Moods, unlike primary emotions, are less intense, but more lasting and influential; They may seem weak, discreet, easy to forget, but we underestimate their power and influence, able to ruin our day…
Our life is colored by the small nuances of the soul. Moods such as melancholy or good humor influence us more than great emotions. They all teach us something, that is why it is important to accept and love them, because they are, ultimately, what makes us human.
Differences between emotions and moods
Pride, compassion, envy, melancholy… We could define moods as mental contents –conscious or unconscious– in which body states, subtle emotions and automatic thoughts are mixed. The role they play and their influence on who we are and what we do is immense, and yet we give them little attention. But we can approach them, because they offer us very valuable information; it is only necessary to stop: stop working, running, cursing the world…
Moods do not necessarily have a precise object like emotions, which does not imply that they lack a cause, but that this it is not so obvious. In general, emotions are a “response” to something that “comes” to us from outside; moods, on the other hand, can also come to us from within, be self-produced. Emotions radicalize and simplify our perception of events; moods complicate it, but make it more subtle.
Emotions are “social agitators” that modify our relationship with others and with the world; Moods are, rather, “internal agitators” that modify our relationship with ourselves and our vision of the world – which can prompt us to change many things, but in a slower way. Emotions drive us towards external action, and moods, first of all, towards internal reflection.
Moods can persevere in the wake of strong emotions (the state in which we find ourselves after a great joy or a great disappointment). And they can also represent the terrain that facilitates them: slowness, which favors the blows of sadness and melancholy; the resentment that waves of anger prepare; the panic that breaks out on a background of anxiety. First come the gray clouds and then the storm breaks loose… But the essence of our mental weather is based more on moods: after all, we spend little time under the influence of anger and much more under the influence of our feelings. irritations. More time with nostalgia than with true despair. More time with concerns than with major panic attacks…
How to know what mood invades us
Our moods are always there, like background noise, but to perceive them it is necessary to stop and listen; as if we were walking through the forest and stopped to listen: we would perceive, then, the sound of the wind, the sound of the trees moving, the chirping of the birds…
Stop to listen to the murmur of our interior it is usually enough at the beginning; if we want to go further, it will be necessary for us to learn to listen and observe our moods better, using, for example, meditation.
The zen meditation, precisely, offers us a beautiful metaphor. We can observe our moods by staying close to them, like a walker who enters a waterfall and remains sheltered, between the rock and the water that falls with force, trembling a little, a bit wet too, but protected and in a privileged place. .
One of the objectives of the meditation that is called “full consciousness” consists, precisely, in stand aside for a moment and watch the moods pass, break them down, understand them… but without trying to stop their flow. Can anyone stop the water from a waterfall? Now that we know what a mood is, we can ask what distinguishes it from an emotion. The answer might be that mood is a kind of evolved and civilized cousin of emotions that have become more outdated; they are, so to speak, subtle emotions.