past.
Emotions to Moods to Temperaments to Personality Traits:
Conditioning the Body to Live in the Past
Unfortunately for most of us, because the brain always works by
repetition and association, it doesn’t take a major trauma to produce the
effect of the body becoming the mind.^1 The most minor triggers can
produce emotional responses that feel as though they are beyond our
control.
For instance, you’re driving to work and you stop at your usual coffee
shop, which is all out of your favorite, hazelnut coffee. Disappointed, you
grumble to yourself why a major enterprise like this one can’t keep in stock
such a very popular flavor. At work, you’re irritated to see another car in
your preferred parking spot. Stepping into an empty elevator, you are
exasperated to discover that someone ahead of you pushed all the buttons.
When you finally walk into the office, someone comments, “What’s up?
You seem kind of down.”
You tell your story, and the person sympathizes. You sum it up: “I’m in a
bad mood. I’ll get over it.”
The thing is, you don’t.
A mood is a chemical state of being, generally short-term, that is an
expression of a prolonged emotional reaction. Something in your
environment—in this case, the failure of your barista to meet your needs,
followed by a few other minor annoyances—sets off an emotional response.
The chemicals of that emotion don’t get used up instantly, so their effect
lingers for a while. I call that the refractory period—the time after their
initial release and until the effect diminishes.^2 The longer the refractory
period, obviously, the longer you experience those feelings. When the
chemical refractory period of an emotional reaction lasts for hours to days,
that’s a mood.
What happens when that recently triggered mood lingers? You’ve been in
a bit of a funk since that day, and now you look around the room during a
staff meeting and all you think of is that this person’s tie is hideous, and the
nasally tone of your boss is worse than nails on a chalkboard.