What makes a bad mood bad?

A beautiful beautiful morning for my two-mile run today.

It was two miles full of ideas.

One of the things I was thinking about was moods: what causes them, whether we can choose them or change them, whether there is actually such a thing as a good or bad mood.

What makes us judge some feelings such as anger, frustration, annoyance and jealousy as bad whilst happy, excited, expectant, grateful and peaceful are all good?

Does it make it wrong or bad of us when we feel angry?

I would suggest not.

You feel what you feel, and making yourself wrong for feeling that way only accentuates and perpetuates the feeling of being wrong.

Also, wrenching yourself out of feeling angry too quickly can be like placing a thin layer of happy veneer over the angry base.

The anger hasn't gone away, it's just bubbling away underneath the surface waiting to emerge again.

However, if you can change your mood just enough to be able to look at the anger from a slightly detached viewpoint, it can help you dissipate it and move to somewhere more powerful for you.

What enables you to shift your mood enough to step back slightly and look at it from a different perspective.

I have a few techniques, but none of them beats a good run!