The anatomy of a mood
Some people make a distinction between feelings, moods, and mindsets, basically drawing the line between them based on their duration. A feeling is what you get when someone gives you the bird. A mood is what happens when everything around you starts to look drab, dull, slightly offensive. And a mindset is something that persists as we weave in and out of feelings and moods, a foundation that either continually brings us up, or takes us down, and often determines how we heal and grow over time.
I’m interested in all three, as I don’t necessarily think that they can be separated. Talking about a feeling separate from its larger context of mood is like trying to figure out how a tomato in a grocery store got so ripe, and the rest of the plant is completely ignored.
As I’ve been thinking about moods for years, I’ve tried many different ways of tracking my moods, and have eventually ended up at the conclusion that there’s no point in recording this stuff unless I’m learning something about myself in the process. There is still a lot of debate about moods. Can you have more than one mood at a time? Can moods be reduced to more basic components? Does saying you are a 5 of 10 on the happy scale actually mean anything? What is there to be learned from tracking moods over time? Are we even objective enough about our own moods to know what we’re feeling with any accuracy at all?
What field do moods lie in? What dimensions can we drape over moods and mark on a grid where they are? Can you ever compare one mood to another, and say that one is more energetic than the other, or that one is more fleeting than the other? Who has a copy of the dictionary that dissects and compares every mood to the others and knows how you feel and can tell you its Mood Identification Number?