10drxtcMEMBERWOLFPACKFAMILY LORD MASTERM...'s blog: "other tickle tests"

Merritt, your mood swings between Calm & Happy At any given moment during the day, you're likely to feel contented, calm and peaceful. Given your positive outlook on life and your steady demeanor, you don't allow all of life's difficulties to rile you up. You experience about 8 times as many positive moods as you do negative moods. Your energy level reflects a fairly even split between your equal desires to expend energy and be still, holding your energy back. Your moods are infinitely varied and complex. They can range from happy to sad to energetic to passive with just about everything in between. In the following section of the test, we'll break down your moods into eight states. Understanding these eight states is the first step to monitoring and managing your mood swings. Your Mood Swings Mood Highs & Lows The Big Picture Your Mood Swings: Causes and Culprits History Further Reading Mood Highs & Lows In addition to your top moods, and your predominant mood swings, you are likely to feel as many as eight different mood states throughout the day. They are: Calm Happy Energetic Enthusiastic Exhausted Uneasy Sad Passive Your mood swings are what you are most likely to notice, but it is the frequency of each of these eight mood states that will have the greatest impact on how you handle and perceive situations every day.. In fact, your moods set the tone for all of your day-to-day experiences—they are the filter through which you experience the good, the bad, the highs and the lows of your day. Let's see how your moods measure up on each of the eight individual mood scales. Calm You scored 10 out of 10. When a person feels calm, he or she feels positive about life but generally has a lower level of energy. This lower level of energy can be beneficial insofar as it offers the individual time to think, reflect on and enjoy their feelings of optimism. Happy You scored 10 out of 10. Happy individuals are generally filled with satisfaction and contentment. Happiness is a purely emotional state—it is not attached to a particular level of energy. It is quite possible for happy individuals to feel extremely satisfied and content with life, but to lack the desire to expend energy on making the situation even better. Energetic You scored 10 out of 10. When a person feels energetic, it is usually experienced as a flurry of activity. Feeling energetic is neither positive nor negative. It's a neutral emotion that simply denotes a highly active state-most likely the result of channeling all feelings, both positive and negative, into actions. Enthusiastic You scored 8 out of 10. A highly enthusiastic individual will experience positive feelings and high energy levels since enthusiasm is both a heightened emotional and heightened physical state. Exhausted You scored 2 out of 10. When a person feels exhausted, he or she experiences negative feelings about life and exceptionally low levels of energy. An exhausted individual might feel depressed, yet be unable to muster the energy to make changes that would take their life in a new or positive direction. This is a particularly difficult mood to navigate since low levels of energy and sadness serve up a double whammy. Uneasy You scored 2 out of 10. When a person feels uneasy, he or she feels negative about life and invests high energy in their negative emotions. They often appear actively upset about the events in their life. Uneasiness is a complicated state because the two components—sadness and obsession over that sadness—feed off one another making situations seem worse than they really are. Sad You scored 2 out of 10. As you know, when a person feels sad, he or she is filled with a sense of dissatisfaction and has a negative outlook on life. Sadness is not attached to a level of energy. In fact, it simply denotes a highly charged negative emotion. A person can feel sad without experiencing fatigue or heightened states of nervous energy. Passive You scored 2 out of 10. Passivity is usually experienced as a stillness in mind and body. In fact, feeling passive is not indicative of happiness or sadness, rather it is a neutral state. The primary emphasis is on quietude, with little attention paid to a positive or negative mood. Your Mood Swings Mood Highs & Lows The Big Picture Your Mood Swings: Causes and Culprits History Further Reading The Big Picture You have now learned about the frequency of your eight mood states; but how do these moods affect one another? And more importantly, how do they affect you? Are your moods taking you on an emotional rollercoaster ride or is it pretty smooth-sailing? The chart below shows your two most common moods Calm & Happy. It is the "distance" between these two moods that determines the type and intensity of your mood swings. As you can see, your predominant daily moods are located near one another on the diagram. This indicates that you experience only the very slightest of mood swings and points to a regularity of mood causing you to be emotionally even-keeled. Of course, every now and again even your mood will swing which might surprise you! Your Mood Swings Mood Highs & Lows The Big Picture Your Mood Swings: Causes and Culprits History Further Reading Your Mood Swings: Causes and Culprits Although you have a dominant mood, you are liable to experience any of eight mood states at some point. Depending on what's going on in your life, your moods can shift on a daily, monthly or even yearly basis. So what's the decisive factor? Well, it could be just about anything: Life events, both good and bad, your perception of those events, your physiological makeup, even your coping methods. External Triggers There's plenty of truth to the old saying: the only thing certain in life is change. Relationships fluctuate, world events—both tragic and joyful—take place without warning. Plain and simple: things happen, and these external influences trigger various mood states. Naturally, people have different responses these triggers. For you, your mood tends to be most affected when you have a positive experience. You are particularly sensitive to the positive things that happen in everyday life and you have the ability to savor and celebrate even the smallest events. For you, finding a five-dollar bill on the ground would sooner raise your spirits than losing a five-dollar bill would lower your spirits. Internal Perceptions The way you perceive the events of your life can also play into the type and severity of the moods that you experience. Each of us has different internal beliefs about how life tends to unfold—whether you believe that it is dependent on your own actions or whether you think it is outside of your personal control. These internal perceptions can have a persistent and powerful affect on your mood state. For you, your internal beliefs tend to emphasize your own behavior over external forces. You tend to blame yourself when things go poorly and take all the credit when things go well. Your particular thought pattern—which focuses on your own actions rather than on external events—has the tendency to stick you with a lot of responsibility for how situations in your life turn out. If you believe your own accountability to the extreme, you will probably end up feeling a lot of self-inflicted pressure when it comes to your own success, with your mood suffering when you feel unaccomplished. Taking on too much personal blame when things go wrong can leave you feeling depressed, discouraged, and it can negatively affect your health. Conversely, affording yourself too much credit when things go well can leave you with an over-inflated sense of security, possibly setting you up for a big fall should anything outside of your control go wrong such as a natural disaster. Most life events unfold as a result of both your actions and situational factors. By placing too much emphasis on either your own behavior or external forces, your worldview may become skewed in a way that is unhelpful in fostering your general well-being and happiness. Mood Generalization In many situations, people generalize their current mood to the rest of their life. They might feel that if one thing has gone wrong, everything has gone wrong or if something good happens, all of life is great. While this can sometimes take a positive form, by producing extensive feelings of optimism, it can also be an agent of gloom when carried into other areas of your life. The extent to which you consistently believe that you can generalize from your current experience to predict your future success will either negatively or positively affect your mood. In fact, the power of positive thought can often result in positive life events while the power of negative thoughts can result in negative life events. For you, when things go wrong in your life, you tend to make sense of it by remembering that things haven't always been bad and that your situation will doubtless improve, especially if you are proactive in fixing the problem at hand. Instead of making negative generalizations about your life, you remain optimistic and try to change things for the better, if only by thinking positively. This kind of thinking keeps your mood upbeat even in adverse situations. Physiological Factors In addition to external forces and internal perceptions, physiological factors are often the culprits behind your mood swings. These might include hormone fluctuations, brain chemistry or diet. Women who are in the premenstrual phase of their fertility cycle can have large hormone shifts that may affect their mood. For those women who don't menstruate, the onset of menopause, pregnancy or an insufficient body weight are all mood-altering factors and may entail hormonal changes of their own. Men are also prone to hormonal shifts, often experiencing a hormonal rollercoaster in adolescence, or later in life as postulated by the theory of "male menopause." In addition, a person's brain chemistry can have an enormous effect on the moods they experience. In the most extreme case, "imbalanced" brain chemistry can lead to serious problems associated with mood such as depression, anxiety, and mania. The good news is that these imbalances can usually be treated with prescribed medications. If you feel that your mood swings sometimes get out of hand, you might want to seek professional advice. Your diet and your intake of controlled substances can also have a significant effect on your mood. For example, eating sugary foods boosts your energy in the short term but ultimately results in a "crash" to a lower-level mood. Alcohol can have a similar effect, producing a brief "high" followed by a depressing "low." As you can see, there are a variety of physiological factors that can affect your mood. While some are more manageable than others, it is important to take all of the above factors into account when figuring out the reasons behind your mood swings. Coping Strategies All of us have different ways of coping with the ups and downs of life. We develop these coping strategies through trial and error, determining what works best to improve a given situation. Effective coping skills can have a huge impact on mood management, allowing an individual to redirect their focus and turn a melancholy mood upside down. When bad moods strike, you usually The more tools and methods you have at your disposal, the more likely that you'll be able to solve any problem that comes your way. The Take Action! section below provides several alternative strategies for combating your negative moods. Take Action! There's no denying that when a bad mood hits, it's not fun. Still, not all negative moods are harmful—sometimes a negative mood can be a good indicator that things aren't going the way you'd like. A negative mood can be a call to action, even a blessing in disguise. However, when a negative mood spins out of control it can change from a helpful warning sign to a potentially harmful thought pattern that's extremely difficult to break. Most of the time, a negative mood is caused by a loss or perceived failure. Major areas in our lives that are susceptible to these negative feelings include family life, romantic partnerships, work, career, and friendships. Sometimes a bad mood may seem to come from out of the blue, but more often than not, it can be related back to a very specific frustration whether in the past or present. The next time you experience a negative mood, try the following steps: Step 1: Focus on the event that is triggering your mood and... change your behavior: Simply stop doing anything that may be contributing to the problem Make a list of things you could do to fix the problem Make a plan to do things differently next time the problem arises Remove yourself from harmful relationships or situations which are contributing to the negative mood Seek advice from friends, family members, or other people that you trust—sometimes, another perspective is all you need to lift your mood change the way you think about the event: Have faith that things will turn out for the best. Hope, in and of itself, can be restorative Make a list of the positive aspects of the situation—sometimes an important life lesson can come out of a seemingly bad event Make a list of the things that are going well in your life and try to focus on those elements Set aside a limited time to think about the negative aspects of the triggering event, then forbid yourself from thinking about it at other times of the day. For example, allow yourself 15 minutes each day to worry about the situation, and then stop Step 2: Focus on the mood you are experiencing and... actually do something to combat the mood: Express your emotions through a creative outlet such as painting or singing. Creative activities can be extremely cathartic Get some exercise—many studies have proven the benefit of exercise in alleviating depression or anxiety Give yourself a little gift to lift your spirits Keep yourself busy with things that are interesting or enjoyable to you— the more you busy yourself, the less time you will have to dwell on your negative thoughts Offer your help to someone else—not only will this keep you busy, but it will also give you a feeling of accomplishment and self-worth Spend some time with friends and family. Avoid isolating yourself, as loneliness may only feed your negative mood Use relaxation techniques—from simple deep breathing to meditation change the negative thought patterns that are produced by your mood or are contributing to your mood: Allow yourself to imagine positive, seemingly unrealistic outcomes—this may trigger a fresh perspective or a new solution Assess your feelings in an intellectual and rational manner—try to separate the actual facts from the emotion Try to determine whether you are employing all-or-nothing or catastrophic thinking. If so, reframe your thinking in a more positive and realistic light Gather strength and learning from your negative experience and then allow yourself to move on Sometimes, denial is healthy and useful. Every now and again, force yourself to stop thinking about the situation actively try to forget or deny your negative emotions Our list of strategies above demonstrates that, for the most part, behaviors, thoughts, and mood are highly interconnected. By adjusting one, you can affect the others. Accordingly, if you can find the power to assert control over one element in the equation, it can have a profound affect on improving your overall mood!