Emotions and the Body Principles:

1.   Recognize the Source of Your Feelings
  
When we are feeling sad or stressed, we usually think that it's because of the way our lives are going at that point. If we wake up feeling down, we find something to blame, like the rain, or a strike out in last night’s game, or an assignment that isn’t going well.  If our bad mood persists for a while, we invariably feel like it’s because life just isn’t going well, and we expect our mood to improve when things turn around. In reality, life is seldom all good or all bad. It’s a mixed bag. When we think that things are going well (or poorly), it’s often as much a matter of perception as reality. When we’re feeling good, we focus on the positives in our lives and minimize the negatives. When we’re feeling down, we do the opposite.

So what makes us feel good or bad in the first place? Certainly a big part of it is our successes and failures, the course of our relationships, and similar things like this that we are all aware of. But there are other variables influencing our mood that we tend not to think about.

For instance, not many people wake up feeling low and say “Hmmm, I must be running low on my feel-good brain chemicals because I’ve eaten terribly this week and have been sitting at a desk all day every day not exercising”. Yet this is just as likely to cause a bad mood as poor weather or a disappointing turn of events. Living an unhealthy lifestyle can quickly begin to undermine your mood. Assuming you then go back to living better, your mood turns around. On the other side, if we wake up feeling fantastic, we seldom suspect that it may have a lot to do with the fact that we've been getting more physical activity recently, or the balanced, healthy dinner full of the right feel-good nutrients that we ate the night before.

 The way we live our lives has rapid and profound effects on the chemistry of our bodies and brains, and, thus, also affects our mood. These effects are even stronger over long periods of time. Over the course of years, poor lifestyle habits may leave our emotional chemistry so deficient that everything in our lives seems overwhelming, and we no longer have the motivation to make good things happen for ourselves. In this state, it’s easy to look at the bad things in your life and blame them for the state of your mood, when the primary cause may really be deteriorating physical health. Ultimately, whether you just want to turn around a brief bout of the blues, or you have been fighting depression for years, it's critical to recognize that part of the cause of your negative emotions may be the health of your entire body. Once your recognize this, you can make a commitment to physical health part of your path to achieving the emotional existence you want.