Peat And Repeat: Who Or What Determines Your Mood

A quick note before the piece itself. I'm reposting a few older entries while I recover, since there are stretches where you simply overdo it and have to pull back. What I'm working on now is fresh material for a course I'll be teaching on campus in the fall, Humanistic Psychology, so some of that will show up here later.

Here's the question I keep circling back to: wouldn't it be something if you got to pick your own mood, rather than handing that job over to another person or some outside event? Moods travel. They catch, the way a cold does.

A little while ago the thing in the air was Obamacare and insurance premiums climbing, and underneath that the worry of not being able to pay for coverage at all and going without. Sitting with that thought was genuinely upsetting, and it accomplished nothing. I'm not saying it couldn't come to pass. But why hand yourself over to the misery now, before anything has actually happened?

The politicians who set this in motion certainly aren't lying awake over it. If the worst did arrive, it wouldn't touch them: their own coverage is locked in, and the higher costs are no strain on their budgets. Misery wants a seat-mate. Get one person worked up over a thing like this and the first instinct is to pass it along, to make sure somebody else carries a share of the dread.

A different character is the sniper. This is the one who appears from nowhere, lands a line that cuts straight to the quick, then strolls off humming while you stand there bleeding out. Think about where it came from. Odds are good this isn't the first time this particular person has done it to you. So the real decision is yours: do you let them hand you a ruined afternoon, especially when they'll swear up and down they meant nothing by it?

Let go and let God. Someone else being upset is not a summons for you to join them. And when a person acts with bad intent and then flatly denies it, do you really hand them the win? You end up feeling awful twice over, once from the remark and again from telling yourself it's fine because, after all, they claimed there was nothing behind it.

Physical sickness spreads from one body to the next. So do the emotional kinds.

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