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Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
What works for this
Behavioural activation
The strongest self help evidence in this whole field says the way out of a flat heavy state is through what you do, not through what you think. You act first and the feeling follows, which is the opposite of what the state tells you.
One move, today
Choose one small thing you used to do and do it today without waiting to feel like it. Ten minutes is enough. Waiting to feel like it is the trap.
What matches
10 practicesThere is motion sitting inside the word emotion. Big feelings come out through the body, so if you cannot keep still while you are grieving, that is the feeling moving rather than something going wrong with you.
Think how strange it would be if someone heard they had come into a fortune and just said thank you and carried on with the morning. Joy gets up and…
Try putting a sentence between you and the mood: this is what my brain is doing right now. It does not make me a bad person, and it does not mean I cannot cope. It just feels that way today.
Low mood does not arrive labelled as a mood. It arrives as facts about you, that you are useless, that nobody wants you around, and it is very hard…
Ask what is happening in the body right now, in the moment it happens, rather than asking afterwards what the feeling was.
A shutdown is quickest to catch while it is switching on. The question that works is small and physical: what is happening in your chest, your…
Some thoughts you could defend all day, and debating whether they are true only gives them more of your time. Try a different question: is this thought kind to me, and does it take me anywhere I want to go?
This one earns its place when you have already proved the case to yourself and feel worse for having done it. You are not conceding the thought is…
Shame is visible before it is spoken. Shallow breath, eyes down, shoulders curling in, a voice gone small: the body says it first.
Learn your own version so you can catch it early, and learn to spot it in others without pointing at it like a diagnosis. When you notice the…
Change the sentence from 'I am bad' to 'I am feeling bad right now'. It is a small grammatical move and it changes what you are actually dealing with.
One is a permanent description of you, the other is weather. Weather you can wait out, describe, get curious about, tell someone about. Try saying…
Anger tells you to say the thing. Fear tells you to leave. You can feel all of it and still not do what it asks, and that gap is the whole skill.
Try naming the urge in your head as it arrives: this is the urge to send the message. Named, it stops being the only available next step and becomes…
Let your face go. Unclench the jaw, let the lips lift very slightly, and let the loosening carry back through your head and shoulders.
You are not pretending to be happy and nobody has to see it. The face holds a lot of the tension of a bad state, and it is one of the few parts you…
Let your hands fall open, palms up, on your lap or at your sides, and breathe there for a minute. It is oddly hard to stay in full fight with open hands.
Anger lives in the grip as much as anywhere. Opening the hands removes one part of what the body is preparing to do, and the rest of the system tends…
You are allowed to put something down. Put it down with a time to pick it up again: Thursday morning, with my therapist, not tonight.
Without the appointment, setting it aside quietly turns into never touching it, and the thing keeps all its power by never being looked at. With the…