I was running a group coaching session for the Daily Reminders Premium 🔖 crew the other night and among the topics we covered (which included money, parenting & helping others), we spoke about moods.
Specifically the hallowed process of moving from a ‘low’ one, to a ‘higher’ one.
In my response, we touched on this notion of ‘low’ and ‘high’ and how you can't really appreciate the existence of one, without the other. (Sounds overly philosophical, even as I type it, but it's true!)
And then yesterday, I had my own example.
Outside-in masterclass
I was in a foul mood in the morning. Snappy, impatient, disheartened, even despairing at one point. It looked pretty bad in there (the same as it always looks, to be fair – low moods are spectacularly uninteresting).
Anyway, the day continued. It was a busy one. My wife's away for a week and I'm taking the child on a 2-day cycling tour, with luggage, which requires muchos prep.
🚲 🧳 🧽 🎒 🔧 🥖 🧼 🗺️ 🛞
Plus queuing up Daily Reminders for while we're away.
What's more, I had a full-on Focus Magazine article end-of-day-deadline to boot!!
😳
So I felt overwhelmed and grumpy and basically like life was a bunch of crap that I wanted to have nothing to do with.
Of course I knew it was ‘just my thinking’ (about all of the above) but that's got nothing to do with anything in these situations, certainly not for me, anyway. (Your mileage may vary.)
And then later in the afternoon, having finished writing the article in record time (and being really pleased with how it turned out; ego-expectations exceeded!) I suddenly noticed what a great mood I was in.
And the mind says:
📦🗣️: “Well, that's because you've written the article. Of course.”
And it kind of was. But it also wasn't.
It was a lot more obvious from the position of the ‘good’ mood, that I'd been properly caught up in a whole bunch of outside-in thinking about how busy my day was and how unfair that all was, and the mind's predicted consequences of not getting everything done and the like; none of which came to pass.
(It's obvious that unnecessary worry is unnecessary when in retrospect the thing doesn't even happen! 😂)
But it was also obvious that the feeling-good wasn't so much about having done the article, but more that all of the low-mood thinking I'd been doing had gone away.
That was the change. That was what I was feeling. The change. The difference.
For which I was profoundly grateful.
☺️
What difference?
When you read that, you might be forgiven for asking:
“Well, hang on Giles, if you can't ‘use’ the Innate Health understanding to get yourself out of a low mood, or even properly see that you don't have to worry like that, what difference does it make?!”
And all I've got for you—here and now, as I write, the next day—is that even though I was in the full effect of that low mood, I knew that's all it was, so I didn't take it too seriously.
- I knew it would pass; that's what it means to be human
- I knew it didn't have to stop me from doing anything that needed doing
- I knew it didn't mean anything about me (or anything else for that matter)
- I knew not to waste any time thinking about this so called ‘low’ mood, thereby layering it up and making it worse.
And I don't know about you, but that seems like quite a lot of difference to me!
For which I am profoundly grateful.
💝
Giles
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Giles P Croft
It could be worse. You could be coming off heroin addiction.