Corporate Personal Wellbeing’s top tips to improve our mood.
When we are feeling low in mood and depressed, we tend to do less and less because it impacts our energy levels, we feel increasingly tired we may have difficulty with sleeping and eating and it often leads to a negative style of thinking.
Naturally, when we are feeling low, we tend to stop doing the things we enjoy. It can get so bad, sometimes all we want to do is stay in bed, stay at home and do very little; we may even begin to isolate ourselves from friends and family.
This is a very common negative cycle to get stuck in, as the less we do the worse we feel, the worse we feel the less we do.
A way to manage this and break the cycle is to gradually start to increase our activity levels. This can make an enormous positive impact on our mood.
Benefits of increasing activity levels:
- Improves our ability to think more clearly
- Helps us to think and focuses our mind away from unhelpful thoughts
- Increases motivation
- Gives us a sense of achievement
- Creates enjoyment
- Stimulates the body’s natural anti-depressant (endorphins)
- Makes us feel less tired
- Makes us feel better about ourselves
Tips to begin to increase activities:
- Gradual: If you are at a low point, trying to go from doing nothing to doing everything can be unhelpful. Therefore, starting to add different activities slowly can be helpful, for example going for a 10-minute walk, or cleaning one room of a house, or as simple as getting up and dressed for the day. From this, each week begin to add in more activities to gradually build up.
- Keep a diary: It is extremely easy to say we are going to do something, but then get caught up with negative thoughts and be distracted from actually completing the activity. Using a diary to plan out a week and add the activities you wish to start doing can be very helpful. Evidence shows you are more likely to complete an activity if you plan it ahead.
- Types of activities: Activities can be broadly categorised into 3 types: routine, necessary and enjoyable. It is important to get a healthy balance of activities that give you a sense of achievement, enjoyment and being close to others.
- Keep goals realistic: Make sure activities have achievable limits. For example, if you want to get back into exercising: aim to walk for 15 minutes rather than jumping in too deep and attempt a half marathon. Remember to build up the activities.
- Choose activities that are important to you: Important activities, have positive meanings and are purposeful are more likely to be carried out which can help you to start to build up the activity levels.