“The key to emotional enlightenment is the knowledge that only your thoughts can affect your moods.”
— David D. Burns, psychiatrist
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Emotions
Do we control emotions or do they control us? Before considering the issue of control we must define what emotions are. According to Ekkekakis (2012):
“Emotional episodes are elicited by some thing, are reactions to something, and are generally about something, the cognitive appraisal involved in the transaction between person and object is considered a defining element.”
This active definition of emotions allows us to refer to our less tangible feelings as attitudes, moods, or states of mind.
Daniel Goleman is credited with introducing us to the importance of emotion with his 1995 book “Emotional Intelligence.” Goleman is a science writer with an academic training in psychology, he was not a researcher or therapist, he was a publicist. That is to say he understood what people were ready to hear and how to speak to them.
We discuss the importance of emotion now because we were ready to recognize it then, not because anything new was revealed about it in 1995. Emotion’s importance in psychology had been widely discussed a century earlier by William James (1884) in an essay titled “What is an Emotion?” But in those times social attitudes were not open to its recognition.
Goleman popularized practical ways of considering emotion that could be applied to personal relationships, business management, and public education. The term is in common use, but it’s rarely used with any depth of understanding. The importance of emotion has long been recognized, but its nature and effects remain poorly understood (Lange 2020).
Social Acceptance
The idea of emotional expression has become somewhat respectable. Previously, it had connotations of weakness, ineffectiveness, lack of intellect, and femininity. With new academic credentials, which no one particularly knows or cares about, emotion is treated with moderate respect.
The masculine ideal is still the stoic, while the ideal feminine remains emotionally pliant and deferential. I’m referring to Western Culture specifically; other cultures had and have different attitudes toward emotion.
Emotional recognition was part of the populist youth movement of the 60s. It was motivated by political, cultural, and personal dissatisfactions. Issues that could not be addressed intellectually because they had little place in discussions of the time. To address the roots of these issues people needed to express their emotions.
The emotions of anger and frustration were similar across the different groups. These were directed at established norms and control. Emotions were a beachhead on which many people could land their objections.
Like most revolutions, the “emotional revolution” of 1960s through the 1990s, if we can call it that, lacked clear boundaries and had many roots. Now that emotions are respectable, we are likely to explain things in emotional terms. This doesn’t lead to agreement or understanding, but that was not the point.
It became the fashion to think of all emotions as variations on a theme. As if emotions were colors on a spectrum all to be understood by the same underlying physics.
Psychologists administered questionnaires whose rating scales provided numbers that could be called evidence. In truth, this only amounted to evidence that people were manufacturing evidence. Finding the neurological source of emotions became a popular research topic.
Some emotions, like fear and anger, can be located in the brain. Most emotions involve multiple brain structures whose functions are still unclear. More importantly, most emotions are not even distinct things, but are mixtures of feelings, memories, thoughts, and actions.
Moods
Moods are more subtle than emotions. You will not commit violence or marriage just because of your mood. In spite of their differences moods and emotions are connected: if you move one, you’ll move the other.
In a dream, I tossed high into the air a pencil and a turkey vulture and watched them tumbling a hundred feet above me in a blue sky. The vulture flapped its wings to right itself, catching the pencil in its talons before banking steeply to a curving descent. As it came back to me, I reached up and it released the pencil to my hand.
This dream put me in a positive mood. It’s unclear what emotion to associate with it, at least I did not feel any clear emotion. All I could say was that my subsequent emotional state was one of greater calm.
Psychologists distinguish moods from emotions, but the words are carelessly interchanged. What are called “mood disorders,” like depression, bi-polar, and borderline, are clearly using the word “mood” in an undiscriminating way.
When we talk about mood we should be precise. The aforementioned “mood disorders” involve much more than moods. It would be more accurate to call them persistent emotional dysfunctions.
The rise of recognizing emotions is a study in the emergence of a new concept. Now, thirty years later, we’re just starting to recognize the concept of mood. Mood needs to be recognized for the separate thing that it is. However, I don’t think we’re ready for it.
If you’d like to work with your moods and emotions then…
Distinctions
Distinguishing between emotion and mood gives you deeper insight and self-control. It has been argued that emotions bias your behavior while moods shift how you think. Here are some distinctions between mood and emotion quoted in Lane et al. (2005):
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Moods are general, background feeling states, with no specific cause or direction. Emotions have a specific cause and are directed at a specific object.
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Moods build up as a combination of minor incidents, persistent conditions in the environment, and biased awareness. Emotions are caused by specific events.
Lane et al. reported subjects made this distinction between moods and emotions:
“An emotion is something you cannot control, you just feel it: sorrow, joy, etc. A mood is something you can modify if you want to do so, you can decide to be in a bad mood or you can decide that what happened does not matter and stay in a good mood.”
Working With Moods
The importance of moods lies in their being more readily changed than emotions. Because this change is not due to a trigger or dependent on a trigger, it can be enduring. Also our intellect, which is so often in conflict with our emotions, has less grounds for argument when it comes to our moods.
Emotions motivate action, while moods motivate emotions. The two are coupled and need to be aligned for any attitude to persist. Intellect, the province of reasons and resolutions, has the least endurance. Not only can any point of view be endorsed through argument, but argument itself fosters a disputatious mood.
There is nothing wrong with this. Each of our systems of communication and awareness operates on its own scale. When each supports the other, our whole system is aware at many levels. When our systems are not aligned, the world is unstable.
We need this sort of broad support. None of this is particularly reasonable, it’s simply more sustainable to incorporate a positive attitude throughout your whole world: your body, social, intellectual, emotional, neurological, and spiritual aspects.
Thoughts and feelings are linked, but feelings have deeper roots, often roots that are too deep to follow. Moods are like seasonal patterns in the weather of our emotions. Because we are less captured by them, we can recognize ourselves as separate from them.
A mood will return as long as the season “tilts” in that direction. To go beyond simply changing one’s mood requires exploring why you’re defined by this mood. Or, as is often the case, why you are comfortable defining yourself by this mood.
Rather than asking what approach offers the best control of moods, the deeper question is how to align these interdependent aspects of ourselves in support of the desired outcome? But what of this “desired outcome”? How desired is this outcome when aspects of us don’t subscribe to it?
Although easy to change, moods are a window onto the prevailing landscape of the psyche. They are an opportunity to understand the lay of the land without stumbling over triggers and trauma, but they are related to them.
If you can coax yourself into a good mood while navigating a triggering event, then you can approach such events with a degree of separation. You need some separation if you’re going to find a new emotional perspective. Building a mood separate from the associated emotion gives you the time and space to find a different perspective.
Altered States
Working with moods and emotions is altered state work. The same kind of work required when working with psychedelics, dreams, hypnosis, and physical illness. Most of us have limited experience in managing our state as we try to maintain our preferred state, which is called our personality. Our personality improves when we learn how to manage unexpected emotions. Achieving a higher level of control is called maturity.
Our personalities involve more than our intellects, moods, and emotions. These three are important, interconnected aspects of ourselves. Other equally important parts are our subconscious, unconscious, social environment, family environment, neurological tone, gut and physical health. Nevertheless, the three part picture—of intellect, mood, and emotion—is pleasingly well contained. We can focus on each separately.
There is a place for intellectual discussion, though it’s mostly a domain of smoke and mirrors. Trying to navigate life using intellect alone is like having a discussion with The Great Oz replete with spectacle and drama. It’s important to engage the bullshit in order to see past the camouflage. You need to recognize that your Great Narrative is your own invention.
Emotions then arise as a landscape shaped by reasons, events, and circumstance. Reason justifies the situation and emotions are what one is left with. This is the beginning of one’s authentic confusion. You work to make things better, but “better” is often based on things that have not worked out.
Mood should not be overlooked. Think of it like the tide. When the tide is high all boats float, and there are much greater opportunities for rearrangement. When the tide is low, when a person’s mood is low, fostering change is like walking through the mud in rubber boots.
In a sense you already know this. You aim to be well rested, eat well, and pursue a healthy lifestyle as these things build a supportive mood. But you can also address mood directly. You can pay attention to your tidal moods and, most likely, you can manage them.
Intentional management of your mood is the aim of mindfulness and relaxation. Exercise doesn’t create an emotion so much as it creates a mood. It’s fairly easy to recognize the onset of a negative mood and change it to the positive. The goal of this is building a positive foundation for emotional and intellectual work.
Working with moods might be a new frontier. Perhaps we don’t have the power to fully manage our moods, but maybe this can be built with practice. Unless we start working with mood we’ll never know how or how much can be done with it.
References
Ekkekakis, P. (2012). “Affect, Mood, and Emotion.” In G. Tenenbaum, R. C. Eklund, & A. Kamata (Eds.), Measurement in Sport and Exercise Psychology: 321–32. Human Kinetics. https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/ekkekaki/files/inline-files/ekkekakis_2012.pdf
James, William (1884). “What is an Emotion?” Mind 9: 188-205.
Lane, A. M., Beedie, C., and Terry, P. C. (September 2005). “Distinctions Between Emotion and Mood.” Cognition and Emotion 19 (6). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/32116456_Distinctions_between_Emotion_and_Mood
Lange, J., Dalege, J., Borsboom, D., van Kleef, G., and Fischer, A. H. (2020 Feb 10). “Toward an Integrative Psychometric Model of Emotions.” Perspect Psychol Sci. 15 (2):444–68. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7059206/
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