Mood swings: the Curst and the Collateral Damage

It was 5 o’clock in the evening when my boyfriend and I arrived at the mall. We went straight for the shawarma joint without even having to discuss it, for we had this strong, similar craving for that little piece of fat. We laughed aloud hungrily at ourselves, completely oblivious of people’s stares, and got our ‘beloved’. From there we moved to get our tickets for the movie, and a lovely date was what we settled for.

I looked out the window as he drove me home, thinking about a call he had received before we got into the car, and all the way home, I stayed silent. My mood had changed, for no particular reason. We had this amazing day, and right there in a moment of lull, I was about to soil it with my mood. The phone call wasn’t from an ex or anything. It was from his mom.

I tried to retrace happenings scene by scene, wanting to put a stamp on the moment my mood started to change. Did he do or say something to me that triggered this? No. It was just sudden, surreptitious and sneaky sullenness.

Many things trigger a bad mood. Some bad moods are for justifiable reasons, but there are many small and seemingly insignificant things which can leave us feeling blue.

Simply encountering someone with bad manners or being stuck in traffic on the way to work can really set the tone of your mood for the rest of day. You could be tired, feeling under the weather, or as a woman have fluctuating hormonal periods due to PMS or the menopause. It could be lack of sex, a bad night’s sleep, an argument with a partner, being broke, or other peoples’ lack of manners.

But when you really can’t decipher or put a mark on a particular reason why you are having a bad mood when you’re having it, know there’s a problem. It becomes a bigger problem when in fact you “want” to stay in it, for no considerable reason, rather than talk about it or just starve it of your attention to kill it.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t as bad as having to check if you are bipolar. No, I won’t go that far. But then, there I was, at the end of my date, feeling blue for no particular reason, about to soil my man’s effort to make me happy.

You could be so used to being sad or emotionally unstable, that it feels so strange when someone tries to make you happy.

True to it, there could be a point or time in your life when certain circumstances cause you to be unhappy. And for how long that lasts, you should be able to decide how it affects you, your family, work, and people around you; and this is especially considering the curst and collateral damage when our emotions go far south.

As bad as they are, these damages, and the curst, that is, the self-inflicting hurt of mood swings, are seriously underestimated and dangerously overlooked. Under thoughtful circumstances, anyone would agree that it takes commonsense to reckon that constant switching between happy and sad or high and low moods must have a deleterious consequence, especially on bodily health, and personal relationships.

When we are constantly low on joy juices or easily swayed into droopy moods, our bodies respond and the health implications are grave. If unchecked, these implications grow into what is clinically termed manic-panic depression, a situation where moody moments would only give way for a permanent state of inexplicable fear; the loss of bodily/skin glow, poor blood pressure and flow, reduction in immunity, recurring loss of appetite, and such likes are other implications consequent of moods we can’t firmly place a cause for. And, this is asides the long-term psychological and psycho-social effects that could range and/or develop from general incoherence to derangement.

This mood mess affects our body by making our minds its HQ, but, its prime curst is its ability to become soul-destroying. Basically, our health, happiness and state of joy – these things are what gets damaged collaterally and all for what? Some mood you can’t place a tag on.

Knowing all these, from a place of careful consideration of the curst and collateral damages of cryptic, indefinable, purposeless and mostly sudden sullen moods, wouldn’t you want to position your mind to fight them out of your being?