The other way I have found to change my mood comes from a saying I heard. Maybe I read it in a fortune cookie, but I don’t actually remember for sure. It says, “You can’t make someone else laugh without laughing yourself.”
While this can be more difficult than actually doing nice things for other people—because it is hard to find funny things to say or do when I feel down—it does work. And since just thinking of funny things can make me laugh, I can do this without anyone else around. I can read a funny book if my thinker seems mired in depression. I have purchased a few good joke books for just such occasions, and I am always on the lookout for good, funny books to put in my library for use during these times.
My sponsor taught me that problems were opportunities. For some people, changing their mood is a problem. I see a mood change as an opportunity to grow. The important thing to remember is that I work to change the mood, not fight against it, trying to make it go away. I need to provide a substitute—a better mood—just like when I replace bad habits with good ones. I should change my mood after I allow myself to feel the bad mood for a short time. By allowing myself to feel the undesirable mood, it helps create a quicker, more stable transition. It also helps me realize that a bad mood won’t hurt me and provides me with proof that I can choose my moods more easily than I might think.
When I fight against something, I have to keep it around. I can’t fight with another person if they leave my location, and I can’t fight a bad mood if it goes away, either. I believe that is why a bad mood sticks around if I fight it—because I need it for there to be a fight. For it to fight me, I must breathe life into it and prop it up. Without me, my bad mood cannot get bigger or stronger. Once I surrender to the mood and let it have its way for a time, the fight ends and I can dismiss it; I can let it go. If I don’t enjoy feeling poorly, then why not let it go? I have found that the easiest way to let one thing go is to replace it with something else, something I enjoy, like a good mood.
Dealing with simple depression is easier than I used to think. With a little practice I can make the switch from depressed to happy in a much shorter time than I ever could before, by using a couple of simple little tricks. I can also keep depression and other bad moods at bay by practicing these tricks on a daily basis. To do so, I need to do a little extra work each day, such as holding doors for others and being nice to people I don’t even know. I find that it is well worth the effort. Because of my many options, I find that there are several things that I can do to maintain my good mood.
One important tool I use is watching what I think. I will examine this more a little later. For now, let’s move on to anger—fear turned outward.
Anger
I don’t get mad very often, and there is good reason for that: it doesn’t do anything positive for me. Confucius said, “When anger rises, think of the consequences.” Unfortunately for me, once anger rises I do not think very well, let alone think of possible consequences. Therefore, I have found it best to notice anger at its first signs and stop it in its tracks by thinking of potential consequences as well as alternative courses of action. It is at this critical moment that I need not only to consider Confucius’s words of wisdom, but also another quotation from ancient times, by Pubilius Syrius, “You can accomplish by kindness what you cannot by force.” If the kind thing to do is to bite my tongue, this is the time to do it. I can usually apply a little restraint early in the process (and avoid biting my tongue off altogether), or I can let it run rampant later and suffer the consequences.
Anger is easy to recognize if I know what to look for. We all know what it feels like physically when anger begins to grow within us. And while we usually do not make a conscious list of the physical effects—the elevated blood pressure, the increased heart rate, the knot in our stomach—we can usually identify these manifestations as anger when they occur.
I do my best these days to be on the lookout for anger for two main reasons. First, I want to know that I am dealing with rising anger as early as possible. Second, I want to slow or stop its progress before it overtakes my mental capacity and reduces or eliminates my ability to deal with it in a productive manner.
The main reason I want to identify my anger before it takes over is that I have learned something important about anger, something I discovered during my recovery that I never considered until it confronted me through other people in the program. You see, I used to believe that someone or something had made me mad. Today I know better.
You cannot make me mad. No one can make me mad. Nothing can make me mad.
While anger is often considered a part of the human fight-or-flight response to a perceived threat, whether real or imagined, it can quickly take over my entire being if I do not take conscious control of my situation. Allowing anger to run my life—even for a short time—can cause me to do things I will later regret. I believe this happens when I am angry or stressed beyond any reasonable or normal measure. If I can’t think straight due to stress, then I am not really my normal, calm self, and I am liable to say and do things that I would not do if I were in a calm, relaxed state.
Therefore, I find it best to see the anger coming and either lock the door and deny it entry, or open the front and back doors, allowing it to pass through quickly—hopefully without making much of a mess. After all, if I allow anger to run me for very long, and I do things I will regret, others affected by my anger will not soon forget my outburst. Nor will they likely allow me to use my anger as an excuse or alibi for my behavior. The potentially more serious issue is that I’m not likely to forgive myself and allow my anger to be an acceptable excuse. There is good reason for this.
You cannot make me mad. No one can make me mad. Nothing can make me mad.
Anger is a choice. For anger to control and dominate me, I must allow it. Anger cannot make me do anything unless I let it. People can do things that I don’t like. They can even do things to me that I don’t like. But I still have to choose, consciously or not, to be angry about it, or at the very least I must know that it is I who allow anger to take over my situation.
When I was introduced to the idea that anger was a choice, I rejected it. After all, I was used to saying things like “You made me mad,” which put the blame on the other person, or so I thought.
The truth is that you did something, I didn’t like it, and I got angry!
My choice of words, my saying to you, “You made me mad,” made it seem as though it was your fault that I got mad. I have discovered through trial and error that I can choose not to get mad almost anytime I want.
There are exceptions to every rule, and no matter how hard I try I will still get angry, but that doesn’t mean I should not take responsibility for my anger. It is my emotion—not yours. Since it is my emotion, if I say, “You made me mad,” then you made me mad because I let you, I gave you permission, and I gave you control of my emotions—even if subconsciously, and only for a moment, I handed over control of my being to you. Whomever or whatever it is that I allowed to make me mad, I still gave control of myself over to someone or something outside myself.
Knowing and understanding this about me, I take close control of my anger whenever I catch it rearing its ugly head. I also take control of it because anger is a tool. Used properly, my anger has benefits, but only if I choose to see it that way.
Anger tells me that something is wrong. Sometimes there is something wrong with the way other people are acting or the things they are doing. Other times I may get angry at the state of the world and the way those in control are running things. There are too many things to get mad about to list them all here. But as I have watched my anger, I have noticed that no matter where the anger comes from, no matter the cause, anger is telling me that something is wrong.
The truth is: whatever is wrong is usually wrong with me.
Of course, there are times when I can justifiably and properly carry my anger. I imagine I would be angry if someone robbed me or held me up at gunpoint. But the more likely reasons for my anger stem from everyday occurrences such as someone pulling out in front of me in traffic, a coworker causing problems at work, or someone trying to cut in front of me in line at