Moody Blues.

We often think of a bad mood as something we need to “snap out of”. Dark clouds of despair, malaise or melancholy are to be surmounted by any means necessary. The good mood, though, the days where you get out on the right side of bed, are to be celebrated and embraced. We’re conditioned to avoid negative emotions, but what if all moods — the good, the bad and the Angry — can help us understand ourselves better?

.“If you look at your mood as something to analyse, rather than something to be scared of or freaked out about, and instead start documenting it, it really changes how you see yourself and how you appreciate your emotions,”

I would stew for hours over a single rude encounter and become overtly infuriated over a delayed flight. Her natural moodiness was as inclination I disliked this about myself but found unavoidable. “I found myself saying over and over again, ‘sorry, I’m in a mood’, like it was my catchphrase,”

“When you realise you’re saying something like that all the time, it must mean something.” Tired of life’s stressors taking disproportionate toll, I decided to find out what my feelings were trying to tell me.

What I discovered was that moods are not random, but an exaggerated emotional response. And while everyone experiences them, women are particularly susceptible due to the physiological functions that inform the female intuition. Through the lens of neuroscience, psychology and cognitive therapy, I presented ways in which we can better understand our moods. My message is one of self-empowerment — an empathetic analysis shared through my own personal experiences. We don’t have to be ruled by our negative emotions, we can take charge of those spirals, or better, curb them from the offset. Crucially, though, we must learn what triggers certain feelings in the first place.

While moods can be traced back to underlying emotions that many of us share — anxiety, insecurity and fear — our triggers are individual. You can’t avoid your triggers, but you can understand why they raise certain negative emotions, and by understanding them, begin to control your reaction. “I started to peel back the layers of my reaction by asking, ‘why am I this upset?’ There has to be a reason. And that’s when I would get to the core investigates one of Lauren’s personal triggers and the underlying emotions that fuel it. On friendship, I explores what it’s like to lose touch with old friends and the loneliness many women experience in their 30s. Underpinning it all is a mood , describes as feeling “unfriendable” or unloved. While moods can be traced back to underlying emotions that many of us share — anxiety, insecurity and fear — our triggers are individual. You can’t avoid your triggers, but you can understand why they raise certain negative emotions.

“I no longer had the confidence in myself that I’d had when I was younger. Like a woman after a bad breakup, I was paranoid and insecure,” In the run-up to my wedding, this mood intensified; I felt I had no close friends to be bridesmaids or to help with planning. “What happens when you feel like you don’t have those friendships?”

Some of these triggers originated on social media. I have lost counts at a a time when I saw old friends having drinks together online; I felt excluded and insecure. “Why didn’t they ask me to come out?” It’s a familiar feeling and Me resulting spiral will no doubt resonate with many. But I identified that my negative reaction and resulting mood are mine and mine alone; I was projecting an energy from her my insecurities and creating the reality around me, closing off from friends still in my life and exacerbating the original feelings of exclusion.

Spiral into moodiness, I can also clearly see that the resulting mood, of feeling unloveable and unwanted, well outsizes the original trigger — that of two friends simply having a drink. Instead of accusing friends of leaving her out, So I realised the insidious cycle of negative self-talk and takes the initiative to invite a friend for a drink.

It’s a simple enough solution to combat feelings of loneliness — reaching out to extend an invitation. But it’s the inner work that leads Me to this point that’s important; how to take a step back and to consider why we react so strongly and how our emotions impact our relationships. At the same time, I have learned not to overanalyse other people’s actions and jump to reading them as a negative reflection on me. “I’m much less quick to feel insecure or feel left out now,” she says. “I can put myself in their shoes, I can understand and I can let things go a little bit. That’s the gift , gentle interruption of the internal monologues that support our bad moods, a break in the pattern of negative self-talk, insecurity, the stories we tell ourselves and the resulting bad feelings. Instead, So I asks to consider our reactions from all vantage points. “It was a huge awakening for me to realise that sometimes it’s nothing to do with you. A lot of the time people are going through their own thing and might be having their own bad day.”

Always remember though no man or woman should leave you feeling an unworthiness and have you lay in your bed at night wonderful where; how, did you go wrong . It is not a reflection of you but by their own unreasonable issues. If that person cannot seek help then you must to walk away as it is toxic and can lead to death.