Here is the one of the recent psychological experiment to
overcome the bad moods.
We are forced to make decisions like this all the time.
The
habitual way in which we deal with how to order our happy and less happy
experiences may have important consequences for how happy we feel overall.
In a new study participants were given pairs of everyday
events, both uplifting and depressing, to see how they chose to order the
experiences.
Participants could not only choose the order of the events
but also their timing. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, people preferred to spread out
the pairs of uplifting events, and the same was true of the pairs of depressing
events.
When both good and bad things happen you don’t usually want
it all on the same day. It’s better to spread out both pain and pleasure—the
pain so you can recover and the pleasure so you can savour it.
Bad
mood buffer
Life, of course, tends to be more mixed and so it’s the
mixed pairs that are most interesting. How did people deal with pairs of good
and bad events?
Firstly, about three-quarters of people preferred to get the
bad news first. This is a consistent finding: most people prefer to end on a
happy event rather than a depressing one.
Secondly, the researchers found that people who reported
being happier showed a stronger tendency to use a positive social event, like
meeting up with a close friend, right after losing some money. They seemed to
have the potentially happy habit of using socialising more quickly after their
loss to fix their bad moods.
Happier people also tended to use socialising as a buffer
against negative events, no matter what they were.
In contrast less happy people tended to use positive
financial events as buffers against negative events, rather than social ones.
We can’t tell directly from this study that this method of
off-setting depressing events with happier social ones really does make people
happier overall, although it’s a very good bet that it does.
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