversity.
Other philosophers like the stoics also highlighted the importance of learning to anticipate and accept misfortunes, such equally loss, sorrow or injustice.
What is the point of sadness?
Psychologists who study how our feelings and behaviors have evolved over time maintain all our affective states (such every bit moods and emotions) accept a useful role: they warning us to states of the globe we need to respond to.
In fact, the range of human emotions includes many more negative than positive feelings. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, shame or disgust are helpful considering they help us recognise, avoid and overcome threatening or unsafe situations.
But what is the point of sadness, peradventure the most common negative emotion, and one most practising psychologists deal with?
Intense and indelible sadness, such as depression, is apparently a serious and debilitating disorder. Nonetheless, mild, temporary bad moods may serve an important and useful adaptive purpose, by helping us to cope with everyday challenges and hard situations. They also act equally a social point that communicates disengagement, withdrawal from competition and provides a protective cover. When we appear lamentable or in a bad mood, people often are concerned and are inclined to help.
Some negative moods, such as melancholia and nostalgia (a longing for the past) may even be pleasant and seem to provide useful data to guide future plans and motivation.
Sadness tin can also enhance empathy, compassion, connectedness and moral and aesthetic sensibility. And sadness has long been a trigger for creative inventiveness.
Recent scientific experiments document the benefits of mild bad moods, which often work every bit automated, unconscious alert signals, promoting a more than attentive and detailed thinking way. In other words, bad moods assistance us to exist more circumspect and focused in difficult situations.
In contrast, positive mood (like feeling happy) typically serves as a signal indicating familiar and prophylactic situations and results in a less detailed and attentive processing mode.
Psychological benefits of sadness
There is now growing bear witness that negative moods, like sadness, has psychological benefits.
To demonstrate this, researchers first dispense people's mood (by showing happy or sad films, for example), then measure changes in performance in various cognitive and behavioral tasks.
Feeling sad or in a bad mood produces a number of benefits:
- improve memory In ane study, a bad mood (caused past bad conditions) resulted in people amend remembering the details of a shop they just left. Bad mood can also improve bystander memories by reducing the furnishings of diverse distractions, like irrelevant, fake or misleading data.
- more than accurate judgements A balmy bad mood also reduces some biases and distortions in how people grade impressions. For instance, slightly distressing judges formed more accurate and reliable impressions nearly others because they processed details more effectively. Nosotros institute that bad moods likewise reduced gullibility and increased scepticism when evaluating urban myths and rumours, and even improved people's ability to more accurately detect deception. People in a mild bad mood are also less likely to rely on simplistic stereotypes.
- motivation Other experiments found that when happy and sad participants were asked to perform a difficult mental task, those in a bad mood tried harder and persevered more. They spent more than time on the chore, attempted more questions and produced more correct answers.
- better communication The more attentive and detailed thinking mode promoted by a bad mood tin too improve advice. We found people in a lamentable mood used more than effective persuasive arguments to convince others, were better at understanding cryptic sentences and amend communicated when talking.
- increased fairness Other experiments establish that a mild bad mood caused people to pay greater attention to social expectations and norms, and they treated others less selfishly and more fairly.
Counteracting the cult of happiness
By extolling happiness and denying the virtues of sadness, we ready an unachievable goal for ourselves. We may also be causing more disappointment, some say fifty-fifty depression.
It is too increasingly recognized that beingness in a good mood, despite some advantages, is not universally desirable.
Feeling sad or in a bad mood helps us to meliorate focus on the situation we find ourselves in, and and so increases our ability to monitor and successfully respond to more demanding situations.
These findings suggest the unrelenting pursuit of happiness may often exist self-defeating. A more than balanced assessment of the costs and benefits of good and bad moods is long overdue.
If feelings of sadness persist, contact your GP, Lifeline 13 11 14, beyondblue 1300 22 4636 or SANE Australia 1800 18 7263.
Joseph Paul Forgas, Scientia Professor of Psychology, UNSW
This article was originally published on The Chat. Read the original article.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/59216-why-bad-moods-are-good-for-you.html
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