Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:39 — 5.6MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Stitcher | RSS
My mood sucks today. It took everything I had to get to my desk and record this episode. But I hope that by sharing what I see about low moods, it will help you when you encounter one.
You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.
Show Notes
- How we’re not responsible for our low moods
- How resisting what’s happening (like a low mood) seems to make it sticky
- Are low moods a precursor to insight or a new creative idea?
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Q&A Episode 9: What is depression?
- Unbroken Ep 11: Sensitivity to Our Thinking with Jonelle Simms
Transcript of episode
Hello, Explorers, and welcome to Q&A Episode number 12 of Unbroken podcast. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. And I’m really happy to have you here with me today.
Today the question we’re going to explore is what does my low mood mean?
I’m doing this one specifically today, because my mood is really low today. And I thought what better way to expand on this topic, explore it a little bit. And then I was originally going to post a different q&a episode next week, number 13. But I think what I’m going to do is a follow up episode to this one. In a few days, I’ll record that and just let you know how things are going.
For me right now, my mood is is really low today, like really low. All I want to do is just lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. And it’s kind of been going downhill for a couple of days, I’ve noticed that. What I wanted to talk about was a few different things.
The first thing I want to say is, it’s so easy for us to take these things personally.
Until I learned about this understanding, that’s exactly what I did. And before I started exploring this understanding, I would have heaped blame on myself for this low mood. And that would have looked like a lot of chatter in my head about how can I get out of this mood? How can I change it? What’s wrong with me? What have I done to create this? How can I fix it. A lot of taking responsibility for it innocently.
And maybe talking to myself about being lazy or unmaotivated, anything in that kind of realm. And, again, yeah, that was an innocent reaction to what was happening. I see this kind of situation, this kind of low mood very differently now.
One of the things I wanted to say is that when we have a lot of that chatter about our responsibility for our moods, and blaming ourselves and shaming ourselves for that, that is resistance. So any kind of any kind of chatter like that is really us resisting what is happening. And again, we do this innocently. I certainly did it for years and decades.
The way that I see it so differently now is that instead of it’s instead of thinking that it’s me, somehow magically creating this mood, and I’m somehow responsible for what’s happening. What I see now is that this is universal life energy moving through me, and this is just what’s happening today. And when I see this low mood from that perspective, what that means is that I don’t take it personally at all.
There’s a little bit of background chatter, I guess, about how I don’t like what’s going on. But what’s really nice is that I’m not taking responsibility for it, like I said. It’s something that’s moving through me at this moment. It came in when it wanted to come in, and it’ll leave when it wants to leave. I really see it, that these kinds of things, even when we don’t like them, they have the same kind of wisdom, as the weather and fighting them is just as useless as fighting or complaining about the weather.
So that was the first thing I wanted to say:
It’s the taking of our moods personally, that that really makes them sticky.
And it’s that resistance, or that is resistance and it that just tends to make the situation worse rather than better.
In the past, I think I would have noticed too that because of all the resistance that I would have been doing the moods that I didn’t like lasted way longer, and were much more extreme and were much more painful for me. So yeah, there was just a lot more suffering. because of what I believed was happening because of the responsibility that I believed that I had for that mood.
It seems to me, and this is why I wanted to post this today, record this today and then record a follow up for next week, after a few days, it seems to me that there is always wisdom in these low moods, that’s at least been my experience.
If you go back to Q&A episode 9, that one’s about depression and it ties in really nicely with this episode. And what I saw, and you can listen to the full episode there, but what I saw with the periods of depression that I experienced, was that there was some wisdom to them. The way that I describe it is the tide had gone way out. So, everything got really quiet. And the ocean seemed quite far away.
And if we didn’t know any better, of course, we wouldn’t know that the tide, of course, it always comes back in. So what I’ve been exploring today and what I wanted to share is, what if I just really lean into the wisdom that’s here in this low mood?
What could it be that it’s trying to tell me? Will there be any insights for me about what’s happening?
Now, I think, and I could really explore this in a lot more depth. But one thing that I’m noticing is that sometimes these things happen, and they are just like the weather, they’re just moving through. That’s just what they are. And they finish when they finish and we carry on with our lives.
And then other times, there can be at least my experience has been there can be an insight that comes from, from a situation like a low mood like this. And I don’t know what the difference is. I don’t know why it is that sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe sometimes I just don’t notice the wisdom that comes with the low mood, I’m not sure. But what I want to explore this week with myself is just observing the low mood and whether or not there’s something to be gleaned from it, I’m really not attaching a lot of heaviness or significance to that question.
I’m holding it super lightly.
I can say that in the past the last few months, anytime I enter a low mood, what usually ends up happening, and I think I talked about this on the episode with Jonelle Sims, what usually ends up happening is that as I come out of the low mood, there’s kind of a shift, something creative happens. I have a new idea about something I want to explore here on the podcast or in a piece of writing or whatever it is.
So it is like the tide going out. And then when the tide comes back in, it brings new information. But again, I’m not too attached to that. This may just be a storm moving through, and there’s nothing I need to do about it. And when it’s done, it’ll be done.
So that’s what I wanted to share today. That’s not a very coherent, I don’t think exploration. So I apologize for that. It took everything I had to just show up at my desk here today. But as I say, what I’m really interested to do is to record another episode for next week. So that’ll be episode 13. And that’ll be a follow up to this one about low moods.
So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. Just the ideas of not taking our low moods to personally, not resisting them, which really I think helps them to move through much more quickly.
And then the bonus thing on top of that the icing is being open to the idea that low moods might be a precursor to some sort of shift or insight or idea, or creative impulse or thing that I want to do.
I hope that’s been helpful for you. Thank you so much for listening. I certainly look forward to what’s going to happen next week on episode 13.
Take care and I will see you then. Bye
Featured image photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash
Leave a Comment