The state of mind or mood is a prolonged emotional state. Moods can vary from time to time and be subject to wide fluctuations. Mood states are influenced by many factors and range from depression to equilibrium to euphoric feelings.
What is mood?
The state of mind or mood is a prolonged emotional state. Moods can vary from time to time and be subject to wide fluctuations. The state of mind is more than the sum of pure feelings. The emotional life is strongly connected with values and cannot be explained purely logically. Individual experiences, every dream, every experience and one’s own fantasies give rise to an image that resonates in the evaluation of every situation. The unity and health of our psyche is determined by the totality of all emotions and wills that we have acquired over time. The emotional feelings of the mind are different from the emotional feeling, which is determined by the heart. A person’s state of mind also affects his or her interaction with others. The state of mind is the subject of psychology and belongs to the areas that take place inside a person. Nevertheless, the mood of a person can be recognized by his facial expressions, gestures and spoken sentences. The mood assigns an emotional coloration to what is experienced. Psychology distinguishes four basic moods: joyful, optimistic, melancholic and threatening. Moods generate functional states in the organism, i.e. they have biological effects. These, in turn, can also produce serious disorders.
Function and task
The world of emotions includes many mental and spiritual phenomena, and people can describe their emotional experience in general terms or very precisely. There are elementary feelings such as love, awe or disgust and thousands of nuances that move us to action. Mind and soul are closely related. Our mood is a sensor for us and for our outside world. Our counterpart can recognize from our mood in which state of mind we are at the moment and direct his actions accordingly. Exactly the same happens in reverse. The mood is a sensitive measuring instrument, which already signals without words how resilient, how joyful or aggressive we feel at the moment. Through external factors such as the behavior of our environment, but also through nutrition and health-promoting measures, the mood can be influenced both positively and negatively. The mind is the basis of moral education. A basic mental attitude toward the positive, the good and the beautiful can be instilled. This is shaped by values such as trust, love, gratitude, mercy, justice, helpfulness, devotion, reliability, strength of will, sense of duty, beauty and religiosity. All these qualities underlie good behavior. Pressure puts a strain on the mind. The longer pressure lasts, the more our mood is affected. Consciously perceiving the environment and concentrating on the moment is one strategy for coping with stress. Movement concepts also play a major role in combating stress, as the positive effects of sport have been proven. Music has similarly good effects in coping with stress. The better we know our own mood barometer, the easier it is to avoid stressful situations and seek positive ones. Prolonged emotional stress can lead to serious psychological problems.
Illnesses and complaints
Mental health is influenced by thousands of factors. We all know situations in which illnesses hit the mind and put us in a negative mood. This is especially true of chronic pain. But a sick mind can also severely affect health and hit organs. However, diseases of the mind are not so easily defined, since they arise much less from a localizable space than physical processes. Restoring a person’s mental health is the task of psychotherapists. Treatment can take place on an outpatient basis or in inpatient facilities. Diseases of the mind are still a taboo subject and those affected usually find their way to the doctor too late. According to surveys by health insurance companies, one in five working people suffers from mental disorders. That’s about 10% of the total number of sick people. The trend is upward. Life circumstances play a major role in disorders of the mind.This often leads to existential fears about job loss and early retirement, the dissolution of family ties, loneliness and fear of poverty in old age. In the worst case, this can lead to suicide. In Germany, more than 200,000 suicide attempts are made every year in addition to around 15,000 suicides. Isolating oneself from the outside world can have an impact on one’s mood. Mood is not so easy to measure, which has often led to medical misjudgments. In the past, many people were classified as mentally ill because the outside world could not cope with their mood swings. Today, we know that many of these people classified as ill were just significantly more sensitive than others. The most common disease of the exhausted mind is depression. The manifestations of depression are strongly determined by social circumstances. The mental suffering is manifested mainly by the deterioration of the will to live. The emotional world of those affected is characterized by hopelessness and feelings of guilt. For many, the only way out is suicide. This makes the attention of the environment all the more important in order to be able to offer help and security.
