Mood Rings and Mood Swings (24 August 2006)

I’ve never actually seen a mood ring, but from time to time they have had fad status. You can tell a person’s mood by the color of the ring: blue for happy, green for so-so, black for anxious. The rings themselves are basically a liquid crystal display (LCD) calibrated to the average skin temperature of 82 degrees. If your skin temperature is average, the ring shows green. If your skin temperature is higher than average, the ring turns blue: the warmer the ring, the darker the blue; the cooler the ring, the deeper the black. I’m not sure what the rings would do for such moods as anger, guilt, or sadness. But this blog entry is not about mood rings so much as it is about moods, especially variations in mood—mood swings. A new book by Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf, 2006), revisits the idea of the “emotional thermostat,” which has also been called the “emotional baseline” or “setpoint” by other authors. The baseline is our normal mood. When good things happen, our mood elevates above the baseline. When we are challenged by circumstances, our mood drops below the baseline.

Gilbert relates the emotional thermostat to what he calls the psychological immune system.” Significant events--whether we consider then “good” or whether we think of them as “bad”--trigger the psychological immune system, which provides us with ways of coping. Small things--such as spilling the milk (or wine), having a flat tire, finding a quarter on the sidewalk, or receiving a promotion at work—often influence our mood more than “big things.” This seems to imply that the accumulation of small things we encounter on a daily basis influence our mood more than major life events, such as losing a job, losing a loved one (whether through death, divorce, or relocation), serious illness, or winning the Lotto.

The real questions—at least for me, however—are whether we can reset our emotional thermostats, so that the little slings and arrows of semi-outrageous fortune have less influence, and, if so, how we can go about doing that. You probably know at least one person who pretends to be more joyful than he or she really is. The person may have a fixed and constant smile and those in conversation with him or her would say, “never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.” Meanwhile, beneath the cheerful façade, you can see glimpses of the shadow of anger, grief, and sorrow. While you may be able to “fake it ‘till you make it” in some aspects of life, I am not sure that resetting the emotional thermostat is one of them.

Just as most of us probably know someone who masks the reality of his or her feelings with the appearance of happiness, most of us probably know people who really are happier than “average” and others who are less happy than “average,” whether in the direction of anger or in the direction of sadness. Their emotional thermostats are set either higher or lower than average. If we are average or below on the scale, or even if we are above average but wanted to stretch ourselves to be ever more joyful, how exactly might we do that?

A number of authors have suggested that keeping a “gratitude journal” will help us focus on the things that elevate our mood, and where we place our focus does seem to be key. In SCS and NLP, we think of this as our "perceptual frame," which is set by a combination of conscious intent and salient beliefs. Salience of beliefs is determined by a combination of context (I am or am not safe in this situation) and core beliefs (the Universe is or is not a safe place). A gratitude journal influences both our conscious intent and the beliefs we have had about our specific context and the Universe as a whole. When we choose to look for those things for which we can and should feel a sense of gratitude, we begin to influence whatever beliefs we had about our place in the Universe. As the evidence accumulates, our emotional thermostat is set increasingly higher.

I suspect that conscious intent can also assist with your remembering that small things tend to influence your mood far more than their insignificance would warrant so that, when you experience something small that would have influenced your emotional thermostat in the past, you will automatically use your psychological immune system to reset your perceptual frame back on your feelings of gratitude.

joel@scs-matters.com
www.scs-matters.com