5 Ways to Reset Your Mood Fast
- Washing your hands with warm water
- Changing your environment
- Listening to one calming sound
- Relaxing your jaw and shoulders
- Doing something slow on purpose
How to Reset Your Mood Fast
It can be a real struggle to figure out how to quickly change your mood when your day feels heavy and you can’t stop thinking about all sorts of things. Most of the time, it is not required to have a whole day off or to make a big change in life; actually, sometimes just a few small and purposeful things are enough to break the pressure and relax your nervous system. Basic methods that concentrate on the body and the senses are particularly efficient since they communicate to your brain that you are safe and stable.
One very surprising, yet powerful, method of quickly resetting your mood is washing your hands with warm water. The mild heat and the feeling of the water on your skin give a mini sensory reset, which is a comforting and safe signal to the nervous system. This little ritual can be a way of coming back to your body when your mind is too packed, in a similar manner to other grounding practices that have been proved to relieve stress and improve the mood.
Changing your surroundings is often a very powerful way to change your mood. Taking fresh air outside, changing to a different room, or even just changing where you sit can help you disconnect from your stressed state. Research on brief bouts of activity and environmental changes shows that even short walks or position shifts can improve mood and reduce emotional fatigue.
Listening to one soothing sound such as the sound of rain, soft music, or white noise can also help you change your mood quickly. Concentrating on a single, continuous sound helps to narrow one’s attention and mental clutter becomes less. Studies on breathwork and mind, body practices suggest that, when attention is given to a comforting sensory input, it can very quickly anxiety and negative affect.
Many people find it hard to believe, but dropping the jaw and relaxing the shoulders is also another emotional reset that is usually overlooked by the majority. It is so often the case that when people are under stress, they clench their jaws and hunch their shoulders without even realizing it, thus they are telling their brain to send even more tension signals. That is why, if you purposely let your shoulders drop, un, clench your jaw, and take a slow breath, you will be giving a physical safety signal that will definitely help your stress to calm down and your mood to go up.
Lastly, choosing to do something slow on purpose only, such as sipping tea mindfully, folding clothes intentionally, or breathing deeply for one minute, gives a moment of pause during your day. The kind of mindful slowness interrupts the stress rush and leaves some time for the body to process emotions. The research on mind, body medicine and brief relaxation practices reveals that even a few minutes of focused, calm behavior can have a great impact on mood and emotional regulation.
Various psychological and physiological research have proven time and again that small, repeated actions such as breathwork, movement, and sensory grounding are capable of changing one’s mood very quickly. Such actions bring about changes like the lowering of stress hormones, the balancing of the nervous system, and the general emotional wellbeing becoming better.
Read More: 8 Micro Rituals to Calm You and Reset Your Mind in Minutes
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