BECOME A SHREWD OBSERVER OF YOUR OWN MOODS

April 29th, 2009

Just as you need to have some sense of the weather in order to know how to dress and whether to take a raincoat or an umbrella along, so you need to have a good sense of your mood in order to make the necessary adjustments to your lifestyle. Sometimes fluctuations in mood occur during a single day. A piece of bad news, a valuable object mislaid or an encounter with an unpleasant person may plunge you into a gloomy frame of mind for several hours, only to be reversed later in the day by a piece of good news, the recovery of your lost treasure or a visit with a friend. Recognizing the connection between your mood and these external events turns out to be enormously useful in making the hour-by-hour adjustments to help even out your mood across the day.

Other mood fluctuations occur over days and are less easy to recognize. For example, people may become depressed a few days after the clocks are turned back at the end of autumn, after returning from abroad or after a big party. In these three situations the deterioration in mood may be due to the hour’s decrease in afternoon daylight, jet lag, or the delayed effects of alcohol respectively. One useful strategy for those who experience unexplained dips in mood is to keep a daily mood log, which will help you to recognize the connection between mood fluctuations and external events. At times such logs can be crucial in convincing you that a clear pattern exists. For example, it was only after she had kept a log for several months that one of my patients was willing to concede that the alcohol she consumed on Saturday night was responsible for the dip in mood experienced two or three days later.

Finally, there are mood changes that have a longer period of duration, such as the monthly mood changes of premenstrual syndrome or the annual mood fluctuations that occur with the change of the seasons in people with SAD or the winter blues.

Mood may change with the environment – physical, climatic or human. One of my patients would feel depressed every time she went to her office. This seemed strange as she liked her colleagues and was passionate about the work itself. The clues to her depression lay in her associated symptoms – headache, dizziness, fatigue and difficulties with short-term memory. She worked in an air-tight office block full of office chemicals – printer cartridges, copiers, FAX machines and other sources of organic solvents. She was a victim of the so-called sick-building syndrome, and depression is one of the key symptoms that affect people suffering from this disorder. One patient with seasonal affective disorder experienced depression after she moved from a bright high-rise block of flats to a dim ground-floor studio. A third patient became depressed every time she visited her mother-in-law. The patient was very self-conscious about her looks and was constantly battling to lose weight. Somehow her mother-in-law always managed to direct the conversation to the patient’s figure, often in the guise of a compliment. ‘That dress really suits you,’ she would say, ‘it’s just right for your shape. Where did you find it?’ This would invariably make the patient self-conscious and depressed. In all of these cases, the first step in handling the problem was understanding it. An old medical adage is that you cannot treat before you diagnose. I therefore recommend that if you are of a moody disposition, become your own diagnostician, find out what is depressing you and then proceed to take remedial steps.