HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR MOOD: 11 PRACTICAL TIPS - GEOGRAFÍA - 2025

The mood is an emotional state that can have a positive or negative valence. In other words; people talk about having a positive or negative frame of mind.

Mood differs from emotions, feelings, or affect in that they are less specific, less intense, and less likely to be triggered by a stimulus or event.

In this article I explain 11 ways to improve your mood that I hope will help you. Are you in a period where you find yourself down? Do you just want to be able to be okay but don't know how to do it?

According to a study carried out by ABC news, a part of our individual happiness is pre-determined by genetic and circumstantial factors, but 40% we can control it depending on the thoughts and actions that we carry out during the day.

11 Tips to improve your mood

1- Train your mind to focus on the good things that happen to you

If you are going through a difficult time and you feel depressed, you may have entered a vicious cycle with a seemingly dead end.

Surely you think, most of the time, about the negative things that you have in your life, what you would like to have and do not have, thinking over and over again about how happy others are and how unhappy you are.

When you feel depressed, a phenomenon acts in your mind that feeds the vicious circle in which you find yourself: cognitive dissonance.

This theory, devised by Leon Festinger, explains that people, when we have beliefs or thoughts, we seek to confirm and corroborate these thoughts and beliefs.

In order to confirm them, what we do is focus our attention on those things that do confirm them, ignoring everything that would refute them.

For example, if your belief is “people misbehave with me”, you start looking in your memories and experiences for situations in which people have misbehaved with you, and you only focus on these situations that feed your belief.

Under this phenomenon, if during the day, for example at work, a colleague has looked at you badly and later another colleague has given you a hug, your focus of attention will only register the colleague who has looked at you badly since it is the one who confirm and nurture your belief that "people misbehave me."

This is how the mind works. However, fortunately, the mind is very trainable.

If you have a tendency to feel depressed, you can train your mind to reverse this phenomenon. And that instead of focusing on the negative aspects, you can focus on the positive aspects.

To do this, I propose that every night, at the end of your day, you remember all the pleasant and beautiful moments that have happened to you during the day and write them down in a diary.

If you do it every day, you will see for yourself how your mind tends more and more to focus more on the positive things while ignoring the negative things that happen to you.

2- Your own spiritual encounter

There is an extensive list of literature that demonstrates the positive effects of spiritual practice on mental health.

Make a new version of your life. A new version that includes a spiritual practice routine that exercises your body and mind.

Spiritual practice has many forms and they are all valid. It's about you being able to create yours.

It can be from praying for the most devout to meditation, yoga, sports or walking through a forest or a park. The objective of all of them is the same: to be with yourself, to listen to yourself, to feel yourself.

The important thing is that you adopt it as a habit. It has to be a regular practice that you incorporate into your lifestyle.

3- Cultivate gratitude

Being grateful is a great source of happiness. Surely, if you stop to think, the happiest people you meet are those who are most grateful. Practice being grateful.

Be grateful for everything you have, be grateful to the people with whom you share your life, be grateful for your existence in this world, be grateful for being able to observe a field of poppies, be grateful for being on the couch watching a movie, be grateful for the gestures that other people have with you…

Try to make it a regular practice. Try to incorporate it as a way of life. You will be surprised how something so simple can bring you so much fulfillment.

4- Feel the connection with someone

In a survey about happiness, participants were asked what were the things that made them feel happiest in their lives.

Most of the people responded that one of the things that brought them the most happiness was feeling connected to another person. And how right. Remember how you felt the last time you had a connection with someone. Didn't you feel alive?

In reality, what brings us more happiness to people is the relationship with other people. Everything else: work, money, quality of life, etc. it is an addition that adds or subtracts to happiness.

Therefore, it is essential to be in a good mood and feel full, cultivate and take care of social relationships. It goes without saying that the quantity is not important but the quality of these relationships.

If you want to increase your mood, seek to reconnect with a person. Stay with that friend or family member with whom you feel a special chemistry.

That person with whom you understand with a glance, that person who has the same sense of humor that you have, that person with whom you talk and change the world.

5- Dig up your photo albums

If you find yourself in a period of depression and melancholy accompanied by a tunnel vision in which you only see everything negative in your life, digging up and looking at your photographs of when you were a child, of your vacations, and of the festivals of your town can be more effective in improving your mood than eating chocolate.

This is what a group of researchers from the United Kingdom's Open University have studied.

These researchers studied how mood improves after eating chocolate, drinking an alcoholic beverage, watching TV, listening to music, and looking at a personal photo album.

This study reveals that listening to music and eating chocolate has the least effect on mood change; drinking alcohol and watching television has a minimum increase of 1%; and the top winner was viewing a personal photo album as people increased their mood by 11%.

After browsing through your photo albums, choose the photos that you like the most and post them in a visible place so that you can look at them frequently.

6- Go towards the light

After three weeks of light therapy, more than 50% of participants in a study on depression reported a substantial improvement in their mood.

One hour a day exposed to bright light had the same effect as antidepressants and no side effects. Even the mood continued to improve weeks after finishing the light therapy.

Find moments to be in contact with the brightness of the light. Going out for a while and sitting on a terrace in the sun can be very therapeutic to improve your mood.

In the case that it is winter and there is no sun or that the light is of low intensity, you can do it with artificial light.

A lamp with fluorescent light that emits a luminosity similar to that of the sun, but that filters ultraviolet light placed a meter away, can be used for this purpose.

Try it and tell us about your experience.

7- Take a day to collect your thoughts

Sometimes your mind is in a mess of disordered and confused thoughts and ideas, and you need to clear your mind to regain balance. Take a day to clarify your ideas.

It can be helpful to write them down on paper to help you define and organize your thoughts. As well as to get out of your head all that noise of thoughts that now remain on paper.

After having that moment with yourself to clear your thoughts, relax your mind by doing an activity that helps clear your mind.

8- Plan a fun activity

Curiously, we people live a lot from illusion and imagination. The simple fact of planning a fun activity and counting the days until that activity is something that gives us great enthusiasm and joy.

It is therefore a good strategy to improve your mood to have fun activities planned.

If, for example, you know that in a month you go for the weekend with some friends to a rural house or you have a nice excursion planned, the simple fact of knowing that you have something planned gives you great dynamism, enthusiasm and motivation.

Once you have carried out that activity, program a new activity in your agenda, you will once again feel illusion and dynamism that will make you feel alive.

In addition, the fact of doing fun activities and feeling that you do not lead a flat and routine life is a great source of motivation that will bring you happiness in your life.

Do it and you will see how your mood improves more and more.

9- do something spontaneous

Besides planning fun activities, also bet on spontaneity. Getting out of the routine, out of the established, out of the line that you have set for yourself is a lot of fun. It makes you feel young, passionate and that everything flows.

Perhaps today you had planned to go to work, do the shopping and then do the bills for the month.

Except going to work, everything else is breakable, so go after work to that wine fair that your city has organized or take the car and go to a viewpoint to see the stars, whatever, but do it.

"But what will I eat tomorrow if I'm not going to buy today?"

Ask yourself another question: Is that really that important? After doing something spontaneously, analyze how you wake up the next day.

Remember this state every time you feel low again, and encourage yourself to jump back into spontaneity.

10- smell a lemon

Citrus aromas have been proven to improve mood due to their anti-stress properties. The sense of smell is a much more powerful sense than we think and with which we can change our mood.

You can directly smell the fruit or apply lemon essential oils on your elbows and wrists to release its aroma.

11- Live here and now

The most important formula for being in a good mood is learning to live in the present. And it is not a utopia, it is reality.

We tend to focus our attention on reaching goals: having a job, getting a promotion, saving money, having a partner, having a house, having children, etc. And focused on achieving goals, we forget to live in the present, the moment we are in. The path we set out to reach those goals.

It is important to improve your mood and feel happy that you learn to connect with the sensations that the present moment is offering you.

If, for example, you are with some friends having something in a bar, it may be that you feel that you are not entirely with them but that your mind is wandering about what worries you or everything you have to do the next day.

At that moment you are missing a great present. When you see your head start to wander, let your thoughts drift and try to connect with the here and now.

Feel the warmth of your friends with you, see how you feel being with them, being together, being able to laugh, being able to have interesting conversations…

These little things from day to day are what will make you feel good, and that you come home with a smile.