Mood Swings may affect Sex Life

Do you have mood swings? Your mood swings may affect others, especially your loved ones. It could also affect your sex life. Moods must be managed carefully or it could create disaster in a relationship. To know your moods is very important in interacting with other people.

Moods are relatively lasting emotional or affective state. They generally have either a positive or negative effect. In other words, people often speak of being in a good or bad mood.

Though you may always feel happy most of the time, you are likely to feel as many as eight different mood states throughout the day. They are:

Calm Happy Energetic Enthusiastic
Uneasy Passive Exhausted Sad

Your mood swings are what you are most likely to notice, but it is the frequency of each of these eight mood states that will have the greatest impact on how you handle and perceive situations every day.. In fact, your moods set the tone for all of your day-to-day experiences—they are the filter through which you experience the good, the bad, the highs and the lows of your day.

Calm
When a person feels calm, he or she feels positive about life but generally has a lower level of energy. This lower level of energy can be beneficial insofar as it offers the individual time to think, reflect on and enjoy their feelings of optimism.

Happy
Happy individuals are generally filled with satisfaction and contentment. Happiness is a purely emotional state—it is not attached to a particular level of energy. It is quite possible for happy individuals to feel extremely satisfied and content with life, but to lack the desire to expend energy on making the situation even better.

Energetic
When a person feels energetic, it is usually experienced as a flurry of activity. Feeling energetic is neither positive nor negative. It's a neutral emotion that simply denotes a highly active state-most likely the result of channeling all feelings, both positive and negative, into actions.

Enthusiastic
A highly enthusiastic individual will experience positive feelings and high energy levels since enthusiasm is both a heightened emotional and heightened physical state.

Uneasy
When a person feels uneasy, he or she feels negative about life and invests high energy in their negative emotions. They often appear actively upset about the events in their life. Uneasiness is a complicated state because the two components—sadness and obsession over that sadness—feed off one another making situations seem worse than they really are.

Passive
Passivity is usually experienced as a stillness in mind and body. In fact, feeling passive is not indicative of happiness or sadness, rather it is a neutral state. The primary emphasis is on quietude, with little attention paid to a positive or negative mood.

Exhausted
When a person feels exhausted, he or she experiences negative feelings about life and exceptionally low levels of energy. An exhausted individual might feel depressed, yet be unable to muster the energy to make changes that would take their life in a new or positive direction. This is a particularly difficult mood to navigate since low levels of energy and sadness serve up a double whammy.

Sad
As you know, when a person feels sad, he or she is filled with a sense of dissatisfaction and has a negative outlook on life. Sadness is not attached to a level of energy. In fact, it simply denotes a highly charged negative emotion. A person can feel sad without experiencing fatigue or heightened states of nervous energy.

But how do these moods affect one another? And more importantly, how do they affect you? Are your moods taking you on an emotional rollercoaster ride or is it pretty smooth-sailing? You are liable to experience any of eight mood states at some point. Depending on what's going on in your life, your moods can shift on a daily, monthly or even yearly basis.

So what's the decisive factor? Well, it could be just about anything: Life events, both good and bad, your perception of those events, your physiological makeup, even your coping methods.

External Triggers
There's plenty of truth to the old saying: the only thing certain in life is change. Relationships fluctuate, world events—both tragic and joyful—take place without warning. Plain and simple: things happen, and these external influences trigger various mood states. Naturally, people have different responses these triggers.

Internal Perceptions
The way you perceive the events of your life can also play into the type and severity of the moods that you experience. Each of us has different internal beliefs about how life tends to unfold—whether you believe that it is dependent on your own actions or whether you think it is outside of your personal control. These internal perceptions can have a persistent and powerful affect on your mood state.

If you believe your own accountability to the extreme, you will probably end up feeling a lot of self-inflicted pressure when it comes to your own success, with your mood suffering when you feel unaccomplished. Taking on too much personal blame when things go wrong can leave you feeling depressed, discouraged, and it can negatively affect your health. Conversely, affording yourself too much credit when things go well can leave you with an over-inflated sense of security possibly setting you up for a big fall should anything outside of your control go wrong such as a natural disaster.

Most life events unfold as a result of both your actions and situational factors. By placing too much emphasis on either your own behavior or external forces, your worldview may become skewed in a way that is unhelpful in fostering your general well-being and happiness.

Mood Generalization
In many situations, people generalize their current mood to the rest of their life. They might feel that if one thing has gone wrong, everything has gone wrong or if something good happens, all of life is great. While this can sometimes take a positive form, by producing extensive feelings of optimism, it can also be an agent of gloom when carried into other areas of your life. The extent to which you consistently believe that you can generalize from your current experience to predict your future success will either negatively or positively affect your mood. In fact, the power of positive thought can often result in positive life events while the power of negative thoughts can result in negative life events.

Physiological Factors
In addition to external forces and internal perceptions, physiological factors are often the culprits behind mood swings. These might include hormone fluctuations, brain chemistry or diet.

Women who are in the premenstrual phase of their fertility cycle can have large hormone shifts that may affect their mood. For those women who don't menstruate, the onset of menopause, pregnancy or an insufficient body weight are all mood-altering factors and may entail hormonal changes of their own. Men are also prone to hormonal shifts, often experiencing a hormonal rollercoaster in adolescence, or later in life as postulated by the theory of "male menopause."

In addition, a person's brain chemistry can have an enormous effect on the moods they experience. In the most extreme case, "imbalanced" brain chemistry can lead to serious problems associated with mood such as depression, anxiety, and mania. The good news is that these imbalances can usually be treated with prescribed medications. If you feel that your mood swings sometimes get out of hand, you might want to seek professional advice.

Your diet and your intake of controlled substances can also have a significant effect on your mood. For example, eating sugary foods boosts your energy in the short term but ultimately results in a "crash" to a lower-level mood. Alcohol can have a similar effect, producing a brief "high" followed by a depressing "low."

As you can see, there are a variety of physiological factors that can affect your mood. While some are more manageable than others, it is important to take all of the above factors into account when figuring out the reasons behind your mood swings.

Coping Strategies
All of us have different ways of coping with the ups and downs of life. We develop these coping strategies through trial and error, determining what works best to improve a given situation. Effective coping skills can have a huge impact on mood management, allowing an individual to redirect their focus and turn a melancholy mood upside down.

Behaviors, thoughts, and mood are highly interconnected. By adjusting one, you can affect the others. Accordingly, if you can find the power to assert control over one element in the equation, it can have a profound affect on improving your overall mood!

If you have positive overall mood in your day to day living, most likely everything will follow. You could affect other people in sanguine manner. Your sex partner would definitely desire you more since positive overall mood could make you look and feel sexy!

(source: Tickle Tests)