Sometimes we are just in a bad mood. Well that is human. But the thing is that we do not even know why. It is not always because of our scores at Bizzo Casino. So if there is no real reason, maybe we could just switch our mood. With this trick you get better mood – and do something for your karma. And here we are going to explain how to get in a better mood through this trick for a good mood.
In a bad mood? Then make a wish for others to feel better. That’s because – according to a U.S. study – it helps YOUR mood more than anything else.
If we want to be happy, we should neither compare ourselves to others nor let ourselves be pressured by social expectations, and we should certainly not feel attacked by other people’s opinions.
Wouldn’t it be easiest and healthiest for our mood to think as much as possible about ourselves and as little as possible about others? Maybe the easiest way, but not the best for our mood, as the following experiment of a team of psychologists from Iowa showed.
IT IS AS SIMPLE AS THIS
Experiment: 12 minutes of thinking about others
The researchers, led by psychology professor Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University, investigated in their experiment how different thinking strategies or thought processes affect human emotions. To do this, they first divided the test participants into four groups:
One group (“Loving-Kindness”) was asked to walk in a building for twelve minutes while thinking benevolently of others, i.e. specifically wishing them something positive or focusing appreciatively (not enviously!) on their strengths and good qualities.
The second group (“Interconnectedness”) should consciously think of people they feel connected to and what connects them to them during their twelve-minute indoor walk.
Group three (“Downward Social Comparison”) was tasked with spending their twelve minutes thinking about people who are worse off than they are – because they earn less or don’t live as nicely as they do, for example.
The fourth group was the control group with no specific thinking task.
Immediately after the twelve minutes, the scientists tested how the subjects’ moods were.
The “Loving-Kindness” group, i.e. the group with the good wishes, performed best overall: Subjects in this group showed fewer feelings of anxiety than the control group, but more satisfaction, compassion and interest in their fellow human beings.
The “Interconnectedness” group did not differ from the control group in terms of their feelings of anxiety and happiness, but was more open-minded and engaged on a social level.
The results of the “Downward-Social-Comparison” group, on the other hand, were not significantly different for the psychologists from those of the control group – comparing themselves with people they were better off with did not raise their mood.
COMPASSION IS HUMAN
Of course, we all tick differently, and if the test subjects of the scientists had been predominantly bad people, the results could have been different… (why, you will find out in our article). But as the Iowa experiment suggests, humans are apparently not simply social beings who, for example, learn from others and live better in a community. Most of them seem to share a sincere sympathy with their fellow human beings, which even goes so deep that they can be more happy about the happiness of others than about someone else’s misfortune, even if their own life is better off next to it. And if that alone doesn’t put you in a good mood, you can take twelve minutes to wish your colleague via thought transmission that she and her great date from the other day will become something more.