What is mood?

Mood is a temporary state of mind, or simply how you feel in a given moment.

Moods can feel good, bad, or neutral. They are generally more stable and less intense than emotions. Those tend to be stronger, more specific, and shorter in duration.

Working together, your moods and emotions have a profound impact across your life.

Your moods can influence:

• How you think, feel, and behave
• Your interest in daily activities
• How you develop and maintain relationships
• How you make decisions
• How you view the world (e.g., positively or negatively)

Trauma, posttraumatic stress injury, and emotions

Several negative emotions are associated with stress, trauma, and PTSI. They include:

• Fear and/or anxiety
• Sadness and/or depression
• Irritability and/or anger
• Guilt and/or shame
• Hopelessness

These emotions can feel overwhelming, especially after an experience of significant stress or trauma. They can lead to unhelpful changes in your thinking, as well as negative feelings that can impact you, your environment, and others around you.

Negative emotions	Unhelpful changes in thinking	Examples
Guilt or shame	Negative self-talk or doubt	“I am stupid” and/or “I cannot do anything right”
	Distorted blame	Blaming yourself for things you can’t control
Fear or anger	Difficulty trusting others	Not believing your colleagues, authority figures, or loved ones
	Detachment from or disinterest in others	Difficulty relating to your colleagues, authority figures, or loved ones
	Difficulty managing negative emotions	Unwanted feelings of fear, anger, horror, etc.
Sadness or hopelessness	Exaggerated negative expectations of yourself or the world	“I will never be happy again” and/or “The world is unsafe”
	Decreased participation in activities	Low energy levels and/or motivation. Loss of pleasure in activities you previously enjoyed
	Difficulty experiencing positive emotions	Reduced ability to feel love and happiness leads to feelings of guilt and shame instead

PTSD and depression

PTSD and depression often happen at the same time because of the impacts that stress and trauma can have on mood.

Everyone has low moods or periods of  “feeling blue” from time to time. However, depression is more intense and lasts longer. It has a large negative impact on your life.

Many symptoms of PTSD and depression overlap, including:

• Feeling detached from loved ones
• Difficulty experiencing positive emotions
• Decreased motivation to engage in regularly enjoyed activities

Low mood and the brain

Chemicals in your brain influence how you think, feel, and act. Two important ones that impact your mood are serotonin and dopamine. Negative mood states often occur when these chemicals are released in low levels.

Boosting these brain chemicals can help you shift towards a more positive state of mind. There are several things you can try to help increase your brain’s output of serotonin and dopamine, including:

• Physical activity
• Goal setting
• Eating nutrient-rich foods
• Trying something new
• Spending time in nature

Incorporating one (or many) of these habits into your daily routines may help improve your mood over time.

Thinking traps

Everybody experiences unhelpful thinking styles, also called thinking traps. These can match (and often worsen) your low mood states.

Thinking traps are especially common for people experiencing depression, anxiety, and PTSI. They have the power to impact how you interpret the world and the conclusions you come to.

Identifying when you’re falling into a thinking trap can be the first step to getting out of it. Increasing your self-awareness can help you escape negative thought cycles and decrease the gloomy mood states that often accompany them.

Some of the most common thinking traps include:

Thinking trap	Definition	Example	Counter thought
Catastrophizing	Expecting the worst-case scenario to happen, no matter how unlikely it might be in reality.	“I’m going to make a fool of myself at the gym. Everyone will laugh at me. I won’t be able to survive the embarrassment.”	“I may feel embarrassed, but others at the gym have probably felt that too. They will not judge me. I can ask someone for help if I need it.”
Mental filtering	Solely focusing on negative events while dismissing positive or neutral information.	“Everyone hated my presentation. A lot of people looked engaged and gave me compliments afterwards, but one person seemed bored with the whole thing.”	“I should be proud that I demonstrated a high capability of doing my job.”
All-or-nothing thinking	Seeing things in extremes or as black-or-white options. There’s either all good or all bad — and nothing in between.	“I planned to eat only healthy foods, but then I had a piece of chocolate cake. Now my diet is ruined!”	“Mistakes happen, but they do not mean I am a failure.”
Labelling	Attaching critical or absolute labels to yourself or others based on behaviours or reactions to a specific situation.	“That went wrong. I’m a failure.”	“I failed that time, but I will learn and do better in the future.”
Magnification and minimization	Magnifying the positive attributes of others while minimizing your own.	“Everyone else is so competent and put together. They do not want to hear about my struggles.”	“I deserve to talk about my struggles. Talking about how I’m feeling may help someone else.”
Shoulding and musting	Placing undue pressure on yourself to meet unrealistic expectations.	“I must pick up as many additional shifts as possible or else I will let my co-workers down.”	“My value as a co-worker is not conditional on picking up additional shifts. I need to take care of myself first so I can be the best version of myself for others.”
Personalization	Assuming personal blame for everything that goes wrong in your life.	“My kid got in trouble at school today because I didn’t spend enough time with him. It happened because I work so much.”	“My child might have made a mistake, but I am not in control of his behaviour and can only talk to him about it.”
Emotional reasoning	Interpreting a situation based on your emotions in the moment.	“I feel really anxious on this plane ride. Something bad is about to happen.”	“Feelings are not facts. I have flown many times before, and nothing bad has ever happened. I can accept my feelings of anxiety without believing something awful will happen.”

Activities

Naming emotions

Often, labelling a negative emotion can help you feel better. Naming an emotion is a skillful technique that requires paying attention to how you feel, understanding what you feel, and using language to communicate it — even if only to yourself.

The next time you notice a strong feeling, pause and label the emotion you are experiencing. Be as specific as possible.

In 1982, Dr. Gloria Willcox created The Feeling Wheel as a tool to help people identify and talk about their emotions. It still works today! You can use it to help assess your own condition.

(For an interactive version of the model, try The Emotion Wheel app by All The Feelz.)

Increase motivation

Use checklists and goal setting to track your short- and long-term accomplishments. Reward yourself for every win, no matter how big or small.

“Scheduled” emotional release

Put a fixed amount of time in your schedule — typically no more than 30 minutes — to check in with your emotions. Let yourself cry or yell privately if you need to. 

If you’re experiencing negative emotions, physical exercise can help relieve anxiety by reducing stress and tension in your muscles.

Grounding

Use your senses — sight, taste, touch, smell, and sound — to get out of your feelings and into your body. Cycle through each sense and pick out things you notice using each one (five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, etc.). Alternatively, you can do a short activity that engages your senses, like holding ice in your hands or walking barefoot on grass.

Self love

Do one small thing that makes you happy every day to remind yourself that you deserve to feel good.

Writing prompts

Identify your emotions

How have your moods and emotions been impacted by stress and trauma? Consider the feelings of guilt, shame, anger, and fear. What does each one mean to you? When do you encounter these feelings? How do you experience them?

Challenge negative thoughts

Write down the negative thoughts you have about yourself. Using the table above, try to identify any thinking traps you may have fallen into. Then write down why each thought might be untrue.