formal journalsim- Bad moods and psychological approaches.

                        Being in a bad mood is possibly one of the worst things on this earth. Everything and everyone appears to be against you, and you want to do is curl up in a ball and die. I’m sure everyone, despite how perfect their lives look, has unavoidably been in this situation at some point, and the strange thing is, that the majority of the time the reason why you’re feeling so low isn’t actually even clear.

                What I would like to do is explore the causes and effectors of ‘feeling blue’ using psychological methods. I will try to refrain from the psychological jargon, by keeping at simple as I possibly can. The theories that I will describe are also backed up by real life studies, so I promise you, that i am not just making up facts. However I will add my input into this piece.

                Basically there are three different theories into ‘the way people think’ the first being Biological, this theory predicts that bad moods, negative thinking and depression are some form of bodily malfunction. This malfunction could either be in the nervous system, this resulting in a chemical imbalance or the wrong type/amount of neurones being released in to the blood steam (serotonin dopamine). Or could be due to neuroanatomical factors (neuroanatomy being the formation and structure of the brain) For instance, in the Texas bell tower shooting, Charles Whitman was a perfectly normal man prior to his catastrophic carnage. However, one day he woke up, killed his family, took a sniper rifle, sat at the top of a bell tower, and maliciously killed 14 and wounded 31 people. During the rampage he was shot dead, interestingly the biopsy of his body, revealed a large tumour on his brain. As Charles’s mass homicide was completely spontaneous and uncharacterised, it was believed that the tumour interrupted his ‘normal’ thinking and changed his behaviours, causing the massacre of events.

               
 The second theory suggests that thinking is purely a psychodynamic process, meaning that moods and ways of thinking are either Cognitive or Behavioural. There are many approaches to each of these, but to keep it short, Cognitive approaches predict that the brain functions in a machine like manor, each individual brain functioning uniquely, some having a more positive outlook and others more negative. This is where the terms ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ apply. Many people are constantly looking at the bad things in their lives, and focus solely on the negative, hence the fact they become depressed. Other people stay happy no matter what, instead of over-analysing the bad bits, they think of the positive to counteract the negative tone. ‘The glass is half full’ rather than ‘The glass is half empty’ this way of thinking is much healthier, and results in a happier person.

Unfortunately, there are more pessimistic people than optimistic, and this negative thinking, can in a way be almost contagious, have you ever noticed how one person can walk in to the room in a bad mood, making every other person slowly sink in to the mood with them? This is said to be because of Behavioural psychology. Behavioural psychology claims that everything a human being says and does is learnt from another human, and that past experience determines actions carried out by and individual. Have you noticed how people’s personalities can vary depending on which kind of people they have been spending time with? This is basically because new morals and actions are learnt from the social group they are in. The Social Learning theory goes into detail of this behaviour; however it would be too long winded for me to describe in this short blog.

So to treat a biological malfunction, we use medicines such as anti-depressants. In this case it isn’t really a self-inflicted, and the psychological disorder could be down to something like genetics. However a psychodynamic or behavioural disorder could easily be self-treated. So the next time you are feeling down, theoretically with enough will power, you could think yourself out of the bad mood. In extreme cases assistance of a therapist may be required, but I believe if everyone just actually took the time to think about things from a different perspective, it would nip it at the bud, by doing so i predict that much fewer cases of chronic depression would develop.