3 Ways To Improve Your Mood in Minutes

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When you’re feeling low, it can color your entire day. To some extent, reframing your mindset has to be a conscious decision, but you can’t change your mood as easily as flipping a mental switch in your brain. Use some of these techniques to quell your mood and gain a greater sense of control over how you’re feeling.

1. Take Advantage of Aromatherapy’s Mood-Enhancing Effects

The neurological and hormonal activity that regulates your mood is intricately entwined with the faculties that register and process olfactory input. Triggering various neurological stimuli by introducing specific aromas activates these processing centers simultaneously.

Try Young Living Essential Oils to begin doing aromatherapy at home. They are made from natural ingredients, and the company sources its materials sustainably. They partner with farmers and suppliers that have limited access to fair trade opportunities, so making a purchase from this aromatherapy product manufacturer helps to end cyclical, generational poverty.

If you’re feeling lethargic and listless, an invigorating aroma such as orange, peppermint, or rosemary. To wind down when your mood has you feeling keyed up or stressed, a calming scent such as lavender or chamomile can produce an instantaneously quieting effect on your nerves.

2. Disrupt Negative Thoughts With Focused Meditation

A downward-spiraling thought process is hard to break from, and the longer it persists, the harder it becomes to shake away. Downtrodeness tends to be self-perpetuating in people’s thought patterns. Negativity bias has a strong foundation in survival-based instincts that evolved over millennia. Being quick to perceive danger and potential harm in the world around you makes you less likely to engage in risky behaviors. In this respect, it conserves mental energy in your decision-making process, allowing you to react to external stimuli rapidly to steer clear of high-risk situations.

The negativity bias that helped your ancestors thrive thousands of years ago can have a detrimental impact on the way that you engage with your environment in today’s modern world. Focusing too much of your attention on worries and stressors probably won’t help you survive and thrive. It will probably just bum you out and detract from the depthness and detail with which you perceive new surroundings or situations.

Work-related anxieties about things that happened last week that are weighing down your mood or money-related concerns about how you’ll be spending the week ahead are going to prevent you from fully experiencing the present. This makes it harder to concentrate and retain new information, which may exacerbate your sense of stress or disorganization.

Meditation geared towards mindfulness is a great technique to counter dominant negativity in your day-to-day life and thought patterns. Begin this practice by setting aside just five to ten minutes in the morning or evening to reaffirm your sense of presence. Sit down in a quiet place and resolve to stop thinking about things that are not relevant to the present moment in time. Collecting yourself and refocusing your attention on real-time perception and engagement in your environment enables you to redefine your mood with greater context in the present rather than self-perpetuating negativity or stress.

3. Learn About Something That Excites or Motivates You

Awakening awe for the things that you enjoy learning about is an excellent activity to redirect your thoughts and mood. Even if you’re pretty busy, taking just a few minutes to concentrate on something you want to be concentrating on replenishes your mental energy and wherewithal. Whereas applying your concentration to stuff that you’d rather not to is strenuous, directing your attention to something you think is cool is practically effortless. Taking a little bit of time to do just that makes the simple act of concentration easier to muster up. When the things you have to do and think about seem any little bit less onerous, it can dramatically brighten your outlook towards them.

When good things happen, a bad mood will make them seem less good. Likewise, you may find that you’re a little bit quicker to perceive the bad things that happen with more negativity and dread than you reasonably should. Taking control of your mood puts more of each experience that you have on your terms, and it helps you live with a greater mindfulness and purposefulness.